To me the wonderful thing is the earnestness with which a boy sets about the task of cleansing his life when once he has been made to realise the real character of the thoughts and acts with which he has been playing.  Boys, as I find them, rarely err in this matter, or in any other, from moral perversity, but merely from ignorance and thoughtlessness.  Severe rebukes and punishments are rarely either just or useful.  The disposition which obliges the teacher to use them in the last resort, and the rebellion against authority which is said to follow puberty, arise almost invariably from injudicious training in the home or at school.  Boys who have received a fair home training, and who find themselves in a healthy atmosphere at school, are almost invariably delightful to deal with; and even those who have been less fortunate in their early surroundings adapt themselves in most cases to the standards which a healthy public opinion in the school demands.

It may be thought that the mere reticence of adults about reproduction and the reproductive organs would impress the child’s mind with the idea that it is unclean to play with his private parts or to talk about their functions with his companions.  This is a psychological error.  For some years past adults have avoided any allusion to the subject of excretion, and the child assumes that public attention to bodily needs and public reference to these needs are alike indelicate.  He does not, however, conclude that excretion in private is an indelicate act, nor does any sense of delicacy oblige him to maintain, with regard to companions of his own sex and age, the reticence which has become habitual to him in his relations with adults.  Why should the child think it “dirty” to fondle and excite his private parts or to talk about them with his boy friends?  The knowledge which makes us feel as we do is as yet hidden from him.

The same thing is certainly true of conversation about the facts of reproduction when those who converse are uncorrupted.  Another element, however, at once appears when these facts are divulged by a corrupt boy, because his manner is irresistibly suggestive of uncleanness as well as of secrecy.  Similarly when self-abuse is fallen into spontaneously by a boy who is otherwise clean, no sense of indecency attaches itself to the act.  When, however, it is taught by an unclean boy, there is a feeling of defilement from the first.  In boys under the age of puberty this feeling may overpower the temptation; in boys above that age it is, as a rule, totally inadequate as a safeguard.