“Private interviews with individual boys in my study have been the chief vehicle of my teaching and the chief source of my information.  My objects in these interviews have been to warn boys against the evils of private impurity, to supply them with a certain amount of knowledge on sexual subjects in order to prevent a prurient curiosity, and to induce them to confide to me the history of their own knowledge and difficulties.  In my early days I interviewed those only who appeared to me to be obviously suffering from the effects of impurity, and, of late years, the extreme pressure of my work has forced me very reluctantly to recur to this plan.

“For several years, however, I was accustomed to interview every boy under my care during his first term with me.  Very rarely have I failed in these interviews so to secure a boy’s confidence as to learn the salient facts of the history of his inner life.  Sunday afternoon addresses to the Sixth Form on the sexual dangers of late youth and early manhood have resulted at times in elder boys themselves seeking an interview with me.  Such spontaneous confidences have naturally been fuller, and therefore more instructive, than the confidences I have invited.

“Many people are inclined to look upon the instruction of boys in relation to adolescence as needless and harmful; needless because few boys, they imagine, awake to the consciousness and problems of sex until manhood; harmful because the pristine innocence of the mind is, they think, destroyed, and evils are suggested of which a boy might otherwise remain unconscious.  To one who knows what boys really are such ideas are nothing less than ludicrous.

“Boys come to our school from many different classes of preparatory and secondary schools.  Almost every such school seems to possess a few boys who delight to initiate younger boys into sexual knowledge, and usually into knowledge of solitary vice.  The very few boys who have come to me quite ignorant of these matters have come either straight from home at ten or eleven, or from a school in which a few young boys are educated with girls.  Of boys who have come under my care as late as twelve I have known but two who even professed total ignorance on sexual subjects, and in one of these cases I am quite sure that no such ignorance existed.

“In a large majority of cases solitary vice has been learned and practised before a boy has got into his teens.  The lack of insight parents display in relation to these questions is quite phenomenal.  The few who mention the subject to me are always quite satisfied of the complete ‘innocence’ of their boys.  Some of the most precocious and unclean boys I have known have been thus confidently commended to me.  Boys are wholly unsuspicious of the extent to which their inner life lies open to the practised eye, and they feel secure that nothing can betray their secrets if they themselves do not.