Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/164

 have the most distorted ideas of a normal healthy sexual life and of the effects of sexual disease. If they follow immoral or intemperate practices in college, in nine cases out of ten they have begun these practices long before they were ready for college, and have pitifully little conception of the ultimate dangers to character and health involved. A beginning in self-discipline should be made when impulses and imagination first lead a boy into untoward things, and this is at the beginning of high school rather than at the beginning of college. A boy's moral status is pretty well settled when he enters college. Someone should have laid down for him definite principles of personal thinking and personal conduct. Some one should have had the courage and the tact to tell him frankly and straightforwardly of his physical being, of the sacredness of his body and the necessity of his keeping it morally clean. If this is not done in the high school, there is very little likelihood of its being done at home.

A father sat in my office a few days ago talking about his freshman son. He had come in response to a letter from me. The boy was doing no good in college, his habits were bad, he was the victim of disease. I told the father the wretched unpleasant truth as gently as I could, and, he seemed surprised, stunned.

"But my boy has always been a good boy," he said. "How has it been possible for college to ruin him so quickly?"

"You are mistaken," I answered. "Every experience