3.8.2 The Influence of Sex

About environmental influences, it is important for teacher’s to know the home condition of his pupils; but it is important here, in passing, to emphasize the point that even though a child were never to live with its parents it could be understood by the teacher acquainted with the peculiar traits of those parents.

“Born with a bent” is a proverb of such force that it cannot be ignored. To know the parental heritage of a boy is to anticipate his reaction to stimuli—is to know what approach to make to win him.

Because of the fact that in many of our organizations we are concerned with the problem of teaching boys and girls together, the question of the influence of sex is one which we must face. There are those who hold that boys and girls are so fundamentally different by nature that they ought not to be taught coeducationally.

Others maintain that they are essentially alike in feeling and intellectuality, and that because of the fact that eventually they are to be mated in the great partnership of life they should be held together as much as possible during the younger years of their lives.

Most authorities are agreed that boys and girls differ not so much because they are possessed of different native tendencies, but because they live differently—they follow different lines of activity, and therefore develop different interests. To quote again from Norsworthy and Whitley:

“That men and women are different, that their natures are not the same, has long been an accepted fact. Out of this fact of difference have grown many hot discussions as to the superiority of one or the other nature as a whole.

The present point of view of scientists seems well expressed by Ellis when he says, ‘We may regard all such discussions as absolutely futile and foolish. If it is a question of determining the existence and significance of some particular physical sexual difference, a conclusion may not be impossible.

To make any broad statement of the phenomena is to recognize that no general conclusion is possible. Now and again we come across facts which group themselves with a certain uniformity, but as we continue, we find other equally important facts which group themselves with equal uniformity in another sense.

The result produces compensation.’ The question of interest then is, what in nature is peculiar to the male sex and what to the female? What traits will be true of a boy, merely because he is a boy, and vice versa?

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