"Innocent Childhood"

Mr. Ellsworth B. Buck is a hard-hitting business man who three years ago became a member of New York City's Board of Education. Mr. Buck was appalled to learn that the city's 400,000 junior and senior high-school pupils were taught virtually nothing about sex. He decided that something should be done about it. Last summer he saw his chance. From the Board of Superintendents came a new course of science study for junior high schools, proposing to teach pupils about reproduction among birds and flowers but not among animals. Mr. Buck & colleagues promptly sent it back, asking "Why?" Back came the superintendents' reasons, including a junior high school principal's plea that the schools ought not to "shoulder the responsibility of shortening for these little ones, very precious to us, their period of innocent childhood."

The Board of Education, even more impressed by protests from Catholic groups than by their responsibility toward innocence, decided not to teach "mammalian reproduction." But Mr. Buck was not done. He sent his secretary, Eugene R. Canudo (onetime secretary to Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia) to make an investigation into youthful sex problems in the nation's biggest city. Mr. Canudo collected literature on sex education. He also went to the courts, the police, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Last week he brought back a report that caused the Board of Education to reconsider its decision. Salient facts:

> Of 1,347 mothers who bore illegitimate children in New York City last year, 96 were girls under 17, one a girl of 11. Many of these girls were unaware, when they were seduced, that they might have babies.

> Reported to city health officials last year were 2,388 cases of syphilis or gonorrhea among youngsters under 19.

> Each year the S. P. C. C. has to care for many girls under 16 who are victims of rape, incest, compulsory prostitution. One investigator studied 1,400 rapings of children, found the biggest group were girls in the sixth grade.

> Contrasted with New York City children's disastrous ignorance was the attitude of youngsters in suburban Bronxville. There boys and girls are taught the facts of life in school. Asked a parent: "Don't you talk about all this outside of class?" Replied a pupil: "Yes, we do some, but there's not much to talk about. Everyone knows as much as everyone else."

> Although Catholics objected to sex education in public schools, Mr. Canudo found a Roman Catholic high school in the city giving such a course to girls.

> From the junior high school whose principal feared to sully "innocent childhood," an average of two girls go each month to a home for unmarried mothers.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.