Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/17

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application of its teachings to the boy's daily life. His mother has never been a boy, so she has no idea what revolutions are going on in his mind and body unless he tells her as he infrequently does, of the changes in view point which passing childhood and dawning youth bring, and his father—his father has long ago forgotten that he ever was a boy, so that he gives the son no concern.

The sensible, sympathetic father who takes his fourteen-year-old boy into his confidence and who talks to him frankly about the changes which are going through and within him is so rare as to be a negligible quantity in the discussion of the boy and his problems. Ninety-five per cent of the boys who enter college from high school will say, if asked, that their fathers have never so much as mentioned to them anything that had to do with sex or adolescence. What the boy learns at this time about his body and about the mysteries of life generally comes from boys as ignorant as himself, or more likely than not from some one who is not only ignorant but whose moral ideals are low and whose tendencies are vicious. It is the rowdy and the street loafer, and the nomadic hired man who has picked up his facts from the gutters, and the ignorant and the vulgar minded who solve our boys' sex problems for them—more's the pity!

A good many things are happening to a boy who is just entering high school, as I have said. Educationally he is forming an entirely new relationship. High school is differently run from the elementary school. He will have more