A somewhat more technical and completely impersonal acquaintance with the essential facts of sex then becomes desirable, and this would usually be supplied by the school.
The great though capricious educator, Basedow, to some extent a pupil of Rousseau, was an early pioneer in both the theory and the practice of giving school children instruction in the facts of the sexual life, from the age of ten onwards.

He insists much on this subject in his great treatise, the _Elementarwerk_ (1770-1774).

The questions of children are to be answered truthfully, he states, and they must be taught never to jest at anything so sacred and serious as the sexual relations.

They are to be shown pictures of childbirth, and the dangers of sexual irregularities are to be clearly expounded to them at the outset.
Boys are to be taken to hospitals to see the results of venereal disease.

Basedow is aware that many parents and teachers will be shocked at his insistence on these things in his books and in his practical pedagogic work, but such people, he declares, ought to be shocked at the Bible (see, e.g., Pinloche, _La Reforme de l'Education en Allemagne au dixhuitieme siecle: Basedow et le Philanthropinisme_, pp.