Human sexuality is one of the subjects in which Gandhi and the Bahá'ís have important differences of opinion.![[footnote]](img32.png){kind=small}
Nevertheless, they do agree that
besides teaching
basic knowledge about maintaining proper hygiene and
health, it is very important to teach children about reproduction and
sex. Sex and reproduction, though related, are far from being the same
thing.
Sex education presents a challenge because on the one hand, great care must be taken to protect children from the extremely harmful effects of dangerous puritanical philosophies that tend to demonize human sexuality. On the other hand, it also becomes vital to teach children, from a young age, the value and necessity of leading a chaste and holy life. Such values are especially vital in these days of sexual permissiveness and instant gratification. The knowledge of how to regulate and channel--but not repress--sexual desires and how to restrain the violent, animalistic side of human sexuality may very well help to avoid the evils of paedophilia, rape, and the other numerous, unacceptable, distorted, expressions of sexuality that currently plague society.
Relating basic sex education with training in self-restraint, Gandhi writes,
We cannot properly control or conquer the sexual passion by turning a blind eye to it. I am, therefore, strongly in favour of teaching young boys and young girls the significance and right use of their generative organs. In my own way I have tried to impart this knowledge to young children of both sexes, for whose training I was responsible. But the sex education that I stand for must have for its object the conquest and sublimation of the sex passion. Such education should automatically serve to bring home to children the essential distinction between man and brute, to make them realize that it is man's privilege and pride to be gifted with the faculties of head and heart both, that he is a thinking no less than a feeling animal, and to renounce the sovereignty of reason over the blind instinct is, therefore, to renounce man's estate. In man, reason quickens and guides the feeling, in brute the soul lies ever dormant. To awaken the heart is to awaken the dormant soul, to awaken reason and to inculcate discrimination between good and evil. Today, our entire environment--our reading, our thinking, and our social behaviour--is generally calculated to subserve and cater for the sex urge. To break through its coils is no easy task. But it is a task worthy of our highest endeavour.[20]
`Abdu'l-Bahá also emphasized the need to teach honor, holiness and chastity to children while they are still young:
Children are even as a branch that is fresh and green; they will grow up in whatever way you train them. Take the utmost care to give them high ideals and goals, so that once they come of age, they will cast their beams like brilliant candles on the world, and will not be defiled by lusts and passions in the way of animals, heedless and unaware, but instead will set their hearts on achieving everlasting honour and acquiring all the excellences of humankind.[21]