Coming of Age in Samoa
personality, through coeducation and free and unregimented friendships, and possibly do away with the evils inherent in the too intimate family organisation, thus eliminating a part of our penalty of maladjustment without sacrificing any of our dearly bought gains.
The next great difference between Samoa and our own culture which may be credited with a lower production of maladjusted individuals is the difference in the attitude towards sex and the education of the children in matters pertaining to birth and death. None of the facts of sex or of birth are regarded as unfit for children, no child has to conceal its knowledge for fear of punishment or ponder painfully over little-understood occurrences. Secrecy, ignorance, guilty knowledge, faulty speculations resulting in grotesque conceptions which may have far-reaching results, a knowledge of the bare physical facts of sex without a knowledge of the accompanying excitement, of the fact of birth without the pains of labour, of the fact of death without the fact of corruption—all the chief flaws in our fatal philosophy of sparing children a knowledge of the dreadful truth—are absent in Samoa. Furthermore, the Samoan child who participates intimately in the lives of a host of relatives has many and varied experiences upon which to base its emotional attitudes. Our children, confined within one family circle (and such confinement is becoming more and more frequent with the growth of cities and the substitution of apartment houses with a transitory population for a neighbourhood of house-
[216]
