Love, Sex, and Happiness in Education: The Russells, Beacon Hill School, and Teaching "Sex-Love" in England, 1927-1943

The story of early twentieth-centurysex education campaigns has generally been told as a narrative of fear about unruly impulses, innocent children, promiscuity, contamination, and illness. In this story, doctors, educators, social purity activists, politicians, and other intellectuals raise haunting specters of venereal disease, masturbation, prostitution, and various perversions. Historians have rightly pointed to the predominance of abstinence and social purity agendas that have given sex education a conservative character, highlighting the dangers rather than the pleasures of sex.¹ However, this is not that story. In the focus on how sex education has warned children about sex, another story has been eclipsed, namely, the story of how "modern" educators also looked to sex education to facilitate normative heterosexual love. Some "modern" educators sought to nurture, if cautiously, and direct rather than stifle and suppress children's sexual instincts. They confronted the dilemma of teaching children to develop healthy, positive attitudes toward sex while ensuring that such attitudes did not lead to promiscuous, perverse, and purportedly unhealthy adult sexual practices. They addressed subjects such as children's sexual curiosity and their propensity to engage in "perverse" sexual practices, even while they hoped to educate children toward mature "heterosexual adjustment." In the pedagogies of these educators, the encouragement of love was important to creating a positive sex ideal, albeit one still firmly bound to the heterosexual, white, and professional-class family.

While many scholars have devoted attention to the development of modern and experimental schools, few of these scholars have explicitly analyzed such schools as sex education experiments.² Yet many modern educators were influenced by, if not important figures in, the transnational sex reform movement, which prominently featured German, American, and British intellectuals. Several well-known sexologists, novelists, feminists, socialists, scientists, and physicians who identified as sex reformers were also deeply concerned about education's effects on childhood sexuality. This same transnational nexus also shaped the development of schools that mobilized alternative methods of education.³ Indeed, the modern school emerged in a time of tremendous white middle-class anxieties over the physical, psychological, political, and evolutionary repercussions of suppressing sexual instincts and in the context of a prominent discourse on the creative power of sexual instincts as the energies of civilization.⁴

As well-known English sex reformers and educators, Bertrand and Dora Russell's founding of Beacon Hill School offers an important case study of sex education as positively directed to white middle-class children's future potential for love, heterosexual marriage, and creative use of sexual energies for upholding "civilization." I suggest here that concerns over training children for loving heterosexual companionship informed the Beacon Hill School's curriculum and policies. The school's goals were also critically shaped by the Russells' philosophies on the nature of the child, which, in line with sexologists, child guidance experts, and other educators, characterized the child as a sexually unrepressed "savage" requiring the refinement and modification of sexual instincts into love. The Russells, like a number of their contemporaries, looked to the child as having a sexual life that was to be emotionally trained rather than denied.

While my focus here is on how both Dora and Bertrand Russell shared similar views, there were also noticeable differences. Bertrand Russell's works on children's education generally focused on how educating emotions could ameliorate the problems of a threatened social order, a declining aristocracy, and the lack of biologically fit citizens for the British Empire.⁵ Dora Russell, in contrast, was more sympathetic to radical socialist experiments in redefining community relations and authority through emotional ties of love.⁶ Moreover, there were subtle differences between how Dora and Bertrand treated the role of educating emotions in relationship to intelligence. Bertrand generally discussed emotions in terms of what they contributed to rethinking intelligence, will, and intentionality, whereas Dora was much more interested in exploring emotions as ways of undermining the patriarchal privileging of rationality.⁷

When the Russells founded Beacon Hill School in 1927, they were deeply involved in feminist, socialist, and sex reform...