They are, in order, sex education; the special problems of seafaring men and soldiers; prostitution and homosexuality; and the question, why do people fail to go for treatment, or run away?

There is no serious disagreement today that greater knowledge of VD is one of the essential elements of any control scheme, and that it must come early to do the most good. If one is to know what VD is about, one must first know what sex is about; so sex education must come even earlier. Sex education begins with anatomy, physiology, embryology, and genetics, scaled to meet the natural curiosity of children about themselves and their playmates, helped by examples with animals, growing in detail and complexity as increasing understanding permits, leading progressively to an undistorted picture of conception, embryonic and fetal development, and birth as part of the preparation of children for the stresses of puberty. That the process has the intrinsic beauty of life, but that the course of life meets problem, can become the kind of introduction to VD that might eliminate the smirking, the false modesty, the hypocrisy, which are close to the root of the whole nontechnical side of the VD problem. Somewhere along the line the questions that come up about homosexuality, as well as about contraception and abortion, must be dealt with as directly, with as little sugar coated duplicity, as all the rest. Yes, we all know it is not easy. But the heart of the problem of sex education is not with the children but with the adults around them. The role of adults in sex education ought to be essentially passive, following the leads and the pace set by the children themselves. Let them learn, and help them to learn, and help them to teach one another, as they do anyway. Help to immunize them against the hucksters, and against the ugliness and cruelty that are inescapable in our world. (see SPECIFIC SOCIAL FACTORS IN THE VD PROBLEM PART II)