What knowledge they possess they keep to themselves, for it is
considered to be in the interests of public schools that these things
should be hushed up. When anything very scandalous occurs one or two lads
are expelled, to their own grave and, perhaps, lifelong injury, and
without benefit to those who remain, whose awakening sexual life rarely
receives intelligent sympathy.
In several of the Histories which follow in this chapter, as well
as in Histories contained in other volumes of these _Studies_,
details will be found concerning homosexuality as it occurs in
English schools, public or private. (See also the study
"Auto-erotism" in vol. i.) The prevalence of homosexual and
erotic phenomena in schools varies greatly at different schools
and at different times in the same school, while in small private
schools such phenomena may be entirely unknown. As an English
schoolboy I never myself saw or heard anything of such practices,
and in Germany, Professor Gurlitt (_Die Neue Generation_,
January, 1909), among others, testifies to similar absence of
experience during his whole school life, although there was much
talk and joking among the boys over sexual things.
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