A champion of the transformation of pedagogy into a psycho-physiological
science is to be found in Sweden in the person of Prof. Hjalmar Oehrwal
who has discussed in his essays native and foreign discoveries in the
field of psychology. One of his conclusions is that the so-called
technical exercises, gymnastics, manual training, sloyd, and the like,
are not, as they are erroneously called, a relaxation from mental
overstrain by change in work, but simply a new form of brain fatigue.
All work, he finds, done under conditions of fatigue is uneconomic
whether one regards the quantity produced or its value as an exercise.
Rest should be nothing more than rest,--freedom to do only what one
wants to, or to do nothing at all. As to fear, he proves, following
Binet's investigation in this subject, how corporal discipline, threats,
and ridicule lead to cowardice; how all of these methods are to be
rejected because they are depressing and tend to a diminution of energy.
He shows, moreover, how fear can be overcome progressively, by
strengthening the nervous system and in that way strengthening the
character. This result comes about partly when all unnecessary
terrorising is avoided, partly when children are accustomed to bear
calmly and quietly the inevitable unpleasantnesses of danger.
Prof. Axel Key's investigations on school children have won
international recognition. In Sweden they have supplied the most
significant material up to the present time for determining the
influence of studies on physical development and the results of
intellectual overstrain.
It is to be hoped that when through empirical investigation we begin to
get acquainted with the real nature of children, the school and the home
will be freed from absurd notions about the character and needs of the
child, those absurd notions which now cause painful cases of physical
and psychical maltreatment, still called by conscientious and thinking
human beings in schools and in homes, education.
CHAPTER IV
HOMELESSNESS
From time to time the present age is criticised, as if its corruption
contrasted with the moral strictness of earlier periods. Such charges
are as crude and as groundless as is most of the same kind of criticism
that is common to every generation of man's history. They have been
repeated ever since man began to strive consciously for other ends than
the momentary gratification of his undisciplined impulses.
One need only to consult the men of the present generation and the still
living representatives of the past generation, to be assured that bad
conduct at school is not characteristic of our time. Let any one read
the account of life at universities in earlier periods when the younger
students were of the same age as schoolboys in high schools and it will
soon be plain that the cause of the evil is not modern literature nor
modern belief.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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