Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and HygieneHall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Science
Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene
Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Adolescence; Children -- Health and hygiene; Educational psychology
One striking and cardinal fact never to be forgotten considering its
each and every phenomenon and stage is that the experiences of
adolescence are extremely transitory and very easily forgotten, so
that they are often totally lost to the adult consciousness.
Lancaster[11] observes that we are constantly told by adults past
thirty that they never had this and that experience, and that those
who have had them are abnormal; that they are far more rare than
students of childhood assert, etc. He says, "Not a single young person
with whom I have had free and open conversation has been free from
serious thoughts of suicide," but these are forgotten later. A typical
case of many I could gather is that of a lady, not yet in middle life,
precise and carefully trained, who, on hearing a lecture on the
typical phases of adolescence, declared that she must have been
abnormal, for she knew nothing of any of these experiences. Her
mother, however, produced her diary, and there she read for the first
time since it was written, beginning in the January of her thirteenth
year, a long series of resolutions which revealed a course of conduct
that brought the color to her face, that she should have found it
necessary to pledge not to swear, lie, etc., and which showed
conclusively that she had passed through about all the phases
described. These phenomena are sometimes very intense and may come
late in life, but it is impossible to remember feelings and emotions
with definiteness, and these now make up a large part of life. Hence
we are prone to look with some incredulity upon the immediate records
of the tragic emotions and experiences typical and normal at this
time, because development has scored away their traces from the
conscious soul.
There is a wall around the town of Boyville, says White,[12] in
substance, which is impenetrable when its gates have once shut upon
youth. An adult may peer over the wall and try to ape the games
inside, but finds it all a mockery and himself banished among the
purblind grown-ups. The town of Boyville was old when Nineveh was a
hamlet; it is ruled by ancient laws; has its own rulers and idols; and
only the dim, unreal noises of the adult world about it have changed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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