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
Mr. Swift has collected interesting biographical material[15] to show
that school work is analytic, while life is synthetic, and how the
narrowness of the school enclosure prompts many youth in the wayward
age to jump fences and seek new and more alluring pastures. According
to school standards, many were dull and indolent, but their nature was
too large or their ideals too high to be satisfied with it. Wagner at
the Nikolaischule at Leipzig was relegated to the third form, having
already attained to the second at Dresden, which so embittered him
that he lost all taste for philology and, in his own words, "became
lazy and slovenly." Priestley never improved by any systematic course
of study. W.H. Gibson was very slow and was rebuked for wasting his
time in sketching. James Russell Lowell was reprimanded, at first
privately and then publicly, in his sophomore year "for general
negligence in themes, forensics, and recitations," and finally
suspended in 1838 "on account of continued neglect of his college
duties." In early life Goldsmith's teacher thought him the dullest boy
she had ever taught. His tutor called him ignorant and stupid. Irving
says that a lad "whose passions are not strong enough in youth to
mislead him from that path of science which his tutors, and not his
inclinations, have chalked out, by four or five years' perseverance,
will probably obtain every advantage and honor his college can bestow.
I would compare the man whose youth has been thus passed in the
tranquility of dispassionate prudence, to liquors that never ferment,
and, consequently, continue always muddy." Huxley detested writing
till past twenty. His schooling was very brief, and he declared that
those set over him "cared about as much for his intellectual and moral
welfare as if they were baby farmers." Humphry Davy was faithful but
showed no talent in school, having "the reputation of being an idle
boy, with a gift for making verses, but with no aptitude for studies
of a graver sort." Later in life he considered it fortunate that he
was left so much to himself. Byron was so poor a scholar that he only
stood at the head of the class when, as was the custom, it was
inverted, and the bantering master repeatedly said to him, "Now,
George, man, let me see how soon you'll be at the foot." Schiller's
negligence and lack of alertness called for repeated reproof, and his
final school thesis was unsatisfactory. Hegel was a poor scholar, and
at the university it was stated "that he was of middling industry and
knowledge but especially deficient in philosophy." John Hunter nearly
became a cabinetmaker. Lyell had excessive aversion to work. George
Combe wondered why he was so inferior to other boys in arithmetic.
Heine agreed with the monks that Greek was the invention of the devil.
"God knows what misery I suffered with it." He hated French meters,
and his teacher vowed he had no soul for poetry. He idled away his
time at Bonn, and was "horribly bored" by the "odious, stiff,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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