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
Of all safeguards I believe a rightly cultivated sense of honor is the
most effective at this age. Sadly as the written code of student honor
in all lands needs revision, and partial, freaky, and utterly
perverted, tainted and cowardly as it often is, it really means what
Kant expressed in the sublime precept, "Thou canst because thou
oughtest." Fichte said that _Faulheit, Feigheit_, and _Falschheit_
[Laziness, cowardice, falsehood] were the three dishonorable things
for students. If they would study the history and enter into the
spirit of their own fraternities, they would often have keener and
broader ideas of honor to which they are happily so sensitive. If
professors made it always a point of honor to confess and never to
conceal the limitation of their knowledge, would scorn all pretense of
it, place credit for originality frankly where it belongs, teach no
creeds they do not profoundly believe, or topics in which they are not
interested, and withhold nothing from those who want the truth, they
could from this vantage with more effect bring students to feel that
the laziness that, while outwardly conforming, does no real inner
work; that getting a diploma, as a professor lately said, an average
student could do, on one hour's study a day; living beyond one's
means, and thus imposing a hardship on parents greater than the talent
of the son justifies; accepting stipends not needed, especially to the
deprivation of those more needy; using dishonest ways of securing rank
in studies or positions on teams, or social standing, are, one and
all, not only ungentlemanly but cowardly and mean, and the axe would
be laid at the root of the tree. Honor should impel students to go
nowhere where they conceal their college, their fraternity, or even
their name; to keep themselves immaculate from all contact with that
class of women which, Ziegler states, brought twenty-five per cent of
the students of the University of Berlin in a single year to
physicians; to remember that other's sisters are as cherished as their
own; to avoid those sins against confiding innocence which cry for
vengeance, as did Valentine against Faust, and which strengthen the
hate of social classes and make mothers and sisters seem tedious
because low ideas of womanhood have been implanted, and which give a
taste for mucky authors that reek with suggestiveness; and to avoid
the waste of nerve substance and nerve weakness in ways which Ibsen
and Tolstoi have described. These things are the darkest blot on the
honor of youth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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