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
half-animal stage, although to a large-brained, large-hearted and
truly parental soul that does not call what causes it inconvenience by
opprobrious names, an altogether lovable and even fascinating stage.
The more we know of boyhood the more narrow and often selfish do adult
ideals of it appear. Something is amiss with the lad of ten who is
very good, studious, industrious, thoughtful, altruistic, quiet,
polite, respectful, obedient, gentlemanly, orderly, always in good
toilet, docile to reason, who turns away from stories that reek with
gore, prefers adult companionship to that of his mates, refuses all
low associates, speaks standard English, or is as pious and deeply in
love with religious services as the typical maiden teacher or the _à
la mode_ parent wishes. Such a boy is either under-vitalized and
anemic and precocious by nature, a repressed, overtrained,
conventionalized manikin, a hypocrite, as some can become under
pressure thus early in life, or else a genius of some kind with a
little of all these.
But with the teens all this begins to be changed and many of these
precepts must be gradually reversed. There is an outburst of growth
that needs a large part of the total kinetic energy of the body. There
is a new interest in adults, a passion to be treated like one's
elders, to make plans for the future, a new sensitiveness to adult
praise or blame. The large muscles have their innings and there is a
new clumsiness of body and mind. The blood-vessels expand and blushing
is increased, new sensations and feelings arise, the imagination
blossoms, love of nature is born, music is felt in a new, more inward
way, fatigue comes easier and sooner; and if heredity and environment
enable the individual to cross this bridge successfully there is
sometimes almost a break of continuity, and a new being emerges. The
drill methods of the preceding period must be slowly relaxed and new
appeals made to freedom and interest. We can no longer coerce a break,
but must lead and inspire if we would avoid arrest. Individuality must
have a longer tether. Never is the power to appreciate so far ahead of
the power to express, and never does understanding so outstrip ability
to explain. Overaccuracy is atrophy. Both mental and moral acquisition
sink at once too deep to be reproduced by examination without injury
both to intellect and will. There is nothing in the environment to
which the adolescent nature does not keenly respond. With pedagogic
tact we can teach about everything we know that is really worth
knowing; but if we amplify and morselize instead of giving great
wholes, if we let the hammer that strikes the bell rest too long
against it and deaden the sound, and if we wait before each methodic
step till the pupil has reproduced all the last, we starve and retard
the soul, which is now all insight and receptivity. Plasticity is at
its maximum, utterance at its minimum. The inward traffic obstructs
the outer currents. Boys especially are often dumb-bound,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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