Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene — John Shaqi
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
Adolescent girls, especially in the middle classes, in upper grammar
and high school grades, during the golden age for nascent muscular
development, suffer perhaps most of all in this respect. Grave as are
the evils of child labor, I believe far more pubescents in this
country now suffer from too little than from too much physical
exercise, while most who suffer from work do so because it is too
uniform, one-sided, accessory, or performed under unwholesome
conditions, and not because it is excessive in amount. Modern industry
has thus largely ceased to be a means of physical development and
needs to be offset by compensating modes of activity. Many
labor-saving devices increase neural strain, so that one of the
problems of our time is how to preserve and restore nerve energy.
Under present industrial systems this must grow worse and not better
in the future. Healthy natural industries will be less and less open
to the young. This is the new situation that now confronts those
concerned for motor education, if they would only make good what is
lost.
Some of the results of these conditions are seen in average
measurements of dimensions, proportions, strength, skill, and control.
Despite the excellence of the few, the testimony of those most
familiar with the bodies of children and adults, and their physical
powers, gives evidence of the ravages of modern modes of life that,
without a wide-spread motor revival, can bode only degeneration for
our nation and our race. The number of common things that can not be
done at all; the large proportion of our youth who must be exempted
from any kinds of activity or a great amount of any; the thin limbs,
collapsed shoulders or chests, the bilateral asymmetry, weak hearts,
lungs, eyes, puny and bad muddy or pallid complexions, tired ways,
automatism, dyspeptic stomachs, the effects of youthful error or of
impoverished heredity, delicate and tender nurture, often, alas, only
too necessary, show the lamentable and cumulative effects of long
neglect of the motor abilities, the most educable of all man's powers,
and perhaps the most important for his well-being. If the unfaithful
stewards of these puny and shameful bodies had again, as in Sparta, to
strip and stand before stern judges and render them account, and be
smitten with a conviction of their weakness, guilty deformity, and
arrest of growth; if they were brought to realize how they are fallen
beings, as weak as stern theologians once deemed them depraved, and
how great their need of physical salvation, we might hope again for a
physical renaissance. Such a rebirth the world has seen but twice or
perhaps thrice, and each was followed by the two or three of the
brightest culture periods of history, and formed an epoch in the
advancement of the kingdom of man. A vast body of evidence could be
collected from the writings of anthropologists showing how superior
unspoiled savages are to civilized man in correct or esthetic
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