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
These simple studies in this vast field demonstrate little or nothing,
but they suggest very much. Slang commonly expresses a moral judgment
and falls into ethical categories. It usually concerns ideas,
sentiment, and will, has a psychic content, and is never, like the
language of the school, a mere picture of objects of sense or a
description of acts. To restate it in correct English would be a
course in ethics, courtesy, taste, logical predication and opposition,
honesty, self-possession, modesty, and just the ideal and
non-presentative mental content that youth most needs, and which the
sensuous presentation methods of teaching have neglected. Those who
see in speech nothing but form condemn it because it is vulgar. Youth
has been left to meet these high needs alone, and the prevalence of
these crude forms is an indictment of the delinquency of pedagogues in
not teaching their pupils to develop and use their intellect properly.
Their pith and meatiness are a standing illustration of the need of
condensation for intellectual objects that later growth analyzes.
These expressions also illustrate the law that the higher and larger
the spiritual content, the grosser must be the illustration in which
it is first couched. Further studies now in progress will, I believe,
make this still clearer.
Again, we see in the above, outcrops of the strong pubescent instinct
to enlarge the vocabulary in two ways. One is to affect foreign
equivalents. This at first suggests an appetency for another language
like the dog-Latin gibberish of children. It is one of the motives
that prompts many to study Latin or French, but it has little depth,
for it turns out, on closer study, to be only the affectation of
superiority and the love of mystifying others. The other is a very
different impulse to widen the vernacular. To pause to learn several
foreign equivalents of things of sense may be anti-educational if it
limits the expansion of thought in our own tongue. The two are, in
fact, often inversely related to each other. In giving a foreign
synonym when the mind seeks a new native word, the pedagogue does not
deal fairly. In this irradiation into the mother tongue, sometimes
experience with the sentiment or feeling, act, fact, or object
precedes, and then a name for it is demanded, or conversely the sound,
size, oddness or jingle of the word is first attractive and the
meaning comes later. The latter needs the recognition and utilization
which the former already has. Lists of favorite words should be
wrought out for spelling and writing and their meanings illustrated,
for these have often the charm of novelty as on the frontier of
knowledge and enlarge the mental horizon like new discoveries. We must
not starve this voracious new appetite "for words as instruments of
thought."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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