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
Some girls are no doubt far fitter for boys' studies and men's careers
than others. Coeducation, too, generally means far more assimilation
of girls' to boys' ways and work than conversely. Many people believe
that girls either gain or are more affected by coeducation, especially
in the upper grades, than boys. It is interesting, however, to observe
the differences that still persist. Certain games, like football and
boxing, girls can not play; they do not fight; they are not flogged or
caned as English boys are when their bad marks foot up beyond a
certain aggregate; girls are more prone to cliques; their punishments
must be in appeals to school sentiment, to which they are exceedingly
sensitive; it is hard for them to bear defeat in games with the same
dignity and unruffled temper as boys; it is harder for them to accept
the school standards of honor that condemn the tell-tale as a sneak,
although they soon learn this. They may be a little in danger of being
roughened by boyish ways and especially by the crude and unique
language, almost a dialect in itself, prevalent among schoolboys.
Girls are far more prone to overdo; boys are persistingly lazy and
idle. Girls are content to sit and have the subject-matter pumped into
them by recitations, etc., and to merely accept, while boys are more
inspired by being told to do things and make tests and experiments. In
this, girls are often quite at sea. One writer speaks of a certain
feminine obliquity, but hastens to say that girls in these schools
soon accept its code of honor. It is urged, too, that singing classes
the voices of each sex are better in quality for the presence of the
other. In many topics of all kinds boys and girls are interested in
different aspects of the same theme, and therefore the work is
broadened. In manual training, girls excel in all artistic work; boys,
in carpentry. Girls can be made not only less noxiously sentimental
and impulsive, but their conduct tends to become more thoughtful; they
can be made to feel responsibility for bestowing their praise aright
and thus influencing the tone of the school. Calamitous as it world be
for the education of boys beyond a certain age to be entrusted
entirely or chiefly to women, it would be less so for that of girls to
be given entirely to men. Perhaps the great women teachers, whose life
and work have made them a power with girls comparable to that of
Arnold and Thring with boys, are dying out. Very likely economic
motives are too dominant for this problem to be settled on its merits
only. Finally, several writers mention the increased healthfulness of
moral tone. The vices that infest boys' schools, which Arnold thought
a quantity constantly changing with every class, are diminished.
Healthful thoughts of sex, less subterranean and base imaginings on
the one hand, and less gushy sentimentality on the other, are favored.
For either sex to be a copy of the other is to be weakened, and each
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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