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
comes normally to respect more and to prefer its own sex.
Not to pursue this subject further here, it is probable that many of
the causes for the facts set forth are very different and some of them
almost diametrically opposite in the two sexes. Hard as it is _per
se_, it is after all a comparatively easy matter to educate boys. They
are less peculiarly responsive in mental tone to the physical and
psychic environment, tend more strongly and early to special
interests, and react more vigorously against the obnoxious elements of
their surroundings. This is truest of the higher education, and more
so in proportion as the tendencies of the age are toward special and
vocational training. Woman, as we saw, in every fiber of her soul and
body is a more generic creature than man, nearer to the race, and
demands more and more with advancing age an education that is
essentially liberal and humanistic. This is progressively hard when
the sexes differentiate in the higher grades. Moreover, nature decrees
that with advancing civilization the sexes shall not approximate, but
differentiate, and we shall probably be obliged to carry sex
distinctions, at least of method, into many if not most of the topics
of the higher education. Now that woman has by general consent
attained the right to the best that man has, she must seek a training
that fits her own nature as well or better. So long as she strives to
be manlike she will be inferior and a pinchbeck imitation, but she
must develop a new sphere that shall be like the rich field of the
cloth of gold for the best instincts of her nature.
Divergence is most marked and sudden in the pubescent period--in the
early teens. At this age, by almost world-wide consent, boys and girls
separate for a time, and lead their lives during this most critical
period more or less apart, at least for a few years, until the ferment
of mind and body which results in maturity of functions then born and
culminating in nubility, has done its work. The family and the home
abundantly recognize this tendency. At twelve or fourteen, brothers
and sisters develop a life more independent of each other than before.
Their home occupations differ as do their plays, games, tastes.
History, anthropology, and sociology, a well as home life, abundantly
illustrate this. This is normal and biological. What our schools and
other institutions should do, is not to obliterate these differences
but to make boys more manly and girls more womanly. We should respect
the law of sexual differences, and not forget that motherhood is a
very different thing from fatherhood. Neither sex should copy nor set
patterns to the other, but all parts should be played harmoniously and
clearly in the great sex symphony.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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