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
I have here less to say against coeducation in college, still less in
university grades after the maturity which comes at eighteen or twenty
has been achieved; but it is high time to ask ourselves whether the
theory and practise of identical coeducation, especially in the high
school, which has lately been carried to a greater extreme in this
country than the rest of the world recognizes, has not brought certain
grave dangers, and whether it does not interfere with the natural
differentiations seen everywhere else. I recognize, of course, the
great argument of economy. Indeed, we should save money and effort
could we unite churches of not too diverse creeds. We could thus give
better preaching, music, improve the edifice, etc. I am by no means
ready to advocate the radical abolition of coeducation, but we can
already sum up in a rough, brief way our account of profit and loss
with it. On the one hand, no doubt each sex develops some of its own
best qualities best in the presence of the other, but the question
still remains, how much, when, and in what way, identical coeducation
secures this end?
As has been said, girls and boys are often interested in different
aspects of the same topic, and this may have a tendency to broaden the
view-point of both and bring it into sympathy with that of the other,
but the question still remains whether one be not too much attracted
to the sphere of the other, especially girls to that of boys. No doubt
some girls become a little less gushy, their conduct more thoughtful,
and their sense of responsibility greater; for one of woman's great
functions, which is that of bestowing praise aright, is increased.
There is also much evidence that certain boys' vices are mitigated;
they are made more urbane and their thoughts of sex made more
healthful. In some respects boys are stimulated to good scholarship by
girls, who in many schools and topics excel them. We should ask,
however, What is nature's way at this stage of life? Whether boys, in
order to be well virified later, ought not to be so boisterous and
even rough as to be at times unfit companions for girls; or whether,
on the other hand, girls to be best matured ought not to have their
sentimental periods of instability, especially when we venture to
raise the question, whether for a girl in the early teens, when her
health for her whole life depends upon normalizing the lunar month,
there is not something unhygienic, unnatural, not to say a little
monstrous, in school associations with boys when she must suppress and
conceal her feelings and instinctive promptings at those times which
suggest withdrawing, to let nature do its beautiful work of
inflorescence. It is a sacred time of reverent exemption from the hard
struggle of existence in the world and from mental effort in the
school. Medical specialists, many of the best of whom now insist that
through this period she should be, as it were, "turned out to grass,"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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