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
In fine, we should use these facts as a stimulus to ask more
searchingly the question whether the present system of higher
education for both sexes is not lacking in some very essential
elements, and if so what these are. Indeed, considering the facts that
in our social system man makes the advances and that woman is by
nature more prone than man to domesticity and parenthood, it is not
impossible that men's colleges do more to unfit for these than do
those for women. One cause may be moral. Ethics used to be taught as a
practical power for life and reënforced by religious motives. Now it
is theoretical and speculative and too often led captive by
metaphysical and epistemological speculations. Sometimes girls work or
worry more over studies and ideals than is good for their
constitution, and boys grow idle and indifferent, and this
proverbially tends to bad habits. Perhaps fitting for college has been
too hard at the critical age of about eighteen, and requirements of
honest, persevering work during college years too little enforced, or
grown irksome by physiological reaction of lassitude from the strain
of fitting and entering. Again, girls mature earlier than boys; and
the latter who have been educated with them tend to certain elements
of maturity and completeness too early in life, and their growth
period is shortened or its momentum lessened by an atmosphere of
femininity. Something is clearly wrong, and more so here than we have
at present any reason to think is the case among the academic male or
female youth of other lands. To see and admit that there is an evil
very real, deep, exceedingly difficult and complex in its causes, but
grave and demanding a careful reconsideration of current educational
ideas and practises, is the first step; and this every thoughtful and
well-informed mind, I believe, must now take.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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