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
It is utterly impossible without injury to hold girls to the same
standards of conduct, regularity, severe moral accountability, and
strenuous mental work that boys need. The privileges and immunities of
her sex are inveterate, and with these the American girl in the middle
teens fairly tingles with a new-born consciousness. Already she
occasionally asserts herself in the public high school against a male
teacher or principal who seeks to enforce discipline by methods boys
respect, in a way that suggests that the time is at hand when
popularity with her sex will be as necessary in a successful teacher
as it is in the pulpit. In these interesting oases where girl
sentiment has made itself felt in school it has generally carried
parents, committeemen, the press, and public sentiment before it, and
has already made a precious little list of martyrs whom, were I an
educational pope, I would promptly canonize. The progressive
feminization of secondary education works its subtle demoralization on
the male teachers who remain. Public sentiment would sustain them in
many parental exactions with boys which it disallows in mixed classes.
It is hard, too, for male principals of schools with only female
teachers not to suffer some deterioration in the moral tone of their
virility and to lose in the power to cope successfully with men. Not
only is this often confessed and deplored, but the incessant
compromises the best male teachers of mixed classes must make with
their pedagogic convictions in both teaching and discipline make the
profession less attractive to manly men of large caliber and of sound
fiber. Again, the recent rapid increase of girls, the percentage of
which to population in high schools has in many communities doubled in
but little more than a decade, almost necessarily involves a decline
in the average quality of girls, perhaps as much greater for them as
compared with boys as their increase has been greater. When but few
were found in these institutions they were usually picked girls with
superior tastes and ability, but now the average girl of the rank and
file is, despite advanced standard, of admission, of an order natively
lower. From this deterioration both boys and teachers suffer, even
though the greatest good for the greatest number may be enhanced. Once
more, it is generally admitted that girls in good boarding-schools,
where evenings, food, and regimen are controlled, are in better health
than day pupils with social, church, and domestic duties and perhaps
worries to which boys are less subject. This is the nascent stage of
periodicity to the slow normalization of which, during these few
critical years, everything that interferes should yield. Some kind of
tacit recognition of this is indispensable, but in mixed classes every
form of such concession is baffling and demoralizing to boys.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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