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
university, professional or technical school. This is the harmony of
counterparts and constitutes the best basis of psychic amphimixis. For
the reinstallation of the humanistic college, the time has come when
cultivated woman ought to come forward and render vital aid. If she
does so and helps to evolve a high school and an A.B. course that is
truly liberal, it will not only fit her nature and needs far better
than anything now existing, but young men at the humanistic stage of
their own education will seek to profit by it, and she will thus repay
her debt to man in the past by aiding him to de-universitize the
college and to rescue secondary education from its gravest dangers.
But even should all this be done, coeducation would by means be thus
justified. If adolescent boys normally pass through a generalized or
even feminized stage of psychic development in which they are
peculiarly plastic to the guidance of older women who have such rare
insight into their nature, such infinite sympathy and patience with
all the symptoms of their storm and stress metamorphosis, when they
seek everything by turns and nothing long, and if young men will
forever afterward understand woman's nature better for living out more
fully this stage of their lives and will fail to do so if it is
abridged or dwarfed, it by no means follows that intimate daily and
class-room association with girls of their own age is necessary or
best. The danger of this is that the boy's instinct to assert his own
manhood will thus be made premature and excessive, that he will react
against general culture, in the capacity for which girls, who are
older than boys at the same age, naturally excel them. Companionship
and comparisons incline him to take premature refuge in some one
talent that emphasizes his psycho-sexual difference too soon. Again,
he is farther from nubile maturity than the girl classmate of his own
age, and coeducation and marriage between them are prone to violate
the important physiological law of disparity that requires the husband
to be some years the wife's senior, both in their own interests, as
maturity begins to decline to age, and in those of their offspring.
Thus the young man with his years of restraint and probation ahead,
and his inflammable desires, is best removed from the half-conscious
cerebrations about wedlock, inevitably more insistent with constant
girl companionship. If he resists this during all the years of his
apprenticeship, he grows more immune and inhibitive of it when its
proper hour arrives, and perhaps becomes in soul a bachelor before his
time. In this side of his nature he is forever incommensurate with and
unintelligible to woman, be she even teacher, sister, or mother.
Better some risk of gross thoughts and even acts, to which phylogeny
and recapitulation so strongly incline him, than this subtle
eviration. But if the boy is unduly repelled from the sphere of girls'
interests, the girl is in some danger of being unduly drawn to his,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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