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
For the slow evolution of such a scheme, we must first of all
distinctly and ostensively invert the present maxim, and educate
primarily and chiefly for motherhood, assuming that, if that does not
come, single life can best take care of itself, because it is less
intricate and lower and its needs far more easily met. While girls may
be trained with boys, coeducation should cease at the dawn of
adolescence, at least for a season. Great daily intimacy between the
sexes in high school, if not in college, tends to rub of the bloom and
delicacy which can develop in each, and girls suffer in this respect,
let us repeat, far more than boys. The familiar comradeship that
ignores sex should be left to the agenic class. To the care of their
institutions, we leave with pious and reverent hands the ideals
inspired by characters like Hypatia, Madame de Staël, the Misses Cobb,
Martineau, Fuller, Bronté, by George Eliot, George Sand, and Mrs.
Browning; and while accepting and profiting by what they have done,
and acknowledging every claim for their abilities and achievements,
prospective mothers must not be allowed to forget a still larger class
of ideal women, both in history and literature, from the Holy Mother
to Beatrice Clotilda de Vaux, and all those who have inspired men to
great deeds, and the choice and far richer anthology of noble mothers.
We must premise, too, that she must not be petted or pampered with
regimen or diet unsuited to her needs; left to find out as best she
can, from surreptitious or worthy sources, what she most of all needs
to know; must recognize that our present civilization is hard on woman
and that she is not yet adjusted to her social environment; that as
she was of old accused of having given man the apple of knowledge of
good and evil, so he now is liable to a perhaps no less serious
indictment of having given her the apple of intellectualism and
encouraged her to assume his standards at the expense of health. We
must recognize that riches are probably harder on her, on the whole,
than poverty, and that poor parents should not labor too hard to
exempt her from its wholesome discipline. The expectancy of change so
stamped upon her sex by heredity as she advances into maturity must
not be perverted into uneasiness or her soul sown with the tares of
ambition or fired by intersexual competition and driven on, to quote
Dr. R.T. Edes, "by a tireless sort of energy which is a compound of
conscience, ambition, and desire to please, plus a peculiar female
obstinacy." If she is bright, she must not be overworked in the school
factory, studying in a way which parodies Hood's "Song of the Shirt";
and if dull or feeble, she should not be worried by preceptresses like
a eminent lady principal,[7] who thought girls' weakness is usually
imaginary or laziness, and that doctors are to blame for suggesting
illness and for intimating that men will have to choose between a
healthy animal and an educated invalid for a wife.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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