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
Without specifying here details or curricula, the ideals that should
be striven toward in the intermediate and collegiate education of
adolescent girls with the proper presupposition of motherhood, and
which are already just as practicable as Abbotsholme[8] or _L'Ecole
des Roches_,[9] may be rudely indicated somewhat as follows.
First, the ideal institution for the training of girls from twelve or
thirteen on into the twenties, when the period most favorable to
motherhood begins, should be in the country in the midst of hills, the
climbing of which is the best stimulus for heart and lungs, and tends
to mental elevation and breadth of view. There should be water for
boating, bathing, and skating, aquaria and aquatic life; gardens both
for kitchen vegetables and horticulture; forests for their seclusion
and religious awe; good roads, walks, and paths that tempt to walking
and wheeling: playgrounds and space for golf and tennis, with large
covered but unheated space favorable for recreations in weather really
too bad for out-of-door life and for those indisposed; and plenty of
nooks that permit each to be alone with nature, for this develops
inwardness, poise, and character, yet not too great remoteness from
the city for a wise utilization of its advantages at intervals. All
that can be called environment is even more important for girls than
boys, significant as it is for the latter.
The first aim, which should dominate every item, pedagogic method and
matter, should be health--a momentous word that looms up beside
holiness, to which it is etymologically akin. The new hygiene of the
last few years should be supreme and make these academic areas soared
to the cult of the goddess Hygeia. Only those who realize what
advances have been made in health culture and know something of its
vast new literature can realize all that this means. The health of
woman is, as we have seen, if possible even more important for the
welfare of the race than that of man; and the influence of her body
upon her mind is, in a sense, greater, so that its needs should be
supreme and primary. Foods should favor the completest digestion, so
that metabolism be on the highest plane. The dietary should be
abundant, plain, and varied, and cooked with all the refinements
possible in the modern cooking-school, which should be one of its
departments, with limited use of rich foods or desserts and
stimulating drinks, but with wholesome proximity to dairy and farm.
Nutrition is the first law of health and happiness, the prime
condition and creator of euphoria; and the appetite should be, as it
always is if unperverted, like a kind of somatic conscience
steadfastly pointing toward the true pole of needs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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