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
Sleep should be regular, with a fixed retiring hour and curfew, on
plain beds in rooms of scrupulous neatness reserved chiefly for it
with every precaution for quiet, and, if possible, with windows more
or less open the year round, and, like other rooms, never overheated.
Bathing in moderation, and especially dress and toilet should be
almost raised to fine arts and objects of constant suggestion. Each
student should have three rooms, for bath, sleep, and study,
respectively, and be responsible for their care, with every
encouragement for expressing individual tastes; but will, an
all-dominant idea of simplicity, convenience, refinement, and
elegance, without luxury. Girls need to go away from home a good part
of every year to escape the indiscretion and often the coddling of
parents and to learn self-reliance; and a family dormitory system,
with but few, twelve to twenty, in each building, to escape nervous
wear and distraction, to secure intimacy and acquaintance with one or
more matrons or teachers and to ensure the most pedagogic dietetics,
is suggested.
Exercise comes after regimen, of which it is a special reform. Swedish
gymnastics should be abandoned or reduced to a minimum of best points,
because it is too severe and, in forbidding music, lays too little
stress upon the rhythm element. Out-of-door walks and games should
have precedence over all else. The principle sometimes advocated, that
methods of physical training should apply to both boys and girls
without regard to sex, and with all the ordinary appliances found in
the men's gymnasia introduced, should be reversed and every possible
adjustment made to sex. Free plays and games should always have
precedence over indoor or uniform _commando_ exercises. Boating and
basket-ball should be allowed, but with the competition element
sedulously reduced, and with dancing of many kinds and forms the most
prominent of indoor exercises. The dance cadences the soul; the
stately minuet gives poise; the figure dances train the mind; and
pantomime and dramatic features should be introduced and even
specialties, if there are strong individual predispositions. The
history of the dance, which has often been a mode of worship, a school
of morals, and which is the root of the best that is in the drama, the
best of all exercises and that could be again the heart of our whole
educational system, should be exploited, and the dancing school and
class rescued from its present degradation. No girl is educated who
can not dance, although she need not know the ballroom in its modern
form.[10]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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