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
Manners, a word too often relegated to the past as savoring of the
primness of the ancient dame school or female seminary, are really
minor or sometimes major morals. They can express everything in the
whole range of the impulsive or emotional life. Now that we understand
the primacy of movement over feeling, we can appreciate what a school
of bearing and repose in daily converse with others means. I would
revive some of the ancient casuistry of details, but less the rules of
the drawing-room, call and party, although these should not be
neglected, than the deeper expressions of true ladyhood seen in an
exquisite, tender and unselfish regard for the feelings of others.
Women's ideal of compelling every one whom they meet to like them is a
noble one, and the control of every automatism is not only a part of
good breeding, but nervous health.
Regularity should be another all-pervading norm. In the main, even
though he may have "played his sex symphony too harshly," E.H. Clark
was right. Periodicity, perhaps the deepest law of the cosmos,
celebrates its highest triumphs in woman's life. For years everything
must give way to its thorough and settled establishment. In the
monthly Sabbaths of rest, the ideal school should revert to the
meaning of the word leisure. The paradise of stated rest should be
revisited, idleness be actively cultivated; reverie, in which the
soul, which needs these seasons of withdrawal for its own development,
expatiates over the whole life of the race, should be provided for and
encouraged in every legitimate way, for, in rest, the whole momentum
of heredity is felt in ways most favorable to full and complete
development. Then woman should realize that _to be_ is greater than
_to do_; should step reverently aside from her daily routine and let
Lord Nature work. In this time of sensitiveness and perturbation, when
anemia and chlorosis are so peculiarly immanent to her sex, remission
of toil should not only be permitted, but required; and yet the
greatest individual liberty should be allowed to adjust itself to the
vast diversities of individual constitutional needs. (See Chapter VII
on this point.) The cottage home, which should take the place of the
dormitory, should always have special interest and attractions for
these seasons.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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