Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene — John Shaqi
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
Contrast this life with that of a "hand" in a modern shoe factory, who
does all day but one of the eighty-one stages or processes from a
tanned hide to a finished shoe, or of a man in a shirt shop who is one
of thirty-nine, each of whom does as piece-work a single step
requiring great exactness, speed, and skill, and who never knows how a
whole shirt is made, and we shall see that the present beginning of a
revival of interest in muscular development comes none too early. So
liberal is muscular education of this kind that its work in somewhat
primitive form has been restored and copied many features by many
educational institutions for adolescents, of the Abbotsholme type and
grade, and several others, whose purpose is to train for primitive
conditions of colonial life. Thousands of school gardens have also
been lately developed for lower grades, which have given a new impetus
to the study of nature. Farm training at its best instills love of
country, ruralizes taste, borrows some of its ideals from Goethe's
pedagogic province, and perhaps even from Gilman's pie-shaped
communities, with villages at the center irradiating to farms in all
directions. In England, where by the law of primogeniture holdings are
large and in few hands, this training has never flourished, as it has
greatly in France, where nearly every adult male may own land and a
large proportion will come to do so. So of processes. As a student in
Germany I took a few lessons each of a bookbinder, a glassblower, a
shoemaker, a plumber, and a blacksmith, and here I have learned in a
crude way the technique of the gold-beater and old-fashioned
broom-maker, etc., none of which come amiss in the laboratory; and I
am proud that I can still mow and keep my scythe sharp, chop, plow,
milk, churn, make cheese and soap, braid a palm-leaf hat complete,
knit, spin and even "put in a piece" in an old-fashioned hand loom,
and weave frocking. But thus pride bows low before the pupils of our
best institutions for negroes, Indians, and juvenile delinquents,
whose training is often in more than a score of industries and who
to-day in my judgment receive the best training in the land, if judged
by the annual growth in mind, morals, health, physique, ability, and
knowledge, all taken together. Instead of seeking soft, ready-made
places near home, such education impels to the frontier, to strike out
new careers, to start at the bottom and rise by merit, beginning so
low that every change must be a rise. Wherever youth thus trained are
thrown, they land like a cat on all-fours and are armed _cap-à-pie_
for the struggle of life. Agriculture, manufacture, and commerce are
the bases of national prosperity; and on them all professions,
institutions, and even culture, are more and more dependent, while the
old ideals of mere study and brain-work are fast becoming obsolete. We
really retain only the knowledge we apply. We should get up interest
in new processes like that of a naturalist in new species.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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