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
Nature in her many phases should, of course, make up a large part of
the entire curriculum, but here again the methods of the sexes should
differ somewhat after puberty. The poetic and mythic factors and some
glimpses of the history of science should be given more prominence;
the field naturalist rather than the laboratory man of technic should
be the ideal especially at first; nature should be taught as God's
first revelation, as an Old Testament related to the Bible as a
primordial dispensation to a later and clearer and more special one.
Reverence and love should be the motive powers, and no aspect should
be studied without beginning and culminating in interests akin to
devotion. Mathematics should be taught only in its rudiments, and
those with special talents or tastes for it should go to agamic
schools. Chemistry, too, although not excluded, should have a
subordinate place. The average girl has little love of sozzling and
mussing with the elements, and cooking involves problems in organic
chemistry too complex to be understood very profoundly, but the
rudiments of household chemistry should be taught. Physics, too,
should be kept to elementary stages. Meteorology should have a larger,
and geology and astronomy increasingly larger places, and are
especially valuable because, and largely in proportion as, they are
taught out of doors, but the general principles and the untechnical
and practical aspects should be kept in the foreground. With botany
more serious work should be done. Plant-lore and the poetic aspect, as
in astronomy, should have attention throughout, while Latin
nomenclature and microscopic technic should come late if at all, and
vulgar names should have precedence over Latin terminology. Flowers,
gardening, and excursions should never be wanting. Economic and even
medical aspects should appear, and prominent and early should come the
whole matter of self cross-fertilization and that by insects. The
moral value of this subject will never be fully understood till we
have what might almost be called a woman's botany, constructed on
lines different from any of the text-books I have glanced at. Here
much knowledge interesting in itself can be early taught, which will
spring up into a world of serviceable insights as adolescence develops
and the great law of sex unfolds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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