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
Zoology should always be taught with plenty of pets, menagerie
resources, and with aquaria, aviaries, apiaries, formicaries, etc., as
adjuncts. It should start in the environment like everything else.
Bird and animal lore, books, and pictures should abound in the early
stages, and the very prolific chapter of instincts should have ample
illustration, while the morphological nomenclature and details of
structure should be less essential. Woman has domesticated nearly all
the animals, and is so superior to man in insight into their modes of
life and psychoses that many of them are almost exemplifications of
moral qualities to her even more than to man. The peacock is an
embodied expression of pride; the pig, of filth; the fox, of cunning;
the serpent, of subtle danger; the eagle, of sublimity; the goose, of
stupidity; and so on through all the range of human qualities, as we
have seen. At bottom, however, the study of animal life is coming to
be more and more a problem of heredity, and its problems should have
dominant position and to them the other matter should grade up.
This shades over into and prepares for the study of the primitive man
and child so closely related to each other. The myth, custom, belief,
domestic practises of savages, vegetative and animal traits in infancy
and childhood, the development of which is a priceless boon for the
higher education of women, open of themselves a great field of human
interest where she needs to know the great results, the striking
details, the salient illustrations, the basal principles rather than
to be entangled in the details of anthropometry, craniometry,
philology, etc.
All this lays the basis for a larger study of modern man--history,
with the biographical element very prominent throughout, with plenty
of stories of heroes of virtue, acts of valor, tales of saintly lives
and the personal element more prominent, and specialization in the
study of dynasties, wars, authorities, and controversies relegated to
a very subordinate place. Sociology, undeveloped, rudimentary, and in
some places suspected as it is, should have in the curriculum of her
higher education a place above political economy. The stories of the
great reforms, and accounts of the constitution of society, of the
home, church, state, and school, and philanthropies and ideals, should
to the fore.
Art in all its forms should be opened at least in a propædeutic way
and individual tastes amply and judiciously fed, but there should be
no special training in music without some taste and gift, and the aim
should be to develop critical and discriminative appreciation and the
good taste that sees the vast superiority of all that is good and
classic over what is cheap and fustian.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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