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
The methods throughout should be objective, with copious illustrations
by way of object-lessons, apparatus, charts, pictures, diagrams, and
lectures, far less book work and recitation, only a limited amount of
room study, the function of examination reduced to a minimum, and
everything as suggestive and germinal as possible. Hints that are not
followed up; information not elaborated into a thin pedagogic sillabub
or froth; seed that is sown on the waters with no thought of reaping;
faith in a God who does not pay at the end of each week, month, or
year, but who always pays abundantly some time; training which does
not develop hypertrophied memory-pouches that carry, or creative
powers that discover and produce--these are lines on which such an
institution should develop. Specialization has its place, but it
always hurts a woman's soul more than a man's, should always come
later, and if there is special capacity it should be trained
elsewhere. Unconscious education is a power of which we have yet to
learn the full ranges.
In most groups in this series of ideal departments there should be at
least one healthful, wise, large-souled, honorable, married and
attractive man, and, if possible, several of them. His very presence
in an institution for young women gives poise, polarizes the soul, and
gives wholesome but long-circuited tension at root no doubt sexual,
but all unconsciously so. This mentor should not be more father than
brother, though he should combine the best of each, but should add
another element. He need not be a doctor, a clergyman, or even a great
scholar, but should be accessible for confidential conferences even
though intimate. He should know the soul of the adolescent girl and
how to prescribe; he should be wise and fruitful in advice, but
especially should be to all a source of contagion and inspiration for
poise and courage even though religious or medical problems be
involved. But even if he lack all these latter qualities, though he so
poised that impulsive girls can turn their hearts inside out in his
presence and perhaps even weep on his shoulder, the presence of such a
being, though a complete realization of this ideal could be only
remotely approximated, would be the center of an atmosphere most
wholesomely tonic.
In these all too meager outlines I have sketched a humanistic and
liberal education and have refrained from all details and special
curriculization. Many of the above features I believe would be as
helpful for boys as for girls, but woman has here an opportunity to
resume her exalted and supreme position, to be the first in this
higher field, to lead man and pay her debt to his educational
institutions, by resuming her crown. The ideal institutions, however,
for the two will always be radically and probably always increasingly
divergent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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