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
influence, young men, as intellectual ideals never can do save in a
select few. We do not want "will-virtuosos," who perform feats hard to
learn, but then easy to do and good for show; nor spurtiness of any
sort which develops an erethic habit of work, temper, and circulation,
and is favored by some of our popular sports but too soon reacts into
fatigue. Even will-training does not reach its end till it leads the
young up to taking a intelligent, serious and life-long interest in
their own physical culture and development. This is higher than
interest in success in school or college sport; and, though naturally
later than these, is one of the earliest forms of will-culture in
which it is safe and wise to attempt to interest the young for its own
sake alone. In our exciting life and trying climate, in which the
experiment of civilization has never been tried before, these thoughts
are merely exercises.
But this is, of course, preliminary. Great as is the need, the
practical difficulties in the way are very great. First, there are not
only no good text-books in ethics, but no good manual to guide
teachers. Some give so many virtues or good habits to be taught per
term, ignoring the unity of virtue as well as the order in which the
child's capacities for real virtue unfold. Advanced text-books discuss
the grounds of obligation, the nature of choice or freedom, or the
hedonistic calculus, as if pleasures and pains could be balanced as
measurable quantities, etc., so that philosophic morality is clearly
not for children or teachers. Secondly, evolution encourages too often
the doubt whether virtue can be taught, when it should have the
opposite effect. Perversity and viciousness of will are too often
treated as constitutional disease; and insubordination or obstinacy,
especially in school, are secretly admired as strength, instead of
being vigorously treated as crampy disorders of will, and the child is
coddled into flaccidity. Becomes the lowest develops first, there is
danger that it will interfere with the development of the higher, and
thus, if left to his own, the child may come to have no will. The
third and greatest difficulty is, that with the best effort to do so,
so few teachers can separate morality from religious creed. So vital
is the religions sentiment here that it is hard to divorce the end of
education from the end of life, proximate from ultimate grounds of
obligation, or finite from infinite duties. Those whose training has
been more religious than ethical can hardly teach morality _per se_
satisfactorily to the _noli me tangere_ [Touch me not] spirit of
denominational freedom so wisely jealous of conflicting standards and
sanctions for the young.
How then can we ever hope to secure proper training for the will?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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