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
by work, and it is only will which enlarges the bounds of personality.
Yet we must not forget that even morality is relative, and is one
thing for adults and often quite another for children. The child knows
nothing of absolute truth, justice, or virtues. The various stimuli of
discipline are to enforce the higher though weaker insights which the
child has already unfolded, rather than to engraft entirely unintuited
good. The command must find some ally, feeble though it be, in the
child's own soul. We should strive to fill each moment with as little
sacrifice or subordination, as mere means or conditions to the future,
as possible, for fear of affectation and insincerity. But yet the
hardier and sounder the nature, the more we may address training to
barely nascent intuitions, with a less ingredient of immediate
satisfaction, and the deeper the higher element Of interest will be
grounded in the end. The child must find as he advances towards
maturity, that every new insight, or realization of his own reveals
the fact that you have been there before with commands, cultivating
sentiments and habits, and not that he was led to mistake your
convenience or hobby for duty, or failed to temper the will by
temporizing with it. The young are apt to be most sincere at an age
when they are also most mistaken, but if sincerity be kept at its
deepest and best, will be least harmful and easiest overcome. If
authority supplement rather than supersede good motives, the child
will so love authority as to overcome your reluctance to apply it
directly, and as a final result will choose the state and act you have
pre-formed in its slowly-widening margin of freedom, and will be all
the less liable to undue subservience to priest or boss, or fashion or
tradition later, as obedience gives place to normal, manly
independence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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