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
Call it inspiration, or Kant's transcendental
impulse above and outside of experience, or Spencer's deep
reverberations from a vast and mysterious past of compacted ancestral
experiences, the most concentrated, distilled and instinctive of all
psychic products, and as old as Mr. Tyndall's "fiery cloud"--the name
or even source is little. We would call it the purest, freest, most
prevailing, because most inward, will or conscience.
This free, habitual guidance by the highest and best, by conviction
with no sense of compulsion or obligation, impractical if not
dangerous ideal, for it can be actually realized only by the rarest
moral genius. For most of us, the best education is that which makes
us the best and most obedient servants. This is the way of peace and
the way of nature, for even if we seriously try to keep up a private
conscience at all, apart from feeling, faction, party or class spirit,
or even habit, which are our habitual guides, the difficulties are so
great that most hasten, more or less consciously and voluntarily, to
put themselves under authority again, serving only the smallest margin
of independence in material interests, choice of masters, etc, and
yielding to the pleasing and easy illusion that inflates the minimum
to seem the maximum of freedom, and uses the noblest ideal of history,
viz., that of pure autonomous oughtness, as a pedestal for idols of
selfishness, caprice and conceit. The trouble is in interpreting these
moral instincts, for even the authorities lack the requisite
self-knowledge in which all wisdom culminates. The moral interregnum
which the _Aufklärung_ [Enlightenment] has brought will not end till
these instincts are rightly interpreted by in intelligence. The
richest streams of thought must flow about them, the best methods must
peep and pry till their secrets are found and put into the
idea-pictures in which most men think.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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