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
When we turn to the needs of these pupils, the errors and limitations
of the method are painful to contemplate. The work is essentially
manual and offers little for the legs, where most of the muscular
tissues of the body lie, those which respond most to training and are
now most in danger of degeneration at this age; the back and trunk
also are little trained. Consideration of proportion and bilateral
asymmetry are practically ignored. Almost in proportion as these
schools have multiplied, the rage for uniformity, together with
motives of economy and administrative efficiency on account of
overcrowding, have made them rigid and inflexible, on the principle
that as the line lengthens the stake must be strengthened. This is a
double misfortune; for the courses were not sufficiently considered at
first and the plastic stage of adaptation was too short, while the
methods of industry have undergone vast changes since they were given
shape. There are now between three and four hundred occupations in the
census, more than half of these involving manual work, so that never
perhaps was there so great a pedagogic problem as to make these
natural developments into conscious art, to extract what may be called
basal types. This requires an effort not without analogy to
Aristotle's attempt to extract from the topics of the marketplace the
underlying categories eternally conditioning all thought, or to
construct a grammar of speech. Hardly an attempt worthy the name, not
even the very inadequate one of a committee, has been made in this
field to study the conditions and to meet them. Like Froebel's gifts
and occupations, deemed by their author the very roots of human
occupations in infant form, the processes selected are underived and
find their justification rather in their logical sequence and
coherence than in being true norms of work. If these latter be
attainable at all, it is not likely that they will fit so snugly in a
brief curriculum, so that its simplicity is suspicious. The wards of
the keys that lock the secrets of nature and human life are more
intricate and mazy. As H.T. Bailey well puts it in substance, a master
in any art-craft must have a fourfold equipment: 1. Ability to grasp
an idea and embody it. 2. Power to utilize all nerve, and a wide
repertory of methods, devices, recipes, discoveries, machines, etc. 3.
Knowledge of the history of the craft. 4. Skill in technical
processes. American schools emphasize chiefly only the last.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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