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
Indeed in more progressive centers, many new departures are now in the
experimental stage. Goetze at Leipzig, as a result of long and
original studies and trials, has developed courses in which pasteboard
work and modeling are made of equal rank with wood and iron, and he
has connected them even with the kindergarten below. In general the
whole industrial life of our day is being slowly explored in the quest
of new educational elements; and rubber, lead, glass, textiles,
metallurgical operations, agriculture, every tool and many machines,
etc., are sure to contribute their choicest pedagogical factors to the
final result. In every detail the prime consideration should be the
nature and needs of the youthful body and will at each age, their
hygiene and fullest development; and next, the closest connection with
science at every point should do the same for the intellect. Each
operation and each tool--the saw, knife, plane, screw, hammer, chisel,
draw-shave, sandpaper, lathe--will be studied with reference to its
orthopedic value, bilateral asymmetry, the muscles it develops, and
the attitudes and motor habits it favors; and uniformity, which in
France often requires classes to saw, strike, plane up, down, right,
left, all together, upon count and command, will give place to
individuality.
Sloyd has certain special features and claims. The word means skilful,
deft. The movement was organised in Sweden a quarter of a century ago
as an effort to prevent the extinction by machinery of peasant home
industry during the long winter night. Home sloyd was installed in an
institution of its own for training teachers at Nääs. It works in wood
only, with little machinery, and is best developed for children of
from eleven to fifteen. It no longer aims to make artisans; but its
manipulations are meant to be developmental, to teach both sexes not
only to be useful but self-active and self-respecting, and to revere
exactness as a form of truthfulness. It assumes that all and
especially the motor-minded can really understand only what they make,
and that one can work like a peasant and think like a philosopher. It
aims to produce wholes rather than parts like the Russian system, and
to be so essentially educational that, as a leading exponent says, its
best effects would be conserved if the hands were cut off. This change
of its original utilitarianism from the lower to the liberal motor
development of the middle and upper classes and from the land where it
originated to another, has not eliminated the dominant marks of its
origin in its models, the Penates of the sloyd household, the unique
features of which persist like a national school of art, despite
transplantation and transformation.[1]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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