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
the supreme effort that develops." This, I may add, suggests what is
developed elsewhere, that truly spontaneous attention is conditioned
by spontaneous muscle tension, which is a function of growth, and that
muscles are thus organs of the mind; and also that even voluntary
attention is motivated by the same nisus of development even in its
most adult form, and that the products of science, invention,
discovery, as well as the association plexus of all that was
originally determined in the form of consciousness, are made by
rhythmic alternation of attack, as it moves from point to point
creating diversions and recurrence.
The other study, although quite independent, is part a special
application and illustration of the same principle.
At the age of four or five, when they can do little more than
scribble, children's chief interest in pictures is as finished
products; but in the second period, which Lange calls that of artistic
illusion, the child sees in his own work not merely what it
represents, but an image of fancy back of it. This, then, is the
golden period for the development of power to create artistically. The
child loves to draw everything with the pleasure chiefly in the act,
and he cares little for the finished picture. He draws out of his own
head, and not from copy before his eye. Anything and everything is
attempted in bold lines in this golden age of drawing. If he followed
the teacher, looked carefully and drew what he saw, he would be
abashed at his production. Indians, conflagrations, games, brownies,
trains, pageants, battles--everything is graphically portrayed; but
only the little artist himself sees the full meaning of his lines.
Criticism or drawing strictly after nature breaks this charm, since it
gives place to mechanical reproduction in which the child has little
interest. Thus awakens him from his dream to a realization that he can
not draw, and from ten to fifteen his power of perceiving things
steadily increases and he makes almost no progress in drawing.
Adolescence arouses the creative faculty and the desire and ability to
draw are checked and decline after thirteen or fourteen. The curve is
the plateau which Barnes has described. The child has measured his own
productions upon the object they reproduced and found them wanting, is
discouraged and dislikes drawing. From twelve on, Barnes found drawing
more and more distasteful; and this, too, Lukens found to be the
opinion of our art teachers. The pupils may draw very properly and
improve in technique, but the interest is gone. This is the condition
in which most men remain all their lives. Their power to appreciate
steadily increases. Only a few gifted adolescents about this age begin
a to develop a new zest in production, rivaling that of the period
from five to ten, when their satisfaction is again chiefly in
creation. These are the artists whose active powers dominate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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