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
Lukens[3] finds in his studies of drawing, that in what he calls his
fourth period of artistic development, there are those "who during
adolescence experience a rebirth of creative power." Zest in creation
then often becomes a stronger incentive to work than any pleasure or
profit to be derived from the finished product, so that in this the
propitious conditions of the first golden age of childhood are
repeated and the deepest satisfaction is again found in the work
itself. At about fourteen or fifteen, which is the transition period,
nascent faculties sometimes develop very rapidly. Lukens[4] draws the
interesting curve shown on the following page.
[Illustration: Motor, creative or productive power. Sensory or
receptive interest in the finished product.]
The reciprocity between the power to produce and that to appreciate,
roughly represented in the above curve, likely is true also in the
domain of music, and may be, perhaps, a general law of development.
Certain it is that the adolescent power to apperceive and appreciate
never so far outstrips his power to produce or reproduce as about
midway in the teens. Now impressions sink deepest. The greatest
artists are usually those who paint later, when the expressive powers
are developed, what they have felt most deeply and known best at this
age, and not those who in the late twenties, or still later, have gone
to new environments and sought to depict them. All young people draw
best those objects they love most, and their proficiency should be
some test of the contents of their minds. They must put their own
consciousness into a picture. At the dawn of this stage of
appreciation the esthetic tastes should be stimulated by exposure to,
and instructed in feeling for, the subject-matter of masterpieces; and
instruction in technique, detail, criticism, and learned
discrimination of schools of painting should be given intermittently.
Art should not now be for art's sake, but for the sake of feeling and
character, life, and conduct; it should be adjunct to morals, history,
and literature; and in all, edification should be the goal; and
personal interest, and not that of the teacher, should be the guide.
Insistence on production should be eased, and the receptive
imagination, now so hungry, should be fed and reinforced by story and
all other accessories. By such a curriculum, potential creativeness,
if it exists, will surely be evoked in its own good time. It will, at
first, attempt no commonplace drawing-master themes, but will essay
the highest that the imagination can bode forth. It may be crude and
lame in execution, but it will be lofty, perhaps grand; and if it is
original in consciousness, it will be in effect. Most creative
painters before twenty have grappled with the greatest scenes in
literature or turning points in history, representations of the
loftiest truths, embodiments of the most inspiring ideals. None who
deserve the name of artist copy anything now, and least of all with
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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