Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene — John Shaqi
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
objective fidelity to nature; and the teacher that represses or
criticizes this first point of genius, or who can not pardon the grave
faults of technique inevitable at this age when ambition ought to be
too great for power, is not an educator but a repressor, a pedagogic
Philistine committing, like so many of his calling in other fields,
the unpardonable sin against budding promise, always at this age so
easily blighted. Just as the child of six or seven should be
encouraged in his strong instinct to draw the most complex scenes of
his daily life, so now the inner life should find graphic utterance in
all its intricacy up to the full limit of unrepressed courage. For the
great majority, on the other hand, who only appreciate and will never
create, the mind, if it have its rights, will be stored with the best
images and sentiments of art; for at this time they are best
remembered and sink deepest into heart and life. Now, although the
hand may refuse, the fancy paints the world in brightest hues and
fairest forms; and such an opportunity for infecting the soul with
vaccine of ideality, hope, optimism, and courage in adversity, will
never come again. I believe that in few departments are current
educational theories and practises so hard on youth of superior gifts,
just at the age when all become geniuses for a season, very brief for
most, prolonged for some, and permanent for the best. We do not know
how to teach to, see, hear, and feel when the sense centers are most
indelibly impressible, and to give relative rest to the hand during
the years when its power of accuracy is abated and when all that is
good is idealized furthest, and confidence in ability to produce is at
its lowest ebb.
Finally, our divorce between industrial and manual training is
abnormal, and higher technical education is the chief sufferer.
Professor Thurston, of Cornell, who has lately returned from a tour of
inspection abroad, reported that to equal Germany we now need: "1.
Twenty technical universities, having in their schools of engineering
50 instructors and 500 students each. 2. Two thousand technical high
schools or manual-training schools, each having not less than 200
students and 10 instructors." If we have elementary trade-schools,
this would mean technical high schools enough to accommodate 700,000
students, served by 20,000 teachers. With the strong economic
arguments in this direction we are not here concerned; but that there
are tendencies to unfit youth for life by educational method and
matter shown in strong relief from this standpoint, we shall point out
in a later chapter.
[Footnote 1: This I have elsewhere tried to show in detail. Criticisms
of High School Physics and Manual Training and Mechanic Arts in High
Schools. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 193-204.]
[Footnote 2: Studies in the Physiology and Psychology of the
Telegraphic Language. Psychological Review, January, 1897, vol. 4, pp.
27-53, and July, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 344-375.]
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