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
A. One aim of Jahn, more developed by Spiess, and their successors,
was to do everything physically possible for the body as a mechanism.
Many postures and attitudes are assumed and many movements made that
are never called for in life. Some of these are so novel that a great
variety of new apparatus had to be devised to bring them out; and Jahn
invented many new names, some of them without etymologies, to
designate the repertory of his discoveries and inventions that
extended the range of motor life. Common movements, industries, and
even games, train only a limited number of muscles, activities, and
coördinations, and leave more or less unused groups and combinations,
so that many latent possibilities slumber, and powers slowly lapse
through disuse. Not only must these be rescued, but the new nascent
possibilities of modern progressive man must be addressed and
developed. Even the common things that the average untrained youth can
not do are legion, and each of these should be a new incentive to the
trainer as he realizes how very far below their motor possibilities
meet men live. The man of the future may, and even must, do things
impossible in the past and acquire new motor variations not given by
heredity. Our somatic frame and its powers must therefore be carefully
studied, inventoried, and assessed afresh, and a kind and amount of
exercise required that is exactly proportioned, not perhaps to the
size but to the capability of each voluntary muscle. Thus only can we
have a truly humanistic physical development, analogous to the
training of all the powers of the mind in a broad, truly liberal, and
non-professional or non-vocational educational curriculum. The body
will thus have its rightful share in the pedagogic traditions and
inspirations of the renaissance. Thus only can we have a true scale of
standardised culture values for efferent processes; and from this we
can measure the degrees of departure, both in the direction of excess
and defect, of each form of work, motor habit; and even play. Many
modern Epigoni in the wake of this great ideal, where its momentum was
early spent, feeling that new activities might be discovered with
virtues hitherto undreamed of, have almost made fetiches of special
disciplines, both developmental and corrective, that are pictured and
landed in scores of manuals. Others have had expectations no less
excessive in the opposite direction and have argued that the greatest
possible variety of movements best developed the greatest total of
motor energy. Jahn especially thus made gymnastics a special art and
inspired great enthusiasm of humanity, and the songs of his pupils
were of a better race of man and a greater and united fatherland. It
was this feature that made his work unique in the world, and his
disciples are fond of reminding us of the fact that it was just about
one generation of men after the acme of influence of his system that,
in 1870, Germany showed herself the greatest military power since
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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