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
This system can arouse youth to the greatest pitch of zest in watching
their own rapidly multiplying curves of growth in dimensions and
capacities, in plotting curves that record their own increment in
girths, lifts, and other tests, and in observing the effects of sleep,
food, correct and incorrect living upon a system so exquisitely
responsive to all these influences as are the muscles. To learn to
know and grade excellence and defect, to be known for the list of
things one can do and to have a record, or to realize what we lack of
power to break best records, even to know that we are strengthening
some point where heredity has left us with some shortage and perhaps
danger, the realization of all this may bring the first real and deep
feeling for growth that may become a passion later in things of the
soul. Growth always has its selfish aspects, and to be constantly
passing our own examination in this respect is a new and perhaps
sometimes too self-conscious endeavor of our young college barbarians;
but it is on the whole a healthful regulative, and this form of the
struggle toward perfection and escape from the handicap of birth will
later move upward to the intellectual and moral plane. To kindle a
sense of physical beauty of form in every part, such as a sculptor
has, may be to start youth on the lowest round of the Platonic ladder
that leads up to the vision of ideal beauty of soul, if his ideal be
not excess of brawn, or mere brute strength, but the true proportion
represented by the classic or mean temperance balanced like justice
between all extremes. Hard, patient, regular work, with the right
dosage for this self-cultural end, has thus at the same time a unique
moral effect.
The dangers of this system are also obvious. Nature's intent can not
be too far thwarted; and as in mental training the question is always
pertinent, so here we may ask whether it be not best in all cases to
some extent, and in some cases almost exclusively, to develop in the
direction in which we most excel, to emphasize physical individuality
and even idiosyncrasy, rather than to strive for monotonous
uniformity. Weaknesses and parts that lag behind are the most easily
overworked to the point of reaction and perhaps permanent injury.
Again, work for curative purposes lacks the exuberance of free sports:
it is not inspiring to make up areas; and therapeutic exercises
imposed like a sentence for the shortcomings of our forebears bring a
whiff of the atmosphere of the hospital, if not of the prison, into
the gymnasium.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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