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
Rousseau would leave prepubescent years to nature and to these primal
hereditary impulsions and allow the fundamental traits of savagery
their fling till twelve. Biological psychology finds many and cogent
reasons to confirm this view _if only a proper environment could be
provided_. The child revels in savagery; and if its tribal, predatory,
hunting, fishing, fighting, roving, idle, playing proclivities could
be indulged in the country and under conditions that now, alas! seem
hopelessly ideal, they could conceivably be so organized and directed
as to be far more truly humanistic and liberal than all that the best
modern school can provide. Rudimentary organs of the soul, now
suppressed, perverted, or delayed, to crop out in menacing forms
later, would be developed in their season so that we should be immune
to them in maturer years, on the principle of the Aristotelian
catharsis for which I have tried to suggest a far broader application
than the Stagirite could see in his day.
These inborn and more or less savage instincts can and should be
allowed some scope. The deep and strong cravings in the individual for
those primitive experiences and occupations in which his ancestors
became skilful through the pressure of necessity should not be
ignored, but can and should be, at least partially, satisfied in a
vicarious way, by tales from literature, history, and tradition which
present the crude and primitive virtues of the heroes of the world's
childhood. In this way, aided by his vivid visual imagination, the
child may enter upon his heritage from the past, live out each stage
of life to its fullest and realize in himself all its manifold
tendencies. Echoes only of the vaster, richer life of the remote past
of the race they must remain, but just these are the murmurings of the
only muse that can save from the omnipresent dangers of precocity.
Thus we not only rescue from the danger of loss, but utilize for
further psychic growth the results of the higher heredity, which are
the most precious and potential things on earth. So, too, in our
urbanized hothouse life, that tends to ripen everything before its
time, we must teach nature, although the very phrase is ominous. But
we must not, in so doing, wean still more from, but perpetually incite
to visit, field, forest, hill, shore, the water, flowers, animals, the
true homes of childhood in this wild, undomesticated stage from which
modern conditions have kidnapped and transported him. Books and
reading are distasteful, for the very soul and body cry out for a more
active, objective life, and to know nature and man at first hand.
These two staples, stories and nature, by these informal methods of
the home and the environment, constitute fundamental education.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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