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
In Panhellenic games as well as at present, athleticism in its
manifold forms was one of the most characteristic expressions of
adolescent nature and needs. Not a single time or distance record of
antiquity has been preserved, although Grasberger[4] and other writers
would have us believe that in those that are comparable, ancient
youthful champions greatly excelled ours, especially in leaping and
running. While we are far from cultivating mere strength, our training
is very one-sided from the Greek norm of unity or of the ideals that
develop the body only for the salve of the soul. While gymnastics in
our sense, with apparatus, exercises, and measurements independently
of games was unknown, the ideal and motive were as different from ours
as was its method. Nothing, so far as is known, was done for
correcting the ravages of work, or for overcoming hereditary defects;
and until athletics degenerated there were Do exercises for the sole
purpose of developing muscle.
On the whole, while modern gymnastics has done more for the trunk,
shoulders, and arms than for the legs, it is now too selfish and
ego-centric, deficient on the side of psychic impulsion, and but
little subordinated to ethical or intellectual development. Yet it
does a great physical service to all who cultivate it, and is a
safeguard of virtue and temperance. Its need is radical revision and
coordination of various cults and theories in the light of the latest
psycho-physiological science.
Gymnastics allies itself to biometric work. The present academic zeal
for physical development is in great need of closer affiliation with
anthropometry. This important and growing department will be
represented in the ideal gymnasium of the future--First, by courses,
if not by a chair, devoted to the apparatus of measurements of human
proportions and symmetry, with a kinesological cabinet where young men
are instructed in the elements of auscultation, the use of calipers,
the sphygmograph, spirometer, plethysmograph, kinesometer to plot
graphic curves, compute average errors, and tables of percentile
grades and in statistical methods, etc. Second, anatomy, especially of
muscles, bones, heart, and skin, will be taught, and also their
physiology, with stress upon myology, the effects of exercise on the
flow of blood and lymph, not excluding the development of the upright
position, and all that it involves and implies. Third, hygiene will be
prominent and comprehensive enough to cover all that pertains to
body-keeping, regimen, sleep, connecting with school and domestic and
public hygiene--all on the basis of modern as distinct from the
archaic physiology of Ling, who, it is sufficient to remember, died in
1839, before this science was recreated, and the persistence of whose
concepts are an anomalous survival to-day. Mechanico-therapeutics, the
purpose and service of each chief kind of apparatus and exercise, the
value of work on stall bars with chest weights, of chinning, use of
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