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
Gulick[1] has urged that what makes certain exercises more interesting
than others is to be found in the phylon. The power to throw with
accuracy and speed was once pivotal for survival, and non-throwers
were eliminated. Those who could throw unusually well best overcame
enemies, killed game, and sheltered family. The nervous and muscular
systems are organized with certain definite tendencies and have back
of them a racial setting. So running and dodging with speed and
endurance, and hitting with a club, were also basal to hunting and
fighting. Now that the need of these is leas urgent for utilitarian
purposes, they are still necessary for perfecting the organism. This
makes, for instance, baseball racially familiar, because it represents
activities that were once and for a long time necessary for survival.
We inherit tendencies of muscular coördination that have been of great
racial utility. The best athletic sports and games a composed of these
racially old elements, so that phylogenetic muscular history is of
great importance. Why is it, this writer asks, that a city man so
loves to sit all day and fish! It is because this interest dates back
to time immemorial. We are the sons of fishermen, and early life was
by the water's side, and this is our food supply. This explains why
certain exercises are more interesting than others. It is because they
touch and revive the deep basic emotions of the race. Thus we see that
play is not doing things to be useful later, but it is rehearsing
racial history. Plays and games change only in their external form,
but the underlying neuro-muscular activities, and also the psychic
content of them, are the same. Just as psychic states must be lived
out up through the grades, so the physical activities most be played
off, each in its own time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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