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
work of rescue and revival is greatly needed; for it is perhaps, not
excepting even music, the completest language of the emotions and can
be made one of the best schools of sentiment and even will,
inculcating good states of mind and exorcising bad ones as few other
agencies have power to do. Right dancing can cadence the very soul,
give nervous poise and control, bring harmony between basal and finer
muscles, and also between feeling and intellect, body and mind. It can
serve both as an awakener and a test of intelligence, predispose the
heart against vice, and turn the springs of character toward virtue.
That its present decadent forms, for those too devitalized to dance
aright, can be demoralizing, we know in this day too well, although
even questionable dances may sometimes work off vicious propensities
in ways more harmless than those in which they would otherwise find
vent. Its utilization for and influence on the insane would be another
interesting chapter.
Very interesting scientifically and suggestive practically is another
correspondence which I believe to be new, between the mode of
spontaneous activity in youth and that of labor in the early history
of the race. One of the most marked distinctions between savage and
civilized races is in the longer rhythm of work and relaxation. The
former are idle and lazy for days, weeks, and perhaps months, and then
put forth intense and prolonged effort in dance, hunt, warfare,
migration, or construction, sometimes dispensing with sleep and
manifesting remarkable endurance. As civilization and specialization
advance, hours become regular. The cultured man is less desultory in
all his habits, from eating and sleeping to performing social and
religious duties, although he may put forth no more aggregate energy
in a year than the savage. Women are schooled to regular work long
before men, and the difficulty of imposing civilization upon low races
is compared by Bücher[8] to that of training a eat to work when
harnessed to a dog-cart. It is not dread of fatigue but of the
monotony of method makes them hate labor. The effort of savages is
more intense and their periods of rest more prolonged and inert.
Darwin thinks all vital function bred to go in periods, as vertebrates
are descended from tidal ascidian.[9] There is indeed much that
suggests some other irregular rhythm more or less independent of day
and night, and perhaps sexual in its nature, but not lunar, and for
males. This mode of life not only preceded the industrial and
commercial period of which regularity is a prime condition, but it
lasted indefinitely longer than the latter has yet existed; during
this early time great exertion, sometimes to the point of utter
exhaustion and collapse, alternated with seasons of almost vegetative
existence. We see abundant traces of this psychosis in the muscle
habits of adolescents, and, I think, in student and particularly in
college life, which can enforce regularity only to a limited extent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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