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
Perhaps next to dancing in phyletic motivation come personal
conflicts, such as wrestling, fighting, boxing, dueling, and in some
sense, hunting. The animal world is full of struggle for survival, and
primitive warfare is a wager of battle, of personal combat of foes
contesting eye to eye and hand to hand, where victory of one is the
defeat and perhaps death of the other, and where life is often staked
against life. In its more brutal forms we see one of the most
degrading of all the aspects of human nature. Burk[10] has shown how
the most bestial of these instincts survive and crop out irresistibly
in boyhood, where fights are often engaged in with desperate abandon.
Noses are bitten, ears torn, sensitive places kicked, hair pulled,
arms twisted, the head stamped on and pounded on stones, fingers
twisted, and hoodlums sometimes deliberately try to strangle, gouge
out an eye, pull off an ear, pull out the tongue, break teeth, nose,
or bones, or dislocate jaws or other joints, wring the neck, bite off
a lip, and torture in utterly nameless ways. In unrestrained anger,
man becomes a demon in love with the blood of his victim. The face is
distorted, and there are yells, oaths, animal snorts and grunts,
cries, and then exultant laughter at pain, and each is bruised, dirty,
disheveled and panting with exhaustion. For coarser natures, the
spectacle of such conflicts has an intense attraction, while some
morbid souls are scarred by a distinct phobia for everything
suggestive of even lower degrees of opposition. These instincts, more
or less developed in boyhood, are repressed in normal cases before
strength and skill are sufficiently developed to inflict serious
bodily injury, while without the reductives that orthogenetic growth
brings they become criminal. Repulsive as are these grosser and animal
manifestations of anger, its impulsion can not and should not be
eliminated, but its expression transformed and directed toward evils
that need all its antagonism. To be angry aright is a good part of
moral education, and non-resistance under all provocations is unmanly,
craven, and cowardly.[11] An able-bodied young man, who can not fight
physically, can hardly have a high and true sense of honor, and is
generally a milksop, a lady-boy, or sneak. He lacks virility, his
masculinity does not ring true, his honesty can not be sound to the
core. Hence, instead of eradicating this instinct, one of the great
problems of physical and moral pedagogy is rightly to temper and
direct it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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