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
This form of personal conflict is better than dueling even in its
comparatively harmless German student form, although this has been
warmly defended by Jacob Grimm, Bismarck, and Treitschke, while
Paulsen, Professor of Philosophy and Pedagogy, and Schrempf, of
Theology, have pronounced it but a slight evil, and several Americans
have thought it better than hazing, which it makes impossible. The
dark side of dueling is seen in the hypertrophied sense of honor which
under the code of the corps becomes an intricate and fantastic thing,
prompting, according to Ziegler,[12] a club of sixteen students to
fight over two hundred duels in four weeks in Jena early in this
century. It is prone to degenerate to an artificial etiquette
demanding satisfaction for slight and unintended offenses. Although
this professor who had his own face scarred on the _mensur_, pleaded
for a student court of honor, with power to brand acts as infamous and
even to expel students, on the ground that honor had grown more
inward, the traditions in favor of dueling were too strong. The duel
had a religious romantic origin as revealing God's judgment, and means
that the victim of an insult is ready to stake body, or even life, and
this is still its ideal side. Anachronism as it now is and
degenerating readily to sport or spectacle, overpunishing what is
often mere awkwardness or ignorance, it still impresses a certain
sense of responsibility for conduct and gives some physical training,
slight and specialized though it be. The code is conventional, drawn
directly from old French military life, and is not true to the line
that separates real honor from dishonor, deliberate insult that wounds
normal self-respect from injury fancied by oversensitiveness or
feigned by arrogance; so that in its present form it is not the best
safeguard of the sacred shrine of personality against invasion of ifs
rights. If, as is claimed, it is some diversion from or fortification
against corrosive sensuality, it has generally allied itself with
excessive beer-drinking. Fencing, while an art susceptible of high
development and valuable for both pose and poise, and requiring great
quickness of eye, arm, and wrist, is unilateral and robbed of the vest
of inflicting real pain on an antagonist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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