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
Bushido,[13] which means military-knightly ways, designates the
Japanese conception of honor in behavior and in fighting. The youth is
inspired by the ideal of Tom Brown "to leave behind him the name of a
fellow who never bullied a little boy or turned his back on a big
one." It expresses the race ideal of justice, patriotism, and the duty
of living aright and dying nobly. It means also sympathy, pity, and
love, for only the bravest can be the tenderest, and those most in
love are most daring, and it includes politeness and the art of
poetry. Honor is a sense of personal dignity and worth, so the _bushi_
is truthful without an oath. At the tender age of five the _samurai_
is given a real sword, and this gives self-respect and responsibility.
At fifteen, two sharp and artistic ones, long and short, are given
him, which must be his companions for life. They were made by a smith
whose shop is a sanctuary and who begins his work with prayer. They
have the finest hilts and scabbards, and are besung as invested with a
charm or spell, and symbolic of loyalty and self-control, for they
must never be drawn lightly. He is taught fencing, archery,
horsemanship, tactics, the spear, ethics and literature, anatomy, for
offence and defense; he must be indifferent to money, hold his life
cheap beside honor, and die if it is gone. This chivalry is called the
soul of Japan, and if it fades life is vulgarised. It is a code of
ethics and physical training.
Football is a magnificent game if played on honor. An English tennis
champion was lately playing a rubber game with the American champion.
They were even and near the end when the American made a bad fluke
which would have lost this country its championship. The English
player, scorning to win on an accident, intentionally made a similar
mistake that the best man might win. The chief evil of modern American
football which now threatens its suppression in some colleges is the
lust to win at any price, and results in tricks and secret practise.
These sneaky methods impair the sentiment of honor which is the best
and most potent of all the moral safeguards of youth, so that a young
man can not be a true gentleman on the gridiron. This ethical
degeneration is far worse than all the braises, sprains, broken bones
and even deaths it causes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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