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
A subtle but potent intersexual influence is among the strongest
factors of all adolescent sport. Male birds and beasts show off their
charms of beauty and accomplishment in many a liturgy of love antics
in the presence of the female. This instinct seems somehow continuous
with the growth of ornaments in the mating season. Song, tumbling,
balking, mock fights, etc., are forms of animal courtship. The boy who
turns cartwheels past the home of the girl of his fancy, is brilliant,
brave, witty, erect, strong in her presence, and elsewhere dull and
commonplace enough, illustrates the same principle. The true cake-walk
as seen in the South is perhaps the purest expression of this impulse
to courtship antics seen in man, but its irradiations are many and
pervasive. The presence of the fair sex gives tonicity to youth's
muscles and tension to his arteries to a degree of which he is rarely
conscious. Defeat in all contests is more humiliating and victory more
glorious thereby. Each sex is constantly passing the examination of
the other, and each judges the other by standards different from its
own. Alas for the young people who are not different with the other
sex from what they are with their own!--and some are transformed into
different beings. Achievement proclaims ability to support, defend,
bring credit and even fame to the object of future choice, and no good
point is lost. Physical force and skill, and above all, victory and
glory, make a hero and invest him with a romantic glamour, which, even
though concealed by conventionality or etiquette, is profoundly felt
and makes the winner more or less irresistible. The applause of men
and of mates is sweet and even intoxicating, but that of ladies is
ravishing. By universal acclaim the fair belong to the brave, strong,
and victorious. This stimulus is wholesome and refining. As is shown
later, a bashful youth often selects a maiden onlooker and is
sometimes quite unconsciously dominated in his every movement by a
sense of her presence, stranger and apparently unnoticed though she
be, although in the intellectual work of coeducation girls are most
influenced thus. In athletics this motive makes for refinement and
good form. The ideal knight, however fierce and terrible, must not be
brutal, but show capacity for fine feeling, tenderness, magnanimity,
and forbearance. Evolutionists tell us that woman has domesticated and
educated savage man and taught him all his virtues by exercising her
royal prerogative of selecting in her mate just those qualities that
pleased her for transmission to future generations and eliminating
others distasteful to her. If so, she is still engaged in this work as
much as ever, and in his dull, slow way man feels that her presence
enforces her standards, abhorrent though it would be to him to
compromise in one iota his masculinity. Most plays and games in which
both sexes participate have some of the advantages with some of the
disadvantages of coeducation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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