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
Where both are partners rather than
antagonists, there is less eviration. A gallant man would do his best
to help, but his worst not to beat a lady. Thus, in general, the
latter performs her best in her true rule of sympathetic spectator
rather than as fellow player, and is now an important factor in the
physical education of adolescents.
How pervasive this femininity is, which is slowly transforming our
schools, is strikingly seen in the church. Gulick holds that the
reason why only some seven per cent of the young men of the country
are in the churches, while most members and workers are women, is that
the qualities demanded are the feminine ones of love, rest, prayer,
trust, desire for fortitude to endure, a sense of atonement--traits
not involving ideals that most stir young men. The church has not yet
learned to appeal to the more virile qualities. Fielding Hall[14] asks
why Christ and Buddha alone of great religious teachers were rejected
by their own race and accepted elsewhere. He answers that these mild
beliefs of peace, nonresistance, and submission, rejected by virile
warrior races, Jews and ancient Hindus, were adopted where women were
free and led in these matters. Confucianism, Mohammedanism, etc., are
virile, and so indigenous, and in such forms of faith and worship
women have small place. This again suggests how the sex that rules the
heart controls men.
Too much can hardly be said in favor of cold baths and swimming at
this age. Marro[15] quotes Father Kneipp, and almost rivals his
hydrotherapeutic enthusiasm. Cold bathing sends the blood inward
partly by the cold which contracts the capillaries of the skin and
tissue immediately underlying it, and partly by the pressure of the
water over all the dermal surface, quickens the activity of kidneys,
lungs, and digestive apparatus, and the reactive glow is the best
possible tonic for dermal circulation. It is the best of all
gymnastics for the nonstriated or involuntary muscles and for the
heart and blood vessels. This and the removal of the products of
excretion preserve all the important dermal functions which are so
easily and so often impaired in modern life, lessen the liability to
skin diseases, promote freshness of complexion; and the moral effects
of plunging into cold and supporting the body in deep water is not
inconsiderable in strengthening a spirit of hardihood and reducing
overtenderness to sensory discomforts. The exercise of swimming is
unique in that nearly all the movements and combinations are such as
are rarely used otherwise, and are perhaps in a sense ancestral and
liberal rather than directly preparatory for future avocations. Its
stimulus for heart and lungs is, by general consent of all writers
upon the subject, most wholesome and beneficial. Nothing so directly
or quickly reduces to the lowest point the plethora of the sex organs.
The very absence of clothes and running on the beach is exhilarating
and gives a sense of freedom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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