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 practicable it is well to dispense
with bathing suits, even the scantiest. The warm bath tub is
enfeebling and degenerative, despite the cold spray later, while the
free swim in cold water is most invigorating.
Happily, city officials, teachers, and sanitarians are now slowly
realizing the great improvement in health and temper that comes from
bathing and are establishing beach and surf, spray, floating and
plunge summer baths and swimming pools; often providing instruction
even in swimming in clothes, undressing in the water, treading water,
and rescue work, free as well as fee days, bathing suits, and, in
London, places for nude bathing after dark; establishing time and
distance standards with certificates and even prizes; annexing
toboggan slides, swings, etc., realizing that in both the preference
of youth and in healthful and moral effects, probably nothing outranks
this form of exercise. Such is its strange fascination that, according
to one comprehensive census, the passion to get to the water outranks
all other causes of truancy, and plays an important part in the
motivation of runaways. In the immense public establishment near San
Francisco, provided by private munificence, there are accommodations
for all kinds of bathing in hot and cold and in various degrees of
fresh and salt water, in closed spaces and in the open sea, for small
children and adults, with many appliances and instructors, all in one
great covered arena with seats in an amphitheater for two thousand
spectators, and many adjuncts and accessories. So elsewhere the
presence of visitors is now often invited and provided for. Sometimes
wash-houses and public laundries are annexed. Open hours and longer
evenings and seasons are being prolonged.
Prominent among the favorite games of early puberty and the years just
before are those that involve passive motion and falling, like
swinging in its many forms, including the May-pole and single rope
varieties. Mr. Lee reports that children wait late in the evening and
in cold weather for a turn at a park swing. Psychologically allied to
these are wheeling and skating. Places for the latter are now often
provided by the fire department, which in many cities floods hundreds
of empty lots. Ponds are cleared of snow and horse-plowed, perhaps by
the park commission, which often provides lights and perhaps ices the
walks and streets for coasting, erects shelters, and devises space
economy for as many diamonds, bleachers, etc., as possible. Games of
hitting, striking, and throwing balls and other objects, hockey,
tennis, all the courts of which are usually crowded, golf and croquet,
and sometimes fives, cricket, bowling, quoits, curling, etc., have
great "thumogenic" or emotional power.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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