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
Leg exercise has perhaps a higher value than that of any other part.
Man is by definition an upright being, but only after a long
apprenticeship.[16] Thus the hand was freed from the necessity of
locomotion and made the servant of the mind. Locomotion overcomes the
tendency to sedentary habits in modern schools and life, and helps the
mind to helpful action, so that a peripatetic philosophy is more
normal than that of the easy chair and the study lamp. Hill-climbing
is unexcelled as a stimulus at once of heart, lungs, and blood. If
Hippocrates is right, inspiration is possible only on a mountain-top.
Walking, running, dancing, skating, coasting are also alterative and
regulative of sex, and there is a deep and close though not yet fully
explained reciprocity between the two. Arm work is relatively too
prominent a feature in gymnasia. Those who lead excessively sedentary
lives are prone to be turbulent and extreme in both passion and
opinion, as witness the oft-adduced revolutionary disposition of
cobblers.
The play problem is now fairly open and is vast in its relation to
many other things. Roof playgrounds, recreation piers, schoolyards and
even school-buildings, open before and after school hours; excursions
and outings of many kinds and with many purposes, which seem to
distinctly augment growth; occupation during the long vacation when,
beginning with spring, most juvenile crime is committed; theatricals,
which according to some police testimony lessen the number of juvenile
delinquents; boys' clubs with more or less self-government of the
George Junior Republic and other types, treated in another chapter;
nature-study; the distinctly different needs and propensities of both
good and evil in different nationalities; the advantages of playground
fences and exclusion, their disciplinary worth, and their value as
resting places; the liability that "the boy without a playground will
become the father without a job"; the relation of play and its slow
transition to manual and industrial education at the savage age when a
boy abhors all regular occupation; the necessity of exciting interest,
not by what is done for boys, but by what they do; the adjustment of
play to sex; the determination of the proper average age of maximal
zest in and good from sandbox, ring-toss, bean-bag, shuffle-board, peg
top, charity, funeral play, prisoner's base, hill-dill; the value and
right use of apparatus, and of rabbits, pigeons, bees, and a small
menagerie in the playground; tan-bark, clay, the proper alternation of
excessive freedom, that often turns boys stale through the summer,
with regulated activities; the disciplined "work of play" and
sedentary games; the value of the washboard rubbing and of the hand
and knee exercise of scrubbing, which a late writer would restore for
all girls with clever and Greek-named play apparatus; as well as
digging, shoveling, tamping, pick-chopping, and hod-carrying exercises
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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