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
dangers are distraction from study and overestimation of the value of
victory, especially in the artificial glamours which the press and the
popular furor give to great games; unsportsmanlike secret tricks and
methods, over-emphasis of combative and too stalwart impulses, and a
disposition to carry things by storm, by rush-line tactics; friction
with faculties, and censure or neglect of instructors who take
unpopular sides on hot questions; action toward license after games,
spasmodic excitement culminating in excessive strain for body and
mind, with alternations of reaction; "beefiness"; overdevelopment of
the physical side of life, and, in some cases, premature features of
senility in later life, undergrowth of the accessory motor parts and
powers, and erethic diathesis that makes steady and continued mental
toil seem monotonous, dull, and boresome.
The propensity to codify sports, to standardize the weight and size of
their implements, and to reduce them to what Spencer calls
regimentation, is a outcrop of uniformitarianism that works against
that individuation which is one of the chief advantages of free play.
This, to be sure, has developed old-fashioned rounders to modern
baseball, and this is well, but it is seen in the elaborate Draconian
laws, diplomacy, judicial and legislative procedures, concerning
"eligibility, transfer, and even sale of players." In some games
international conformity is gravely discussed. Even where there is no
tyranny and oppression, good form is steadily hampering nature and the
free play of personality. Togs and targets, balls and bats, rackets
and oars are graded or numbered, weighed, and measured, and every
emergency is legislated on and judged by an autocratic martinet,
jealous of every prerogative and conscious of his dignity. All this
separates games from the majority and makes for specialism and
professionalism. Not only this, but men are coming to be sized up for
hereditary fitness in each point and for each sport. Runners,
sprinters, and jumpers,[18] we are told, on the basis of many careful
measurements, must be tall, with slender bodies, narrow but deep
chests, longer legs than the average for their height, the lower leg
being especially long, with small calf, ankle, and feet, small arms,
narrow hips, with great power of thoracic inflation, and thighs of
small girth. Every player must be studied by trainers for ever finer
individual adjustments. His dosage of work must be kept well within
the limits of his vitality, and be carefully adjusted to his
recuperative power. His personal nascent periods must be noted, and
initial embarrassment carefully weeded out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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