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
The field of play is as wide as life and its varieties far outnumber
those of industries and occupations in the census. Plays and games
differ in seasons, sex, and age. McGhee[19] has shown on the basis of
some 8,000 children, that running plays are pretty constant for boys
from six to seventeen, but that girls are always far behind boys and
run steadily less from eight to eighteen. In games of choice, boys
showed a slight rise at sixteen and seventeen, and girls a rapid
increase at eleven and a still more rapid one after sixteen. In games
of imitation girls excel and show a marked, as boys do a slight,
pubescent fall. In those games involving rivalry boys at first greatly
excel girls, but are overtaken by the latter in the eighteenth year,
both showing marked pubescent increment. Girls have the largest number
of plays and specialise on a few less than boys, and most of these
plays are of the unorganized kinds. Johnson[20] selected from a far
larger number 440 plays and games and arranged the best of them in a
course by school grades, from the first to the eighth, inclusive, and
also according to their educational value as teaching observation,
reading and spelling, language, arithmetic, geography, history, and
biography, physical training, and specifically as training legs, hand,
arm, back, waist, abdominal muscles, chest, etc. Most of our best
games are very old and, Johnson thinks, have deteriorated. But
children are imitative and not inventive in their games, and easily
learn new ones. Since the Berlin Play Congress in 1894 the sentiment
has grown that these are of national importance and are preferable to
gymnastics both for soul and body. Hence we have play-schools,
teachers, yards, and courses, both for their own value and also to
turn on the play impulse to aid in the drudgery of school work.
Several have thought that a well-rounded, liberal education could be
given by plays and games alone on the principle that there is no
profit where there is no pleasure or true euphoria.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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