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 worst product of striving to do things with defective psychic
impulsion is fatigue in its common forms, which slows down the pace,
multiplies errors and inaccuracies, and develops slovenly habits,
ennui, flitting will specters, velleities and caprices, and
neurasthenic symptoms generally. It brings restlessness, and a
tendency to many little heterogeneous, smattering efforts that weaken
the will and leave the mind like a piece of well-used blotting paper,
covered with traces and nothing legible. All beginnings are easy, and
only as we leave the early stages of proficiency behind and press on
in either physical or mental culture and encounter difficulties, do
individual differences and the tendency of weak will, to change and
turn to something else increase. Perhaps the greatest disparity
between men is the power to make a long concentrative, persevering
effort, for _In der Beschränkung zeigt sich der Meister_ [The master
shows himself in limitation]. Now no kind or line of culture is
complete till it issues in motor habits, and makes a well-knit soul
texture that admits concentration series in many directions and that
can bring all its resources to bear at any point. The brain
unorganized by training has, to recur to Richter's well-worn aphorism,
saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, or all the ingredients of gunpowder,
but never makes a grain of it because they never get together. Thus
willed action is the language of complete men and the goal of
education. When things are mechanized by right habituation, there is
still further gain; for not only is the mind freed for further and
higher work, but this deepest stratum of motor association is a plexus
that determines not only conduct and character, but even beliefs. The
person who deliberates is lost, if the intellect that doubts and
weighs alternatives is less completely organised than habits. All will
culture is intensive and should safeguard us against the chance
influence of life and the insidious danger of great ideas in small and
feeble minds. Now fatigue, personal and perhaps racial, is just what
arrests in the incomplete and mere memory or noetic stage. It makes
weak bodies that command, and not strong ones that obey. It divorces
knowing and doing, _Kennen_ and _Können_, a separation which the
Greeks could not conceive because for them knowledge ended in skill or
was exemplified in precepts and proverbs that were so clear cut that
the pain of violating them was poignant. Ideas must be long worked
over till life speaks as with the rifle and not with the shotgun, and
still less with the water hose. The purest thought, if true, is only
action repressed to be ripened to more practical form. Not only do
muscles come before mind, will before intelligence, and sound ideas
rest on a motor basis, but all really useless knowledge tends to be
eliminated as error or superstition. The roots of play lie close to
those of creative imagination and idealism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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