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 opposite extreme is the factitious and superficial motivation of
fear, prizes, examinations, artificial and immediate rewards and
penalties, which can only tattoo the mind and body with conventional
patterns pricked in, but which lead an unreal life in the soul because
they have no depth of soil in nature or heredity. However precious and
coherent in themselves, all subject-matters thus organized are mere
lugs, crimps, and frills. All such culture is spurious, unreal, and
parasitic. It may make a scholastic or sophistic mind, but a worm is
at the root and, with a dim sense of the vanity of all knowledge that
does not become a rule of life, some form of pessimism is sure to
supervene in every serious soul. With age a civilization accumulates
such impedimenta, traditional flotsam and jetsam, and race fatigue
proceeds with equal step with its increasing volume. Immediate
utilities are better, but yet not so much better than acquisitions
that have no other than a school or examination value. If, as Ruskin
says, all true work is praise, all true play is love and prayer.
Instil into a boy's soul learning which he sees and feels not to have
the highest worth and which can not become a part of his active life
and increase it, and his freshness, spontaneity, and the fountains of
play slowly run dry in him, and his youth fades to early desiccation.
The instincts, feelings, intuitions, the work of which is always play,
are superseded by method, grind, and education by instruction which is
only an effort to repair the defects of heredity, for which, at its
best, it is vulgar, pinchbeck substitute. The best play is true
genius, which always comes thus into the world, and has this way of
doing its work, and all the contents of the memory pouches is luggage
to be carried rather than the vital strength that carries burdens.
Grosswell says that children are young because they play, and not
_vice versa_; and he might have added, men grow old because they stop
playing, and not conversely, for play is, at bottom, growth, and at
the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type of research
from sheer love of truth. Home, school, church, state, civilization,
are measured in one supreme scale of values, viz., whether and how,
for they aid in bringing youth to its fullest maturity. Even vice,
crime, and decline are often only arrest or backsliding or reversion.
National and racial decline beginning in eliminating one by one the
last and highest styles of development of body and mind, mental
stimulus of excessive dosage lowers general nutrition. A psychologist
that turns his back on mere subtleties and goes to work in a life of
service has here a great opportunity, and should not forget, as Horace
Mann said, "that for all that grows, one former is worth one hundred
reformers."
[Footnote 1: Interest in Relation to Muscular Exercise. American
Physical Education Review, June, 1902, vol. 7, pp. 57-65.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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