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
measurements slightly smaller than the average child, is more
energetic and is generally capable of the greatest activity and
usefulness in more out-of-door vocations. Truancy is augmented, too,
just in proportion as legitimate and interesting physical exercise is
denied.
The vagrant, itinerant, vagabond, gadabout, hobo, and tramp, that Riis
has made so interesting, is an arrested, degenerate, or perverted
being who abhors work; feels that the world owes him a living; and
generally has his first real nomad experience in the teens or earlier.
It is a chronic illusion of youth that gives "elsewhere" a special
charm. In the immediate present things are mean, dulled by wont, and
perhaps even nauseating because of familiarity. There must be a change
of scene to see the world; man is not sessile but locomotor; and the
moment his life becomes migratory all the restraints and
responsibilities of settled life vanish. It is possible to steal and
pass on undiscovered and unsuspected, and to steal again. The vagabond
escapes the control of public sentiment, which normally is an external
conscience, and having none of his own within him thus lapses to a
feral state. The constraint of city, home, and school is especially
irksome, and if to this repulsion is added the attraction of a love of
nature and of perpetual change, we have the diathesis of the roadsman
already developed. Adolescence is the normal time of emancipation from
the parental roof, when youth seeks to set up a home of its own, but
the apprentice to life must wander far and long enough to find the
best habitat in which to set up for himself. This is the spring season
of emigration; and it should be an indispensable part of every life
curriculum, just before settlement, to travel far and wide, if
resources and inclination permit. But this stage should end in wisely
chosen settlement where the young life can be independently developed,
and that with more complacency and satisfaction because the place has
been wisely chosen on the basis of a wide comparison. The chronic
vagrant has simply failed to develop the reductives of this normal
stage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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