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
Although pedagogues make vast claims for the moralizing effect of
schooling, I cannot find a single criminologist who is satisfied with
the modern school, while most bring the severest indictments against
it for the blind and ignorant assumption that the three R's or any
merely intellectual training can moralize. By nature, children are
more or less morally blind, and statistics show that between thirteen
and sixteen incorrigibility is between two and three times as great as
at any other age. It is almost impossible for adults to realize the
irresponsibility and even moral neurasthenia incidental to this stage
of development. If we reflect what a girl would do if dressed like a
boy and leading his life and exposed to the same moral contagion, or
what a boy would do if corseted and compelled to live like a girl,
perhaps we can realize that whatever rôle heredity plays, the youth
who go wrong are, in the vast majority of cases, victims of
circumstances or of immaturity, and deserving of both pity and hope.
It was this sentiment that impelled Zarnadelli to reconstruct the
criminal law of Italy, in this respect, and it was this sympathy that
made Rollet a self-constituted advocate, pleading each morning for the
twenty or thirty boys and eight or ten girls arrested every day in
Paris.
Those smitten with the institution craze or with any extreme
correctionalist views will never solve the problem of criminal youths.
First of all, they must be carefully and objectively studied, lived
with, and understood as in this country Gulick, Johnson, Forbush and
Yoder are doing in different ways, but each with success. Criminaloid
youth is more sharply individualized than the common good child, who
is less differentiated. Virtue is more uniform and monotonous than
sin. There is one right but there are many wrong ways, hence they need
to be individually studied by every paidological method, physical and
psychic. Keepers, attendants, and even sponsors who have to do with
these children should be educators with souls full of fatherhood and
motherhood, and they should understand that the darkest criminal
propensities are frequently offset by the very best qualities; that
juvenile murderers are often very tender-hearted to parents, sisters,
children, or pets;[15] they should understand that in the criminal
constitution there are precisely the same ingredients, although
perhaps differently compounded, accentuated, mutually controlled,
etc., by the environment, as in themselves, so that to know all would,
in the great majority of cases, be to pardon all; that the home
sentiments need emphasis; that a little less stress of misery to
overcome the effects of economic malaise and, above all, a friend,
mentor, adviser are needed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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