Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 2

Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 2

Everything, in short, suggests that this period may represent in the

individual what was once for a very protracted and relatively

stationary period an age of maturity in the remote ancestors of our

race, when the young of our species, who were perhaps pygmoid, shifted

for themselves independently of further parental aid. The qualities

developed during pre-adolescence are, in the evolutionary history of

the race, far older than hereditary traits of body and mind which

develop later and which may be compared to a new and higher story

built upon our primal nature. Heredity is so far both more stable and

more secure. The elements of personality are few, but are well

organised on a simple, effective plan. The momentum of these traits

inherited from our indefinitely remote ancestors is great, and they

are often clearly distinguishable from those to be added later. Thus

the boy is father of the man in a new sense, in that his qualities are

indefinitely older and existed, well compacted, untold ages before the

more distinctly human attributes were developed. Indeed there are a

few faint indications of an earlier age node, at about the age of six,

as if amid the instabilities of health we could detect signs that this

may have been the age of puberty in remote ages of the past. I have

also given reasons that lead me to the conclusion that, despite its

dominance, the function of sexual maturity and procreative power is

peculiarly mobile up and down the age-line independently of many of

the qualities usually so closely associated with it, so that much that

sex created in the phylum now precedes it in the individual.

 

Rousseau would leave prepubescent years to nature and to these primal

hereditary impulsions and allow the fundamental traits of savagery

their fling till twelve. Biological psychology finds many and cogent

reasons to confirm this view _if only a proper environment could be

provided_. The child revels in savagery; and if its tribal, predatory,

hunting, fishing, fighting, roving, idle, playing proclivities could

be indulged in the country and under conditions that now, alas! seem

hopelessly ideal, they could conceivably be so organized and directed

as to be far more truly humanistic and liberal than all that the best

modern school can provide. Rudimentary organs of the soul, now

suppressed, perverted, or delayed, to crop out in menacing forms

later, would be developed in their season so that we should be immune

to them in maturer years, on the principle of the Aristotelian

catharsis for which I have tried to suggest a far broader application

than the Stagirite could see in his day.

 

These inborn and more or less savage instincts can and should be

allowed some scope. The deep and strong cravings in the individual for

those primitive experiences and occupations in which his ancestors

became skilful through the pressure of necessity should not be

ignored, but can and should be, at least partially, satisfied in a

vicarious way, by tales from literature, history, and tradition which

present the crude and primitive virtues of the heroes of the world's

childhood. In this way, aided by his vivid visual imagination, the

child may enter upon his heritage from the past, live out each stage

of life to its fullest and realize in himself all its manifold

tendencies. Echoes only of the vaster, richer life of the remote past

of the race they must remain, but just these are the murmurings of the

only muse that can save from the omnipresent dangers of precocity.

Thus we not only rescue from the danger of loss, but utilize for

further psychic growth the results of the higher heredity, which are

the most precious and potential things on earth. So, too, in our

urbanized hothouse life, that tends to ripen everything before its

time, we must teach nature, although the very phrase is ominous. But

we must not, in so doing, wean still more from, but perpetually incite

to visit, field, forest, hill, shore, the water, flowers, animals, the

true homes of childhood in this wild, undomesticated stage from which

modern conditions have kidnapped and transported him. Books and

reading are distasteful, for the very soul and body cry out for a more

active, objective life, and to know nature and man at first hand.

These two staples, stories and nature, by these informal methods of

the home and the environment, constitute fundamental education.

 

But now another remove from nature seems to be made necessary by the

manifold knowledges and skills of our highly complex civilization. We

should transplant the human sapling, I concede reluctantly, as early

as eight, but not before, to the schoolhouse with its imperfect

lighting, ventilation, temperature. We must shut out nature and open

books. The child must sit on unhygienic benches and work the tiny

muscles that wag the tongue and pen, and let all the others, which

constitute nearly half its weight, decay. Even if it be prematurely,

he must be subjected to special disciplines and be apprenticed to the

higher qualities of adulthood; for he is not only a product of nature,

but a candidate for a highly developed humanity. To many, if not most,

of the influences here there can be at first but little inner

response. Insight, understanding, interest, sentiment, are for the

most part only nascent; and most that pertains to the true kingdom of

mature manhood is embryonic. The wisest requirements seem to the child

more or less alien, arbitrary, heteronomous, artificial, falsetto.

There is much passivity, often active resistance and evasion, and

perhaps spasms of obstinacy, to it all. But the senses are keen and

alert, reactions immediate and vigorous; and the memory is quick, sure

and lasting; and ideas of space, time, and physical causation, and of

many a moral and social licit and non-licit, are rapidly unfolding.

Never again will there be such susceptibility to drill and discipline,

such plasticity to habituation, or such ready adjustment to new

conditions. It is the age of external and mechanical training.

Reading, writing, drawing, manual training, musical technic, foreign

tongues and their pronunciations, the manipulation of numbers and of

geometrical elements, and many kinds of skill have now their golden

hour; and if it passes unimproved, all these can never be acquired

later without a heavy handicap of disadvantage and loss. These

necessities may be hard for the health of body, sense, mind, as well

as for morals; and pedagogic art consists in breaking the child into

them betimes as intensely and as quickly as possible with minimal

strain and with the least amount of explanation or coquetting for

natural interest, and in calling medicine confectionery. This is not

teaching in its true sense so much as it is drill, inculcation, and

regimentation. The method should be mechanical, repetitive,

authoritative, dogmatic. The automatic powers are now at their very

apex, and they can do and bear more than our degenerate pedagogy knows

or dreams of. Here we have something to learn from the schoolmasters

of the past back to the middle ages, and even from the ancients. The

greatest stress, with short periods and few hours, incessant

insistence, incitement, and little reliance upon interest, reason or

work done without the presence of the teacher, should be the guiding

principles for pressure in these essentially formal and, to the child,

contentless elements of knowledge. These should be sharply

distinguished from the indigenous, evoking, and more truly educational

factors described in the last paragraph, which are meaty,

content-full, and relatively formless as to time of day, method,

spirit, and perhaps environment and personnel of teacher, and possibly

somewhat in season of the year, almost as sharply as work differs from

play, or perhaps as the virility of man that loves to command a

phalanx, be a martinet and drill-master, differs from femininity which

excels in persuasion, sympathetic insight, story-telling, and in the

tact that discerns and utilizes spontaneous interests in the young.

 

Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human

traits are now born. The qualities of body and soul that now emerge

are far newer. The child comes from and harks back to a remoter past;

the adolescent is neo-atavistic, and in him the later acquisitions of

the race slowly become prepotent. Development is less gradual and more

saltatory, suggestive of some ancient period of storm and stress when

old moorings were broken and a higher level attained. The annual rate

of growth in height, weight, and strength is increased and often

doubled, and even more. Important functions, previously non-existent,

arise. Growth of parts and organs loses its former proportions, some

permanently and some for a season. Some of these are still growing in

old age and others are soon arrested and atrophy. The old measures of

dimensions become obsolete, and old harmonies are broken. The range of

individual differences and average errors in all physical measurements

and all psychic tests increases. Some linger long in the childish

stage and advance late or slowly, while others push on with a sudden

outburst of impulsion to early maturity. Bones and muscles lead all

other tissues, as if they vied with each other; and there is frequent

flabbiness or tension as one or the other leads. Nature arms youth for

conflict with all the resources at her command--speed, power of

shoulder, biceps, back, leg, jaw--strengthens and enlarges skull,

thorax, hips, makes man aggressive and prepares woman's frame for

maternity.

 

* * * * *

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER II

 

 

THE MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL

 

 

Muscles as organs of the will, of character and even of thought--The

muscular virtues--Fundamental and accessory muscles and functions--The

development of the mind and of the upright position--Small

muscles as organs of thought--School lays too much stress upon

these--Chorea--vast numbers of automatic movements in children--Great

variety of spontaneous activities--Poise, control and spurtiness--Pen

and tongue wagging--Sedentary school life _vs_ free out-of-door

activities--Modern decay of muscles, especially in girls--Plasticity

of motor habits at puberty.

 

The muscles are by weight about forty-three per cent. of the average

adult male human body. They expend a large fraction of all the kinetic

energy of the adult body, which a recent estimate places as high as

one-fifth. The cortical centers for the voluntary muscles extend over

most of the lateral psychic zones of the brain, so that their culture

is brain building. In a sense they are organs of digestion, for which

function they play a very important rôle. Muscles are in a most

intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will. They have built

all the roads, cities, and machines in the world, written all the

books, spoken all the words, and, in fact, done everything that man

has accomplished with matter. If they are undeveloped or grow relaxed

and flabby, the dreadful chasm between good intentions and their

execution is liable to appear and widen. Character might be in a sense

defined as a plexus of motor habits. To call conduct three-fourths of

life, with Matthew Arnold; to describe man as one-third intellect and

two-thirds will, with Schopenhauer; to urge that man is what he does

or that he is the sum of his movements, with F.W. Robertson; that

character is simply muscle habits, with Maudsley; that the age of art

is now slowly superseding the age of science, and that the artist will

drive out with the professor, with the anonymous author of "Rembrandt

als Erzicher";[1] that history is consciously willed movements, with

Bluntschli; or that we could form no conception of force or energy in

the world but for our own muscular effort; to hold that most thought

involves change of muscle tension as more or less integral to it--all

this shows how we have modified the antique Ciceronian conception

_vivere est cogitari_, [To live is to think] to _vivere est velle_,

[To live is to will] and gives us a new sense of the importance of muscular development and regimen.