Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 13

Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 13

In all these modes of developing our efferent powers, we conceive that

the race comes very close to the individual youth, and that ancestral

momenta animate motor neurons and muscles and preside over most of the

combinations. Some of the elements speak with a still small voice

raucous with age. The first spontaneous movements of infancy are

hieroglyphs, to most of which we have as yet no good key. Many

elements are so impacted and felted together that we can not analyze

them. Many are extinct and many perhaps made but once and only hint

things we can not apprehend. Later the rehearsals are fuller, and

their significance more intelligible, and in boyhood and youth the

correspondences are plain to all who have eyes to see. Pleasure is

always exactly proportional to the directness and force of the current

of heredity, and in play we feel most fully and intensely ancestral

joys. The pain of toil died with our forebears; its vestiges in our

play give pure delight. Its variety prompts to diversity that enlarges

our life. Primitive men and animals played, and that too has left its

traces in us. Some urge that work was evolved or degenerated from

play; but the play field broadens with succeeding generations youth is

prolonged, for play is always and everywhere the best synonym of

youth. All are young at play and only in play, and the best possible

characterization of old age is the absence of the soul and body of

play. Only senile and overspecialized tissues of brain, heart, and

muscles know it not.

 

Gulick[1] has urged that what makes certain exercises more interesting

than others is to be found in the phylon. The power to throw with

accuracy and speed was once pivotal for survival, and non-throwers

were eliminated. Those who could throw unusually well best overcame

enemies, killed game, and sheltered family. The nervous and muscular

systems are organized with certain definite tendencies and have back

of them a racial setting. So running and dodging with speed and

endurance, and hitting with a club, were also basal to hunting and

fighting. Now that the need of these is leas urgent for utilitarian

purposes, they are still necessary for perfecting the organism. This

makes, for instance, baseball racially familiar, because it represents

activities that were once and for a long time necessary for survival.

We inherit tendencies of muscular coördination that have been of great

racial utility. The best athletic sports and games a composed of these

racially old elements, so that phylogenetic muscular history is of

great importance. Why is it, this writer asks, that a city man so

loves to sit all day and fish! It is because this interest dates back

to time immemorial. We are the sons of fishermen, and early life was

by the water's side, and this is our food supply. This explains why

certain exercises are more interesting than others. It is because they

touch and revive the deep basic emotions of the race. Thus we see that

play is not doing things to be useful later, but it is rehearsing

racial history. Plays and games change only in their external form,

but the underlying neuro-muscular activities, and also the psychic

content of them, are the same. Just as psychic states must be lived

out up through the grades, so the physical activities most be played

off, each in its own time.

 

The best exercise for the young should thus be more directed to

develop the basal powers old to the race than those peculiar to the

individual, and it should enforce those psycho-neural and muscular

forms which race habit has banded down rather than insist upon those

arbitrarily designed to develop our ideas of symmetry regardless of

heredity. The best guide to the former is _interest_, zest, and

spontaneity. Hereditary moment, really determine, too, the order in

which nerve centers come into function. The oldest, racial parts come

first, and those which are higher and represent volition come in much

later.[2] As Hughlings Jackson has well shown, speech uses most of the

same organs as does eating, but those concerned with the former are

controlled from a higher level of nerve-cells. By right mastication,

deglutition, etc., we are thus developing speech organs. Thus not only

the kind but the time of forms and degrees of exercise is best

prescribed by heredity. All growth is more or less rhythmic. There are

seasons of rapid increment followed by rest and then perhaps succeeded

by a period of augmentation, and this may occur several times.

Roberts's fifth parliamentary report shows that systematic gymnastics,

which, if applied at the right age, produce such immediate and often

surprising development of lung capacity, utterly fail with boys of

twelve, because this nascent period has not yet come. Donaldson showed

that if the eyelid of a young kitten be forced open prematurely at

birth and stimulated with light, medullation was premature and

imperfect; so, too, if proper exercise is deferred too long, we know

that little result is achieved. The sequence in which the maturation

of levels, nerve areas, and bundles of fibers develop may be, as

Flechsig thinks, causal; or, according to Cajal, energy, originally

employed in growth by cell division, later passes to fiber extension

and the development of latent cells; or as in young children, the

nascent period of finger movements may stimulate that of the thumb

which comes later, and the independent movement of the two eyes, their

subsequent coördination, and so on to perhaps a third and yet higher

level. Thus exercise ought to develop nature's first intention and

fulfil the law of nascent periods, or else not only no good but great

harm may be done. Hence every determination of these periods is of

great practical as well as scientific importance. The following are

the chief attempts yet made to fix them, which show the significance

of adolescence.

 

The doll curve reaches its point of highest intensity between eight

and nine,[3] and it is nearly ended at fifteen, although it may

persist. Children can give no better reason why they stop playing with

dolls than because other things are liked better, or they are too old,

ashamed, love real babies, etc. The Roman girl, when ripe for

marriage, hung up her childhood doll as a votive offering to Venus.

Mrs. Carlyle, who was compelled to stop, made sumptuous dresses and a

four-post bed, and made her doll die upon a funeral pyre like Dido,

after speaking her last farewell and stabbing herself with a penknife

by way of Tyrian sword. At thirteen or fourteen it is more distinctly

realized that dolls are not real, because they have no inner life or

feeling, yet many continue to play with them with great pleasure, in

secret, till well on in the teens or twenties. Occasionally single

women or married women with no children, and in rare cases even those

who have children, play dolls all their lives. Gales's[4] student

concluded that the girls who played with dolls up to or into pubescent

years were usually those who had the fewest number, that they played

with them in the most realistic manner, kept them because actually

most fond of them, and were likely to be more scientific, steady, and

less sentimental than those who dropped them early. But the instinct

that "dollifies" new or most unfit things is gone, as also the subtle

points of contact between doll play and idolatry. Before puberty dolls

are more likely to be adults; after puberty they are almost always

children or babies. There is no longer a struggle between doubt and

reality in the doll cosmos, no more abandon to the doll illusion; but

where it lingers it is a more atavistic rudiment, and just as at the

height of the fever dolls are only in small part representatives of

future children, the saying that the first child is the last doll is

probably false. Nor are doll and child comparable to first and second

dentition, and it is doubtful if children who play with dolls as

children with too great abandonment are those who make the best

mothers later, or if it has any value as a preliminary practise of

motherhood. The number of motor activities that are both inspired and

unified by this form of play and that can always be given wholesome

direction is almost incredible, and has been too long neglected both

by psychologists and teachers. Few purer types of the rehearsal by the

individual of the history of the race can probably be found even

though we can not yet analyze the many elements involved and assign to

each its phyletic correlate.

 

In an interesting paper Dr. Gulick[5] divides play into three childish

periods, separated by the ages three and seven, and attempts to

characterize the plays of early adolescence from twelve to seventeen and

of later adolescence from seventeen to twenty-three. Of the first two

periods he says, children before seven rarely play games spontaneously,

but often do so under the stimulus of older persons. From seven to

twelve, games are almost exclusively individualistic and competitive,

but in early adolescence "two elements predominate--first, the plays are

predominantly team games, in which the individual is more or less

sacrificed for the whole, in which there is obedience to a captain, in

which there is coöperation among a number for a given end, in which play

has a program and an end. The second characteristic of the period is

with reference to its plays, and there seems to be all of savage

out-of-door life--hunting, fishing, stealing, swimming, rowing, sailing,

fighting, hero-worship, adventure, love of animals, etc. This

characteristic obtains more with boys than with girls." "The plays of

adolescence are socialistic, demanding the heathen virtues of courage,

endurance, self-control, bravery, loyalty, enthusiasm."

 

Croswell[6] found that among 2,000 children familiar with 700 kinds of

amusements, those involving physical exercises predominated over all

others, and that "at every age after the eighth year they were

represented as almost two to one and in the sixteenth year rose among

boys as four to one." The age of the greatest number of different

amusements is from ten to eleven, nearly fifteen being mentioned, but

for the next eight or nine years there is a steady decline of number,

and progressive specialisation occurs. The games of chase, which are

suggestive on the recapitulation theory, rise from eleven per cent in

boys of six to nineteen per cent at nine, but soon after decline, and

at sixteen have fallen to less than four per cent. Toys and original

make-believe games decline still earlier, while ball rises steadily

and rapidly to eighteen, and card and table games rise very steadily

from ten to fifteen in girls, but the increment is much less in boys.

"A third or more of all the amusements of boys just entering their

teens are games of contest--games in which the end is in one way or

another to gain an advantage one's fellows, in which the interest is n

the struggle between peers." "As children approach the teens, a

tendency arises that is well expressed by one of the girls who no

longer makes playthings but things that are useful." Parents and

society must, therefore, provide the most favorable conditions for the

kind of amusement fitting at each age. As the child grows older,

society plays a larger rôle in all the child's amusements, and from

the thirteenth year "amusements take on a decidedly coöperative and

competitive character, and efforts are ore and more confined to the

accomplishments of some definite aim. The course for this period will

concentrate the effort upon fewer lines," and more time will be

devoted to each. The desire for mastery is now at its height. The

instinct is to maintain one's self independently and ask no odds. At

fourteen, especially, the impulse is, in manual training, to make something and perhaps to coöperate.