Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 14

Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 14

McGhee[7] collected the play preferences of 15,718 children, and found

a very steady decline in running plays among girls from nine to

eighteen, but a far more rapid rise in plays of chance from eleven to

fifteen, and a very rapid rise from sixteen to eighteen. From eleven

onward with the most marked fall before fourteen, there was a distinct

decline in imitative games for girls and a slower one for boys. Games

involving rivalry increased rapidly among boys from eleven to sixteen

and still more rapidly among girls, their percentage of preference

even exceeding that of boys at eighteen, when it reached nearly

seventy per cent. With adolescence, specialization upon a few plays

was markedly increased in the teens among boys, whereas with girls in

general there were a large number of plays which were popular with

none preëminent. Even at this age the principle of organization in

games so strong with boys is very slight with girls. Puberty showed

the greatest increase of interest among pubescent girls for croquet,

and among boys for swimming, although baseball and football, the most

favored for boys, rose rapidly. Although the author does not state it,

it would seem from his data that plays peculiar to the different

seasons were most marked among boys, in part, at least, because their

activities are more out of doors.

 

Ferrero and others have shown that the more intense activities of

primitive people tend to be rhythmic and with strongly automatic

features. No form of activity is more universal than the dance, which

is not only intense but may express chiefly in terms of fundamental

movements, stripped of their accessory finish and detail, every

important act, vocation, sentiment, or event in the life of man in

language so universal and symbolic that music and poetry themselves

seem to have arisen out of it. Before it became specialized much labor

was cast in rhythmic form and often accompanied by time-marking and

even tone to secure the stimulus of concert on both economic and

social principles. In the dark background of history there is now much

evidence that at some point, play, art, and work were not divorced.

They all may have sprung from rhythmic movement which is so

deep-seated in biology because it secures most joy of life with least

expense. By it Eros of old ordered chaos, and by its judicious use the

human soul is cadenced to great efforts toward high ideals. The many

work-songs to secure concerted action in lifting, pulling, stepping,

the use of flail, lever, saw, ax, hammer, hoe, loom, etc., show that

areas and thesis represent flexion and extension, that accent

originated in the acme of muscular stress, as well as how rhythm eases

work and also makes it social. Most of the old work-canticles are

lost, and machines have made work more serial, while rhythms are

obscured or imposed from without so as to limit the freedom they used

to express. Now all basal, central, or strength movements tend to be

oscillatory, automatically repetitive, or rhythmic like savage music,

as if the waves of the primeval sea whence we came still beat in them,

just as all fine peripheral and late movements tend to be serial,

special, vastly complex, end diversified. It is thus natural that

during the period of greatest strength increment in muscular

development, the rhythmic function of nearly all fundamental movements

should be strongly accentuated. At the dawn of this age boys love

marching; and, as our returns show, there is a very remarkable rise in

the passion for beating time, jigging, double shuffling, rhythmic

clapping, etc. The more prominent the factor of repetition the more

automatic and the less strenuous is the hard and new effort of

constant psychic adjustment and attention. College yells, cheers,

rowing, marching, processions, bicycling, running, tug-of-war,

calisthenics and class gymnastics with counting, and especially with

music, horseback riding, etc., are rhythmic; tennis, baseball and

football, basketball, golf, polo, etc., are less rhythmic, but are

concerted and intense. These latter emphasise the conflict factor,

best brought out in fencing, boxing, and wrestling, and lay more

stress on the psychic elements of attention and skill. The effect of

musical accompaniment, which the Swedish system wrongly rejects, is to

make the exercises more fundamental and automatic, and to

proportionately diminish the conscious effort and relieve the

neuro-muscular mechanism involved in fine movements.

 

Adolescence is the golden period of nascency for rhythm. Before this

change many children have a very imperfect sense of it, and even those

who march, sing, play, or read poetry with correct and overemphasised

time marking, experience a great broadening of the horizon of

consciousness, and a marked, and, for mental power and scope,

all-conditioning increase in the carrying power of attention and the

sentence-sense. The soul now feels the beauty of cadences, good

ascension, and the symmetry of well-developed periods--and all, as I

am convinced, because this is the springtime of the strength movements

which are predominantly rhythmic. Not only does music start in time

marking, the drum being the oldest instrument, but quantity long took

precedence of sense and form of content, both melody and words coming

later. Even rhythmic tapping or beating of the foot (whence the poetic

feet of prosody and meter thus later imposed monotonous prose to make

poetry) exhilarates, makes glad the soul and inspires it to attack,

gives compulsion and a sense of unity. The psychology of rhythm shows

its basal value in cadencing the soul. We can not conceive what war,

love, and religion would be without it. The old adage that "the parent

of prose is poetry, the parent of poetry is music, the parent of music

is rhythm, and the parent of rhythm is God" seems borne out not only

in history, but by the nature of thought and attention that does not

move in a continuum, but flies and perches alternately, or on

stepping-stones and as if influenced by the tempo of the leg swinging

as a compound pendulum.

 

Dancing is one of the best __EXPRESSION__s of pure play and of the motor

needs of youth. Perhaps it is the most liberal of all forms of motor

education. Schopenhauer thought it the apex of physiological

irritability and that it made animal life most vividly conscious of

its existence and most exultant in exhibiting it. In very ancient

times China ritualised it in the spring and made it a large part of

the education of boys after the age of thirteen. Neale thinks it was

originally circular or orbicular worship, which he deems oldest. In

Japan, in the priestly Salic College of ancient Rome, in Egypt, in the

Greek Apollo cult, it was a form of worship. St. Basil advised it; St.

Gregory introduced it into religious services. The early Christian

bishops, called præsuls, led the sacred dance around the altar; and

only in 692, and again in 1617, was it forbidden in church. Neale and

others have shown how the choral processionals with all the added

charm of vestment and intonation have had far more to do in

Christianizing many low tribes, who could not understand the language

of the church, than has preaching. Savages are nearly all great

dancers, imitating every animal they know, dancing out their own

legends, with ritual sometimes so exacting that error means death. The

character of people is often learned from their dances, and Molière

says the destiny of nations depends on them. The gayest dancers are

often among the most downtrodden and unhappy people. Some mysteries

can be revealed only in them, as holy passion-plays. If we consider

the history of secular dances, we find that some of them, when first

invented or in vogue, evoked the greatest enthusiasm. One writer says

that the polka so delighted France and England that statesmen forgot

politics. The spirit of the old Polish aristocracy still lives in the

polonaise. The gipsy dances have inspired a new school of music. The

Greek drama grew out of the evolution of the tragic chorus. National

dances like the hornpipe and reel of Scotland, the _Reihen_, of

Germany, the _rondes_ of France, the Spanish tarantella and

_chaconne_, the strathspey from the Spey Valley, the Irish jig, etc.,

express racial traits. Instead of the former vast repertory, the

stately pavone, the graceful and dignified saraband, the wild

_salterrelle_, the bourrée with song and strong rhythm, the light and

skippy bolero, the courtly bayedere, the dramatic plugge, gavotte, and

other peasant dances in costume, the fast and furious fandango, weapon

and military dances; in place of the pristine power to express love,

mourning, justice, penalty, fear, anger, consolation, divine service,

symbolic and philosophical conceptions, and every industry or

characteristic act of life in pantomime and gesture, we have in the

dance of the modern ballroom only a degenerate relict, with at best

but a very insignificant culture value, and too often stained with bad

associations. This is most unfortunate for youth, and for their sake a

work of rescue and revival is greatly needed; for it is perhaps, not

excepting even music, the completest language of the emotions and can

be made one of the best schools of sentiment and even will,

inculcating good states of mind and exorcising bad ones as few other

agencies have power to do. Right dancing can cadence the very soul,

give nervous poise and control, bring harmony between basal and finer

muscles, and also between feeling and intellect, body and mind. It can

serve both as an awakener and a test of intelligence, predispose the

heart against vice, and turn the springs of character toward virtue.

That its present decadent forms, for those too devitalized to dance

aright, can be demoralizing, we know in this day too well, although

even questionable dances may sometimes work off vicious propensities

in ways more harmless than those in which they would otherwise find

vent. Its utilization for and influence on the insane would be another

interesting chapter.

 

Very interesting scientifically and suggestive practically is another

correspondence which I believe to be new, between the mode of

spontaneous activity in youth and that of labor in the early history

of the race. One of the most marked distinctions between savage and

civilized races is in the longer rhythm of work and relaxation. The

former are idle and lazy for days, weeks, and perhaps months, and then

put forth intense and prolonged effort in dance, hunt, warfare,

migration, or construction, sometimes dispensing with sleep and

manifesting remarkable endurance. As civilization and specialization

advance, hours become regular. The cultured man is less desultory in

all his habits, from eating and sleeping to performing social and

religious duties, although he may put forth no more aggregate energy

in a year than the savage. Women are schooled to regular work long

before men, and the difficulty of imposing civilization upon low races

is compared by Bücher[8] to that of training a eat to work when

harnessed to a dog-cart. It is not dread of fatigue but of the

monotony of method makes them hate labor. The effort of savages is

more intense and their periods of rest more prolonged and inert.

Darwin thinks all vital function bred to go in periods, as vertebrates

are descended from tidal ascidian.[9] There is indeed much that

suggests some other irregular rhythm more or less independent of day

and night, and perhaps sexual in its nature, but not lunar, and for

males. This mode of life not only preceded the industrial and

commercial period of which regularity is a prime condition, but it

lasted indefinitely longer than the latter has yet existed; during

this early time great exertion, sometimes to the point of utter

exhaustion and collapse, alternated with seasons of almost vegetative

existence. We see abundant traces of this psychosis in the muscle

habits of adolescents, and, I think, in student and particularly in

college life, which can enforce regularity only to a limited extent.

This is not reversion, but partly __EXPRESSION__ of the nature and perhaps

the needs of this stage of immaturity, and partly the same instinct of

revolt against uniformity imposed from without, which rob life of

variety and extinguish the spirit of adventure and untrammeled

freedom, and make the savage hard to break to the harness of

civilization. The hunger for fatigue, too, can become a veritable

passion and is quite distinct from either the impulse for activity for

its own sake or the desire of achievement. To shout and put forth the

utmost possible strength in crude ways is erethic intoxication at a

stage when every tissue can become erectile and seems, like the crying

of infants, to have a legitimate function in causing tension and

flushing, enlarging the caliber of blood vessels, and forcing the

blood perhaps even to the point of extravasation to irrigate newly

growing fibers, cells, and organs which atrophy if not thus fed. When

maturity is complete this need abates. If this be correct, the

phenomenon of second breath, so characteristic of adolescence, and one

factor in the inebriate's propensity, is ontogenetic __EXPRESSION__ of a

rhythm trait of a long racial period. Youth needs overexertion to

compensate for underexertion, to undersleep in order to offset

oversleep at times. This seems to be nature's provision to expand in

all directions its possibilities of the body and soul in this plastic

period when, without this occasional excess, powers would atrophy or

suffer arrest for want of use, or larger possibilities world not be

realized without this regimen peculiar to nascent periods. This is treated more fully elsewhere.