Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene | Page 2

explanation of play proposed as
rehearsing ancestral activities--The glory of Greek physical training, its
ideals and results--The first spontaneous movements of infancy as keys
to the past--Necessity of developing basal powers before those that are
later and peculiar to the individual--Plays that interest due to their
antiquity--Play with dolls--Play distinguished by age--Play preferences
of children and their reasons--The profound significance of
rhythm--The value of dancing and also its significance, history, and the
desirability of reintroducing
it--Fighting--Boxing--Wrestling--Bushido--Foot-ball--Military
ideals--Showing off--Cold baths--Hill climbing--The playground
movement--The psychology of play--Its relation to work
VII.--FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES.
Classification of children's faults--Peculiar children--Real fault as
distinguished from interference with the teacher's ease--Truancy, its
nature and effects--The genesis of crime--The lie, its classes and
relations to imagination--Predatory activities--Gangs--Causes of
crime--The effects of stories of crime--Temibility--Juvenile crime and
its treatment
VIII.--BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH.
Knightly ideals and honor--Thirty adolescents from
Shakespeare--Goethe--C.D. Warner--Aldrich--The fugitive nature of
adolescent experience--Extravagance of autobiographies--Stories that
attach to great names--Some typical crazes--Illustrations from George

Eliot, Edison, Chatterton, Hawthorne, Whittier, Spencer, Huxley, Lyell,
Byron, Heine, Napoleon, Darwin, Martineau, Agassiz, Madame Roland,
Louisa Alcott, F.H. Burnett, Helen Keller, Marie Bashkirtseff, Mary
MacLane, Ada Negri, De Quincey, Stuart Mill, Jefferies, and scores of
others
IX.--THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS.
Change from childish to adult friends--Influence of favorite
teachers--What children wish or plan to do or be--Property and the
money sense--Social judgments--The only child--First social
organizations--Student life--Associations for youth controlled by adults
X.--INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK.
The general change and plasticity at puberty--English teaching--Causes
of its failure, (1) too much time to other languages, (2) subordination of
literary content to form, (3) too early stress on eye and hand instead of
ear and mouth, (4) excessive use of concrete words--Children's interest
in words--Their favorites--Slang--Story telling--Age of reading
crazes--What to read--The historic sense--Growth of memory span
XI.--THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS.
Equal opportunities of higher education now open--Brings new dangers
to women--Ineradicable sex differences begin at puberty, when the
sexes should and do diverge--Different interests--Sex tension--Girls
more mature than boys at the same age--Radical psychic and
physiological differences between the sexes--The bachelor
women--Needed
reconstruction--Food--Sleep--Regimen--Manners--Religion--Regularity
-- The topics for a girls' curriculum--The eternally womanly
XII.--MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING.
Dangers of muscular degeneration and overstimulus of
brain--Difficulties in teaching morals--Methods in Europe--Obedience
to commands--Good habits should be mechanized--Value of
scolding--How to flog aright--Its dangers--Moral precepts and
proverbs--Habituation--Training will through
intellect--Examinations--Concentration--Originality--Froebel and the
naive--First ideas of God--Conscience--Importance of Old and New
Testaments--Sex dangers--Love and religion--Conversion

CHAPTER I
PRE-ADOLESCENCE
Introduction: Characterization of the age from eight to twelve--The era
of recapitulating the stages of primitive human development--Life close
to nature--The age also for drill, habituation, memory, work and
regermination--Adolescence superposed upon this stage of life, but
very distinct from it.
The years from about eight to twelve constitute a unique period of
human life. The acute stage of teething is passing, the brain has
acquired nearly its adult size and weight, health is almost at its best,
activity is greater and more varied than it ever was before or ever will
be again, and there is peculiar endurance, vitality, and resistance to
fatigue. The child develops a life of its own outside the home circle,
and its natural interests are never so independent of adult influence.
Perception is very acute, and there is great immunity to exposure,
danger, accident, as well as to temptation. Reason, true morality,
religion, sympathy, love, and esthetic enjoyment are but very slightly
developed.
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