Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene | Page 3

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