Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene | Page 4

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;