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

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 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