Youth and Sex | Page 8

our
elementary schools. The exercises are based on those systematised by Ling; each series is
varied, and is therefore the more interesting, and each lesson commences with simple,
easily performed movements, leading on to those that are more elaborate and fatiguing,
and finally passing through a descending series to the condition of repose.
The gymnasia where such exercises are taught in England are relatively few and far
between, and it is lamentable to find that many excellent and well-appointed schools for
children, whose parents pay large sums of money for their education, have no properly
equipped gymnasia nor adequately trained teachers. When the question is put, "How
often do you have gymnastics at your school?" the answer is frequently, "We have none,"
or, "Half an hour once a week." Exercises such as Ling's not only exercise every muscle
in the body in a scientific and well-regulated fashion, but being performed by a number
of pupils at once in obedience to words of command, discipline, co-operation, obedience
to teachers, and loyalty to comrades, are taught at the same time. The deepest interest
attaches to many of the more complex exercises, while some of them make large
demands on the courage and endurance of the young people.
In Scandinavia the State provides knickerbockers, tunics, and gymnasium shoes for those
children whose parents are too poor to provide them; and again, in Scandinavia there is
very frequently the provision of bathrooms in which the pupils can have a shower bath
and rub-down after the exercises. These bathrooms in connection with the gymnasia need
not necessarily be costly; indeed many of them in Stockholm and Denmark merely
consist of troughs in the cement floor, on the edge of which the children sit in a row
while they receive a shower bath over their heads and bodies. The feet get well washed in
the trough, and the smart douche of water on head and shoulders acts as an admirable
tonic.
Another exercise which ought to be specially dear to a nation of islanders is swimming,
and this, again, is a relatively cheap luxury too much neglected amongst us. Certainly
there are public baths, but there are not enough to permit of all the elementary school
children bathing even once a week, and still less have they the opportunity of learning to
swim. There is much to be done yet before we can be justly proud of our national system
of education. We must not lose sight of the ideal with which we started--viz. that we
should endeavour to do the best that is possible for our young people in body, soul, and
spirit. The three parts of our nature are intertwined, and a duty performed to one part has
an effect on the whole.

CHAPTER III
.
CARE OF THE ADOLESCENT GIRL IN SICKNESS.
If measured by the death-rate the period of adolescence should cause us little anxiety, but
a careful examination into the state of health of children of school age shows us that it is
a time in which disorders of health abound, and that although these disorders are not
necessarily, nor even generally, fatal, they are frequent, they spoil the child's health, and
inevitably bear fruit in the shape of an injurious effect on health in after life.
That the health of adolescents should be unstable is what we ought to expect from the
general instability of the organism due to the rapidity of growth and the remarkable
developmental changes that are crowded into these few years. Rapidity of growth and
increase of weight are very generally recognised, although their effects upon health are
apt to be overlooked. On the other hand, the still more remarkable development that
occurs in adolescence is very generally ignored.
As a general rule the infectious fevers, the so-called childish diseases--such as measles,
chicken-pox, and whooping-cough--are less common in adolescence than they are in
childhood, while the special diseases of internal organs due to their overwork, or to their
natural tendency to degeneration, is yet far in the future. The chief troubles of adolescents
appear to be due to overstress which accompanies rapid development, to the difficulty of
the whole organism in adapting itself to new functions and altered conditions, and no
doubt in some measure to the unwisdom both of the young people and of their advisers.
This is not the place for a general treatise on the diseases of adolescents, but a few of the
commonest and most obvious troubles should be noted.
The Teeth.--It is quite surprising to learn what a very large percentage of young soldiers
are refused enlistment in the army on account of decayed or defective teeth, and anyone
who has examined the young women candidates for the Civil Service and for Missionary
Societies must have recognised that their teeth are in