Volume 1

Adolescence : its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education / by G. Stanley Hall.

  • Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley), 1844-1924.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Adolescence : its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education / by G. Stanley Hall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    xr I have tried to suggest a far broader application than the Stagirite could see in his day. These nativistic and more-or less feral instincts can and should be fed and formed. The deep and strong cravings in the individual to revive the ancestral experiences and occu- pations of the race can and must be met, at least in a second- ary and vicarious way, by tales of the heroic virtues the child can appreciate, and these proxy experiences should make up by variety and extent what they lack in intensity. The teacher art should so vivify all that the resources of literature, tradi- tion, history, can supply which represents the crude, rank virtues of the world’s childhood that, with his almost visual imagination, reenforced by psychonomic recapitulatory im- pulses, the child can enter upon his full heritage, live out each stage of his life to the 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 hot- house 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 perpet- ually incite to visit field, forest, hill, shore, the water, flowers, animals, the true homes of childhood in this wild, undomes- ticated 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 sap- ling, I concede reluctantly, as early as eight, but not before, to the schoolhouse with its imperfect lighting, ventilation, tem- perature. We must shut out nature and open books. . The child must sit on unhygienic benches and work the tiny mus-