Youth : its education, regimen, and hygiene / by G. Stanley Hall.

  • Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley), 1844-1924
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Youth : its education, regimen, and hygiene / by G. Stanley Hall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    lessly 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. Rudi- mentary organs of the soul, now suppressed, perverted, or delayed, to crop out in menacing forms later, would be de- veloped in their season so that we should be immune to them in maturer years, on the principle of the Aristote- lian 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 ten- dencies. 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 file 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, wrean still more from, but perpetually incite to visit, field, forest, hill, shore, the water, flowers,