Class J_iX ^ COPYRIGHT DEPOSm PEEFACE I HAVE often been asked to select and epitomize the practical and especially the pedagogical conclusions of my large volumes on Adolescence, published in 1904, in such form that they may be available at a minimum cost to parents, teachers, reading circles, normal schools, and college classes, by whom even the larger volumes have been often used. This, with the cooperation of the pub- lishers and with the valuable aid of Superintendent C. N. Kendall of Indianapolis, I have tried to do, following in the main the original text, with only such minor changes and additions as were necessary to bring the topics up to date, and adding a new chapter on moral and religious education. For the scientific justification of my educational conclusions I must, of course, refer to the larger volumes. The last chapter is not in "Ado- lescence," but is revised from a paper printed elsewhere. I am indebted to Dr. Theodote L. Smith of Clark Uni- versity for verification of all references, proof-reading, and many minor changes.
G. Stanley Hall.
CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE 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 1 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 acces- sory 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. 7 III. — Industrial Education.
Trade classes and schools, their importance in the interna- tional market — Our dangers and the superiority of German workmen — The effects of a tariff — Description of schools between the kindergarten and the industrial school — Equal salaries for teachers in France — Dangers from machinery — The advantages of life on the old New England farm — Its resemblance to the education we now give ^groes and Indians — Its advantage for all-sided muscular developvii CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE IV. — Manual Training and Sloyd.
History of the movement — Its philosophy — ^The value of hand training in the development of the brain and its sig- nificance in the making of man — A grammar of our many industries hard — The best we do can reach but few — Very great defects in our manual training methods which do not base on science and make nothing salable — The Leipzig system — Sloyd is hypermethodic — These crude peasant in- dustries can never satisfy educational needs — The gospel of work; William Morris and the arts and crafts movement — Its spirit desirable — ^The magic effects of a brief period of intense work — The natural development of the drawing instinct in the child 35 V. — Gymnastics.
V. — Gymnastics.
The story of Jahn and the Turners — ^The enthusiasm which this movement generated in Germany — ^The ideal of bringing out latent powers — ^The concept of more perfect voluntary control — Swedish gymnastics — Doing everything possible for the body as a machine — Liberal physical culture — Ling's orthogenic scheme of economic postures and movements and correcting defects — The ideal of symmetry and prescribing exercises to bring the body to a standard — Lamentable lack of correlation between these four systems — Illustrations of the great good that a systematic training can effect — Athletic records — Greek physical training...53 VI. — Play, Sports, and Games.
The view of Groos partial, and a better explanation of play proposed as rehearsing ancestral activities — The glory of Greek physical training, its ideals and results — The first spontaneous movements of infancy as keys to the past — Necessity of developing basal powers before those that are later 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 rein- troducing it — Fighting — Boxing — Wrestling — Bushido — viii CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE Foot-ball — Military ideals — Showing off — Cold baths — Hill climbing — The playground movement — The psychology of play — Its relation to work 73 VII. — Faults, Lies, and Crimes.
Classification of children's faults — Peculiar children — Real faults 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 — Preda- tory activities — Gangs — Causes of crime — The effects of / stories of crime — ^Temibility — Juvenile crime and its treat- VIII. — Biographies of Youth.
Knightly ideals and honor — Thirty adolescents from Shakespeare — Goethe — C. D. Warner — Aldrich — The fugi- tive 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...141 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 207 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 234 ix CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XL — 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 recon- struction— Food — Sleep — Regimen — Manners — Religion — Regularity — The topics for a girls' curriculum — The eter- nally womanly 277 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 mechan- ized— Value of scolding — How to flog aright — Its dangers — Moral precepts and proverbs — Habituation — Training will through intellect — Examinations — Concentration — Origi- ^ nality — Froebel and the naive — First ideas of God — Con- science— Importance of Old and New Testaments — Sex dangers — Love and religion — Conversion,...324 YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 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, habitviation, 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 teeth- ing 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 "vvas before or ever will be again, and there is peculiar endurance, vitality, and re- sistance 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 enjoy- ment 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 1 YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE for themselves independently of further parental aid. The qualities developed during pre-adolescence are, in the evolutionary history of the race, far older than hered- itary 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 organized on a simple, effective plan. The momentum of these traits inherited from our indefi- nitely 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 com- pacted, 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 beerf 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 and allow the fundamental traits of savagery their fling till twelve. Biological psychology finds many and cogent rea- sons to confirm this view if only a proper environ- ment could he provided. The child revels in savagery; and if its tribal, predatory, hunting, fishing, fighting, roving, idle, playing proclivities could be indulged in the country and under conditions that now, alas! seem hope- 2 PRE-ADOLESCEXCE 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 the 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, wean still more from, but perpetually incite to visit, field, forest, hill, shore, the water, flowers, 3 YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, RJ IGIMEN, AND HYGIENE animals, the true homes of childhood in this wild, un- domesticated 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 environ- ment, 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 trans- plant the human sapling, I concede reluctantly, as early as eight, but not before, to the schoolhouse with its im- perfect lighting, ventilation, temperature. We must shut out nature and open books. The child must sit on unhygienic benches and work the tiny muscles that wag the tongue and pen, and let all the others, which consti- tute nearly half its weight, decay. Even if it be pre- maturely, he must be subjected to special disciplines and be apprenticed to the higher qualities of adulthood; for he is not only a product of nature, but a candidate for a highly developed humanity. To many, if not most, of the influences here there can be at first but little inner response. Insight, understanding, interest, sentiment, are for the most part only nascent; and most that per- tains to the true kingdom of mature manhood is em- bryonic. The wisest requirements seem to the child more or less alien, arbitrary, heteronomous, artificial, falsetto. There is much passivity, often active resistance and evasion, and perhaps spasms of obstinacy, to it all. But the senses are keen and alert, reactions immediate and vigorous; and the memory is quick, sure and lasting; and ideas of space, time, and physical causation, and of many a moral and social licit and non-licit, are rapidly unfold- 4 PRE-ADOLESCENCE mg. Never again will there be such susceptibility to drill and discipline, such plasticity to habituation, or such ready adjustment to new conditions. It is the age of external and mechanical training. Reading, writing, dr-awing, manual training, musical technic, foreign tongues and their pronunciation, the manipulation of numbers and of geometrical elements, and many kinds of skill have now their golden hour; and if it passes unim- proved, all these can never be acquired later without a heavy handicap of disadvantage and loss. These necessi- ties 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, re- petitive, 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 guid- ing principles for pressure in these essentially formal and, to the child, contentless elements of knowledge. These should be sharply distinguished from the in- digenous, evoking, and more truly educational factors described in the last paragraph, which are meaty, con- tent-full, and relatively formless as to time of day, method, spirit, and perhaps environment and personnel 5 YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 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 spon- taneous 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 adoles- cent 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 or- gans 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 har- monies 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.
6 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 activ- ities— 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 role. IMuscles 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 every- thing that man has accomplished with matter. If they are undeveloped or grow relaxed and flabby, the dread- ful 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 con- duct three-fourths of life, with ]\Iatthew Arnold; to de- scribe man as one-third intellect and two-thirds will, with YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENI Schopenhauer; to urge that man is what he does or th -i he is the sum of his movements, with F. W. Robertso: that character is simply muscle habits, with Maudsle; that the age of art is now slowly superseding the age oi science, and that the artist will drive out with the pro- fessor, with the anonymous author of " Rembrandt als Erzieher"^; that history is consciously willed move- ments, with Bluntschli; or that we could form no con- ception of force or energy in the world but for our own muscular effort; to hold that most thought involves change of muscle tension as more or less integral to it — all this shows how Vve have modified the antique Cice- ronian conception vivere est cogitari,^ to vivere est velle,^ and gives us a new sense of the importance of muscular development and regimen.* Modern psychology thus sees in muscles organs of expression for all efferent processes. Beyond all their demonstrable functions, every change of attention and of psychic states generally plays upon them unconsciously, modifying their tension in subtle ways so that they may be called organs of thought and feeling as well as of will, in which some now see the true Kantian thing-in-itself the real substance of the world, in the anthropomor- phism of force. Habits even determine the deeper strata of belief; thought is repressed action; and deeds, not words, are the language of complete men. The motor areas are closely related and largely identical with the psychic, and muscle culture develops brain-centers as nothing else yet demonstrably does. Muscles are the vehicles of habituation, imitation, obedience, character, and even of manners and customs. For the young, motor education is cardinal, and is now coming to due 1 Dieterich. Gottingen, 1886. 2 To live is to think.
3 To live is to will. See Chap. xii.
8 MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL recognition; and, for all, education is incomplete without a motor side. Skill, endurance, and perseverance may almost be called muscular virtues; and fatigue, velleity, caprice, ennui, restlessness, lack of control and poise, muscular faults.
To understand the momentous changes of motor functions that characterize adolescence we must con- sider other than the measurable aspects of the subject. Perhaps the best scale on which to measure all normal growth of muscle structure and functions is found in the progress from fundamental to accessory. The former designates the muscles and movements of the trunk and large joints, neck, back, hips, shoulders, knees, and elbows, sometimes called central, and which in general man has in common with the higher and larger animals. Their activities are few, mostly simultaneous, alternating and rhythmic, as of the legs in walking, and predomi- nate in hard-working men and women with little culture or intelligence, and often in idiots. The latter or acces- sory movements are those of the hand, tongue, face, and articulatory organs, and these may be connected into a long and greatly diversified series, as those used in writing, talking, piano-playing. They are represented by smaller and more numerous muscles, whose functions develop later in life and represent a higher standpoint of evolution. These smaller muscles for finer move- ments come into function later and are chiefly associated with psychic activity, which plays upon them by inces- santly changing their tensions, if not causing actual movement. It is these that are so liable to disorder in the many automatisms and choreic tics we see in school children, especially if excited or fatigued. General paralysis usually begins in the higher levels by breaking these down, so that the first symptom of its insidious and 9 V YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE never interrupted progress is inability to execute the more exact and delicate movements of tongue or hand, or both. Starting with the latest evolutionary level, it is a devolution that may work downward till very many of the fundamental activities are lost before death.