Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene

by G. Stanley Hall

Perhaps next to dancing in phyletic motivation come personal conflicts, such as wrestling, fighting, boxing, dueling, and in some sense, hunting. The animal world is full of struggle for survival, and primitive warfare is a wager of battle, of personal combat of foes contesting eye to eye and hand to hand, where victory of one is the defeat and perhaps death of the other, and where life is often staked against life. In its more brutal forms we see one of the most degrading of all the aspects of human nature. Burk[10] has shown how the most bestial of these instincts survive and crop out irresistibly in boyhood, where fights are often engaged in with desperate abandon. Noses are bitten, ears torn, sensitive places kicked, hair pulled, arms twisted, the head stamped on and pounded on stones, fingers twisted, and hoodlums sometimes deliberately try to strangle, gouge out an eye, pull off an ear, pull out the tongue, break teeth, nose, or bones, or dislocate jaws or other joints, wring the neck, bite off a lip, and torture in utterly nameless ways. In unrestrained anger, man becomes a demon in love with the blood of his victim. The face is distorted, and there are yells, oaths, animal snorts and grunts, cries, and then exultant laughter at pain, and each is bruised, dirty, disheveled and panting with exhaustion. For coarser natures, the spectacle of such conflicts has an intense attraction, while some morbid souls are scarred by a distinct phobia for everything suggestive of even lower degrees of opposition. These instincts, more or less developed in boyhood, are repressed in normal cases before strength and skill are sufficiently developed to inflict serious bodily injury, while without the reductives that orthogenetic growth brings they become criminal. Repulsive as are these grosser and animal manifestations of anger, its impulsion can not and should not be eliminated, but its expression transformed and directed toward evils that need all its antagonism. To be angry aright is a good part of moral education, and non-resistance under all provocations is unmanly, craven, and cowardly.[11] An able-bodied young man, who can not fight physically, can hardly have a high and true sense of honor, and is generally a milksop, a lady-boy, or sneak. He lacks virility, his masculinity does not ring true, his honesty can not be sound to the core. Hence, instead of eradicating this instinct, one of the great problems of physical and moral pedagogy is rightly to temper and direct it.

Sparta sedulously cultivated it in boys; and in the great English schools, where for generations it has been more or less tacitly recognized, it is regulated by custom, and their literature and traditions abound in illustrations of its man-making and often transforming influence in ways well appreciated by Hughes and Arnold. It makes against degeneration, the essential feature of which is weakening of will and loss of honor. Real virtue requires enemies, and women and effeminate and old men want placid, comfortable peace, while a real man rejoices in noble strife which sanctifies all great causes, casts out fear, and is the chief school of courage. Bad as is overpugnacity, a scrapping boy is better than one who funks a fight, and I have no patience with the sentimentality that would here "pour out the child with the bath," but would have every healthy boy taught boxing at adolescence if not before. The prize-ring is degrading and brutal, but in lieu of better illustrations of the spirit of personal contest I would interest a certain class of boys in it and try to devise modes of pedagogic utilization of the immense store of interest it generates. Like dancing it should be rescued from its evil associations, and its educational force put to do moral work, even though it be by way of individual prescriptions for specific defects of character. At its best, it is indeed a manly art, a superb school for quickness of eye and hand, decision, force of will, and self-control. The moment this is lost stinging punishment follows. Hence it is the surest of all cures for excessive irascibility and has been found to have a most beneficent effect upon a peevish or unmanly disposition. It has no mean theoretic side, of rules, kinds of blow and counters, arts of drawing out and tiring an opponent, hindering but not injuring him, defensive and offensive tactics, etc., and it addresses chiefly the fundamental muscles in both training and conflict. I do not underestimate the many and great difficulties of proper purgation, but I know from both personal practise and observation that they are not unconquerable.

This form of personal conflict is better than dueling even in its comparatively harmless German student form, although this has been warmly defended by Jacob Grimm, Bismarck, and Treitschke, while Paulsen, Professor of Philosophy and Pedagogy, and Schrempf, of Theology, have pronounced it but a slight evil, and several Americans have thought it better than hazing, which it makes impossible. The dark side of dueling is seen in the hypertrophied sense of honor which under the code of the corps becomes an intricate and fantastic thing, prompting, according to Ziegler,[12] a club of sixteen students to fight over two hundred duels in four weeks in Jena early in this century. It is prone to degenerate to an artificial etiquette demanding satisfaction for slight and unintended offenses. Although this professor who had his own face scarred on the mensur, pleaded for a student court of honor, with power to brand acts as infamous and even to expel students, on the ground that honor had grown more inward, the traditions in favor of dueling were too strong. The duel had a religious romantic origin as revealing God's judgment, and means that the victim of an insult is ready to stake body, or even life, and this is still its ideal side. Anachronism as it now is and degenerating readily to sport or spectacle, overpunishing what is often mere awkwardness or ignorance, it still impresses a certain sense of responsibility for conduct and gives some physical training, slight and specialized though it be. The code is conventional, drawn directly from old French military life, and is not true to the line that separates real honor from dishonor, deliberate insult that wounds normal self-respect from injury fancied by oversensitiveness or feigned by arrogance; so that in its present form it is not the best safeguard of the sacred shrine of personality against invasion of ifs rights. If, as is claimed, it is some diversion from or fortification against corrosive sensuality, it has generally allied itself with excessive beer-drinking. Fencing, while an art susceptible of high development and valuable for both pose and poise, and requiring great quickness of eye, arm, and wrist, is unilateral and robbed of the vest of inflicting real pain on an antagonist.

Bushido,[13] which means military-knightly ways, designates the Japanese conception of honor in behavior and in fighting. The youth is inspired by the ideal of Tom Brown "to leave behind him the name of a fellow who never bullied a little boy or turned his back on a big one." It expresses the race ideal of justice, patriotism, and the duty of living aright and dying nobly. It means also sympathy, pity, and love, for only the bravest can be the tenderest, and those most in love are most daring, and it includes politeness and the art of poetry. Honor is a sense of personal dignity and worth, so the bushi is truthful without an oath. At the tender age of five the samurai is given a real sword, and this gives self-respect and responsibility. At fifteen, two sharp and artistic ones, long and short, are given him, which must be his companions for life. They were made by a smith whose shop is a sanctuary and who begins his work with prayer. They have the finest hilts and scabbards, and are besung as invested with a charm or spell, and symbolic of loyalty and self-control, for they must never be drawn lightly. He is taught fencing, archery, horsemanship, tactics, the spear, ethics and literature, anatomy, for offence and defense; he must be indifferent to money, hold his life cheap beside honor, and die if it is gone. This chivalry is called the soul of Japan, and if it fades life is vulgarised. It is a code of ethics and physical training.

Football is a magnificent game if played on honor. An English tennis champion was lately playing a rubber game with the American champion. They were even and near the end when the American made a bad fluke which would have lost this country its championship. The English player, scorning to win on an accident, intentionally made a similar mistake that the best man might win. The chief evil of modern American football which now threatens its suppression in some colleges is the lust to win at any price, and results in tricks and secret practise. These sneaky methods impair the sentiment of honor which is the best and most potent of all the moral safeguards of youth, so that a young man can not be a true gentleman on the gridiron. This ethical degeneration is far worse than all the braises, sprains, broken bones and even deaths it causes.

Wrestling is a form of personal encounter which in antiquity reached a high development, and which, although now more known and practised as athletics of the body than of the soul, has certain special disciplinary capacities in its various forms. It represents the most primitive type of the struggle of unarmed and unprotected man with man. Purged of its barbarities, and in its Greco-Roman form and properly subject to rules, it cultivates more kinds of movements than any other form—for limbs, trunk, neck, hand, foot, and all in the upright and in every prone position. It, too, has its manual of feints, holds, tricks, and specialties, and calls out wariness, quickness, strength, and shiftiness. Victory need involve no cruelty or even pain to the vanquished. The very closeness of body to body, emphasizing flexor rather than extensor arm muscles, imparts to it a peculiar tone, gives it a vast variety of possible activities, developing many alternatives at every stage, and tempts to many undiscovered forms of permanent mayhem. Its struggle is usually longer and less interrupted by pauses than pugilism, and its situations and conclusions often develop slowly, so that all in all, its character among contests is unique. As a school of posture for art, its varieties are extremely manifold and by no means developed, for it contains every kind of emphasis of every part and calls out every muscle group and attitude of the human body; hence its training is most generic and least specialized, and victories have been won by very many kinds of excellence.

Perhaps nothing is more opposed to the idea of a gentleman than the sæva animi tempestas [Fierce tempest of the soul] of anger. A testy, quarrelsome, mucky humor is antisocial, and an outburst of rage is repulsive. Even non-resistance, turning the other cheek, has its victories and may be a method of moral combat. A strong temper well controlled and kept in leash makes a kinetic character; but in view of bullying, unfair play, cruel injustice to the weak and defenseless, of outrageous wrong that the law can not reach, patience and forbearance may cease to be virtues, and summary redress may have a distinct advantage to the ethical nature of man and to social order, and the strenuous soul must fight or grow stagnant or flabby. If too repressed, righteous indignation may turn to sourness and sulks, and the disposition be spoiled. Hence the relief and exhilaration of an outbreak that often clears the psychic atmosphere like a thunderstorm, and gives the "peace that passeth understanding" so often dilated on by our correspondents. Rather than the abject fear of making enemies whatever the provocation, I would praise those whose best title of honor is the kind of enemies they make. Better even an occasional nose dented by a fist, a broken bone, a rapier-scarred face, or even sometimes the sacrifice of the life of one of our best academic youth than stagnation, general cynicism and censoriousness, bodily and psychic cowardice, and moral corruption, if this indeed be, as it sometimes is, its real alternative.

So closely are love and war connected that not only is individual pugnacity greatly increased at the period of sexual maturity, when animals acquire or develop horns, fangs, claws, spurs, and weapons of offense and defense, but a new spirit of organization arises which makes teams possible or more permanent. Football, baseball, cricket, etc., and even boating can become schools of mental and moral training. First, the rules of the game are often intricate, and to master and observe them effectively is no mean training for the mind controlling the body. These are steadily being revised and improved, and the reasons for each detail of construction and conduct of the game require experience and insight into human nature. Then the subordination of each member to the whole and to a leader cultivates the social and coöperative instincts, while the honor of the school, college, or city, which each team represents, is confided to each and all. Group loyalty in Anglo-Saxon games, which shows such a marked increment in coördination and self-subordination at the dawn of puberty as to constitute a distinct change in the character of sports at this age, can be so utilized as to develop a spirit of service and devotion not only to town, country, and race, but to God and the church. Self must be merged and a sportsmanlike spirit cultivated that prefers defeat to tricks and secret practise, and a clean game to the applause of rooters and fans, intent only on victory, however won. The long, hard fight against professionalism that brings in husky muckers, who by every rule of true courtesy and chivalry belong outside academic circles, scrapping and underhand advantages, is a sad comment on the character and spirit of these games, and eliminates the best of their educational advantages. The necessity of intervention, which has imposed such great burdens on faculties and brought so much friction with the frenzy of scholastic sentiment in the hot stage of seasonal enthusiasms, when fanned to a white heat by the excessive interest of friends and patrons and the injurious exploitation of the press, bears sad testimony to the strength and persistence of warlike instincts from our heredity. But even thus the good far predominates. The elective system has destroyed the class games, and our institutions have no units like the English colleges to be pitted against each other, and so colleges grow, an ever smaller percentage of students obtain the benefit of practise on the teams, while electioneering methods often place second-best men in place of the best. But both students and teachers are slowly learning wisdom in the dear school of experience. On the whole, there is less license in "breaking training" and in celebrating victories, and even at their worst, good probably predominates, while the progress of recent years bids us hope.

Finally, military ideals and methods of psycho-physical education are helpful regulations of the appetite for combat, and on the whole more wholesome and robust than those which are merely esthetic. Marching in step gives proper and uniform movement of legs, arms, and carriage of body; the manual of arms, with evolution and involution of figures in the ranks, gives each a corporate feeling of membership, and involves care of personal appearance and accouterments, while the uniform levels social distinction in dress. For the French and Italian and especially the German and Russian adolescent of the lower classes, the two or three years of compulsory military service is often compared to an academic course, and the army is called, not without some justification, the poor man's university. It gives severe drill, strict discipline, good and regular hours, plain but wholesome fare and out-of-door exercise, exposure, travel, habits of neatness, many useful knacks and devices, tournaments and mimic or play battles; these, apart from its other functions, make this system a great promoter of national health and intelligence. Naval schools for midshipmen, who serve before the mast, schools on board ship that visit a wide curriculum of ports each year, cavalry schools, where each boy is given a horse to care for, study and train, artillery courses and even an army drill-master in an academy, or uniform, and a few exterior features of soldierly life, all give a distinct character to the spirit of any institution. The very fancy of being in any sense a soldier opens up a new range of interests too seldom utilized; and tactics, army life and service, military history, battles, patriotism, the flag, and duties to country, should always erect a new standard of honor. Youth should embrace every opportunity that offers in this line, and instruction should greatly increase the intellectual opportunities created by every interest in warfare. It would be easy to create pregnant courses on how soldiers down the course of history have lived, thought, felt, fought, and died, how great battles were won and what causes triumphed in them, and to generalize many of the best things taught in detail in the best schools of war in different grades and lands.

A subtle but potent intersexual influence is among the strongest factors of all adolescent sport. Male birds and beasts show off their charms of beauty and accomplishment in many a liturgy of love antics in the presence of the female. This instinct seems somehow continuous with the growth of ornaments in the mating season. Song, tumbling, balking, mock fights, etc., are forms of animal courtship. The boy who turns cartwheels past the home of the girl of his fancy, is brilliant, brave, witty, erect, strong in her presence, and elsewhere dull and commonplace enough, illustrates the same principle. The true cake-walk as seen in the South is perhaps the purest expression of this impulse to courtship antics seen in man, but its irradiations are many and pervasive. The presence of the fair sex gives tonicity to youth's muscles and tension to his arteries to a degree of which he is rarely conscious. Defeat in all contests is more humiliating and victory more glorious thereby. Each sex is constantly passing the examination of the other, and each judges the other by standards different from its own. Alas for the young people who are not different with the other sex from what they are with their own!—and some are transformed into different beings. Achievement proclaims ability to support, defend, bring credit and even fame to the object of future choice, and no good point is lost. Physical force and skill, and above all, victory and glory, make a hero and invest him with a romantic glamour, which, even though concealed by conventionality or etiquette, is profoundly felt and makes the winner more or less irresistible. The applause of men and of mates is sweet and even intoxicating, but that of ladies is ravishing. By universal acclaim the fair belong to the brave, strong, and victorious. This stimulus is wholesome and refining. As is shown later, a bashful youth often selects a maiden onlooker and is sometimes quite unconsciously dominated in his every movement by a sense of her presence, stranger and apparently unnoticed though she be, although in the intellectual work of coeducation girls are most influenced thus. In athletics this motive makes for refinement and good form. The ideal knight, however fierce and terrible, must not be brutal, but show capacity for fine feeling, tenderness, magnanimity, and forbearance. Evolutionists tell us that woman has domesticated and educated savage man and taught him all his virtues by exercising her royal prerogative of selecting in her mate just those qualities that pleased her for transmission to future generations and eliminating others distasteful to her. If so, she is still engaged in this work as much as ever, and in his dull, slow way man feels that her presence enforces her standards, abhorrent though it would be to him to compromise in one iota his masculinity. Most plays and games in which both sexes participate have some of the advantages with some of the disadvantages of coeducation. Where both are partners rather than antagonists, there is less eviration. A gallant man would do his best to help, but his worst not to beat a lady. Thus, in general, the latter performs her best in her true rule of sympathetic spectator rather than as fellow player, and is now an important factor in the physical education of adolescents.