Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene

by G. Stanley Hall

It is only so far as this primitive will is wrong by nature or training, that drastic reconstructions of any sort are needed. Only those who mistake weakness for innocence, or simplicity for candor, or forget that childish faults are no less serious because universal, deny the, at least, occasional depravity of all children, or fail to see that fear and pain are among the indispensables of education, while a parent, teacher, or even a God, all love, weakens and relaxes the will. Children do not cry for the alphabet; the multiplication table is more like medicine than confectionery, and it is only affected thoroughness that omits all that is hard. "The fruits of learning may be sweet, but its roots are always bitter," and it is this alone that makes it possible to strengthen the will while instructing the mind. The well-schooled will comes, like Herder, to scorn the luxury of knowing without the labor of learning. We must anticipate the future penalties of sloth as well as of badness. The will especially is a trust we are to administer for the child, not as he may now wish, but as he will wish when more mature. We must now compel what he will later wish to compel himself to do. To find his habits already formed to the same law that his mature will and the world later enjoin, cements the strongest of all bonds between mentor and child. Nothing, however, must be so individual as punishment. For some, a threat at rare intervals is enough; while for others, however ominous threats may be, they become at once "like scarecrows, on which the foulest birds soonest learn to perch." To scold well and wisely is an art by itself. For some children, pardon is the worst punishment; for others, ignoring or neglect; for others, isolation from friends, suspension from duties; for others, seclusion—which last, however, is for certain ages beset with extreme danger—and for still others, shame from being made conspicuous. Mr. Spencer's "natural penalties" can be applied to but few kinds of wrong, and those not the worst. Basedow tied boys who fell into temptation to a strong pillar to brace them up; if stupid and careless, put on a fool's cap and bells; if they were proud, they were suspended near the ceiling in a basket, as Aristophanes represented Socrates. Two boys who quarreled, were made to look into each other's eyes before the whole school till their angry expressions gave way before the general sense of the ridiculous. This is more ingenious than wise. The object of discipline is to avoid punishment, but even flogging should never be forbidden. It maybe reserved, like a sword in its scabbard, but should not get so rusted in that it can not be drawn on occasion. The law might even limit the size and length of the rod, and place of application, as in Germany, but it should be of no less liberal dimensions here than there. punishment should, of course, be minatory and reformatory, and not vindictive, and we should not forget that certainty is more effective than severity, nor that it is apt to make motives sensuous, and delay the psychic restraint which should early preponderate over the physical. But will-culture for boys is rarely as thorough as it should be without more or less flogging. I would not, of course, urge the extremes of the past. The Spartan beating as a gymnastic drill to toughen, the severity which prevailed in Germany for a long time after its Thirty Years' Wars,[2] the former fashion in many English schools of walking up not infrequently to take a flogging as a plucky thing to do, and with no notion of disgrace attaching to it, shows at least an admirable strength of will. Severe constraint gives poise, inwardness, self-control, inhibition, and not-willingness, if not willingness, while the now too common habit of coquetting for the child's favor, and tickling its ego with praises and prizes, and pedagogic pettifogging for its good-will, and sentimental fear of a judicious slap to rouse a spoiled child with no will to break, to make it keep step with the rest in conduct, instead of delaying a whole school-room to apply a subtle psychology of motives on it, is bad. This reminds one of the Jain who sweeps the ground before him lest he unconsciously tread on a worm. Possibly it may be well, as Schleiermacher suggests, not to repress some one nascent bad act in some natures, but let it and the punishment ensue for the sake of Dr. Spankster's tonic. Dermal pain is not the worst thing in the world, and by a judicious knowledge of how it feels at both ends of the rod, by flogging and being flogged, far deeper pains may be forefended. Insulting defiance, deliberative disobedience, ostentatious carelessness and bravado, are diseases of the will, and, in very rare cases of Promethean obstinacy, the severe process of breaking the will is needful, just as in surgery it is occasionally needful to rebreak a limb wrongly set, or deformed, to set it over better. It is a cruel process, but a crampy will in childhood means moral traumatism of some sort in the adult. Few parents have the nerve to do this, or the insight to see just when it is needed. It is, as some one has said, like knocking a man down to save him from stepping off a precipice. Even the worst punishments are but very faint types of what nature has in store in later life for some forms of perversity of will, and are better than sarcasm, ridicule, or tasks, as penalties. The strength of obstinacy is admirable, and every one ought to have his own will; but a false direction, though almost always the result of faulty previous training when the soul more fluid and mobile, is all the more fatal. While so few intelligent parents are able to refrain from the self-indulgence of too much rewarding or giving, even though it injures the child, it is perhaps too much to expect the hardihood which can be justly cold to the caresses of a child who seeks, by displaying all its stock of goodness and arts of endearment, to buy back good-will after punishment has been deserved. If we wait too long, and punish in cold blood, a young child may hate us; while, if we punish on the instant, and with passion, a little of which is always salutary, on the principle, ohne Affekt kein Effekt, [Without passion, no effect] an older child may fail of the natural reactions of conscience, which should always be secured. The maxim, summum jus summa injuria, [The rigor of the law may be the greatest wrong] we are often told, is peculiarly true in school, and so it is; but to forego all punishment is no less injustice to the average child, for it is to abandon one of the most effective means of will-culture. We never punish but a part, as it were, of the child's nature; he has lied, but is not therefore a liar, and we deal only with the specific act, and must love all the rest of him.

And yet, after all, indiscriminate flogging is so bad, and the average teacher is so inadequate to that hardest and most tactful of all his varied duties, viz., selecting the right outcrop of the right fault of the right child at the right time and place, mood, etc., for best effect, that the bold statement of such principles as above is perhaps not entirely without practical danger, especially in two cases which Madame Necker and Sigismund have pointed out, and in several cases of which the present writer has notes. First, an habitually good child sometimes has a saturnalia of defiance and disobedience; a series of insubordinate acts are suddenly committed which really mark the first sudden epochful and belated birth of the instinct of independence and self-regulation, on which his future manliness will depend. He is quite irresponsible, the acts are never repeated, and very lenient treatment causes him, after the conflict of tumultuous feelings has expanded his soul, to react healthfully into habitual docility again, if some small field for independent action be at once opened him. The other case is that of ennui, of which children suffer such nameless qualms. When I should open half a dozen books, start for a walk, and then turn back, wander about in mind or body, seeking but not finding content in anything, a child in my mood will wish for a toy, an amusement, food, a rare indulgence, only to neglect or even reject it petulantly when granted. These flitting "will-spectres" are physical, are a mild form of the many fatal dangers of fatigue; and punishment is the worst of treatment. Rest or diversion is the only cure, and the teacher's mind must be fruitful of purposes to that end. Perhaps a third case for palliative treatment is, those lies which attend the first sense of badness. The desire to conceal it occasionally accompanies the nascent effort to reform and make the lie true. These cases are probably rare, while the temptation to lie is far greater for one who does ill than for one who does well, for fear is the chief motive, and a successful lie which concealed would weaken the desire to cure a fault.

We have thus far spoken of obedience, and come now to the later necessity of self-guidance, which, if obedience has wrought its perfect work, will be natural and inevitable. It is very hard to combine reason and coercion, yet it is needful that children think themselves free long before we cease to determine them. As we slowly cease to prescribe and begin to inspire, a very few well-chosen mottoes, proverbs, maxims, should be taught very simply, so that they will sink deep. Education has been defined as working against the chance influences of life, and it is certain that without some precepts and rules the will will not exert itself. If reasons are given, and energy is much absorbed in understanding, the child will assent but will not do. If the mind is not strong, many wide ideas are very dangerous. Strong wills are not fond of arguments, and if a young person falls to talking or thinking beyond his experience, subjective or objective, both conduct and thought are soon confused by chaotic and incongruous opinions and beliefs; and false expectations, which are the very seducers of the will, arise. There can be little will-training by words, and the understanding can not realize the ideals of the will. All great things are dangerous, as Plato said, and the truth itself is not only false but actually immoral to unexpanded minds. Will-culture is intensive, not extensive, and the writer knows a case in which even a vacation ramble with a moralizing fabulist has undermined the work of years. Our precepts must be made very familiar, copiously illustrated, well wrought together by habit and attentive thought, and above all clear cut, that the pain of violating them may be sharp and poignant. Vague and too general precepts beyond the horizon of the child's real experience do not haunt him if they are outraged. Now the child must obey these, and will, if he has learned to obey well the command of others.

One of the best sureties that he will do so is muscle-culture, for if the latter are weaker than the nerves and brain, the gap between knowing and doing appears and the will stagnates. Gutsmuths, the father of gymnastics in Germany before Jahn, used to warn men not to fancy that the few tiny muscles that moved the pen or tongue had power to elevate men. They might titillate the soul with words and ideas; but rigorous, symmetrical muscle-culture alone, he and his Turner societies believed, could regenerate the Fatherland, for it was one thing to paint the conflict of life, and quite another to bear arms in it. They said, "The weaker the body the more it commands; the stronger it is the more it obeys."

In this way we shall have a strong, well-knit soul-texture, made up of volitions and ideas like warp and woof. Mind and will will be so compactly organized that all their forces can be brought to a single point. Each concept or purpose will call up those related to it, and once strongly set toward its object, the soul will find itself borne along by unexpected forces. This power of totalizing, rather than any transcendent relation of elements, constitutes at least the practical unity of the soul, and this unimpeded association of its elements is true or inner freedom of will. Nothing is wanting or lost when the powers of the soul are mobilized for a great task, and its substance is impervious to passion. With this organization, men of really little power accomplish wonders. Without it great minds are confused and lost. They have only velleity or caprice. The will makes a series of vigorous, perhaps almost convulsive, but short, inconsistent efforts. As Jean Paul says, there is sulphur, charcoal, and saltpetre in the soul, but powder is not made, for they never find each other. To understand this will-plexus is preeminent among the new demands now laid on educators.

But, although this focalizing power of acting with the whole rather than with a part of the soul, gives independence of many external, conventional, proximate standards of conduct, deepening our interests in life, and securing us against disappointment by defining our expectations, while such a sound and simple will-philosophy is proof against considerable shock and has firmness of texture enough to bear much responsibility, there is, of course, something deeper, without which all our good conduct is more or less hollow. This is that better purity established by mothers in the plastic heart, before the superfoetation of precept is possible, or even before the "soul takes flight in language"; it is perhaps pre-natal or hereditary. Much every way depends on how aboriginal our goodness is, whether the will acts with effort, as we solve an intricate problem, in solitude, or as we say the multiplication table, which only much distraction can confuse, or as we repeat the alphabet, which the din of battle could not hinder. Later and earlier training should harmonize with each other and with nature. Thrice happy he who is so wisely trained that he comes to believe he believes what his soul deeply does believe, to say what he feels and feel what he really does feel, and chiefly whose express volitions square with the profounder drift of his will as the resultant of all he has desired or wished, expected, attended to, or striven for. When such an one comes to his moral majority by standing for the first time upon his own careful conviction, against the popular cry, or against his own material interests or predaceous passions, and feels the constraint and joy of pure obligation which comes up from this deep source, a new, original force is brought into the world of wills. Call it inspiration, or Kant's transcendental impulse above and outside of experience, or Spencer's deep reverberations from a vast and mysterious past of compacted ancestral experiences, the most concentrated, distilled and instinctive of all psychic products, and as old as Mr. Tyndall's "fiery cloud"—the name or even source is little. We would call it the purest, freest, most prevailing, because most inward, will or conscience.

This free, habitual guidance by the highest and best, by conviction with no sense of compulsion or obligation, impractical if not dangerous ideal, for it can be actually realized only by the rarest moral genius. For most of us, the best education is that which makes us the best and most obedient servants. This is the way of peace and the way of nature, for even if we seriously try to keep up a private conscience at all, apart from feeling, faction, party or class spirit, or even habit, which are our habitual guides, the difficulties are so great that most hasten, more or less consciously and voluntarily, to put themselves under authority again, serving only the smallest margin of independence in material interests, choice of masters, etc, and yielding to the pleasing and easy illusion that inflates the minimum to seem the maximum of freedom, and uses the noblest ideal of history, viz., that of pure autonomous oughtness, as a pedestal for idols of selfishness, caprice and conceit. The trouble is in interpreting these moral instincts, for even the authorities lack the requisite self-knowledge in which all wisdom culminates. The moral interregnum which the Aufklärung [Enlightenment] has brought will not end till these instincts are rightly interpreted by in intelligence. The richest streams of thought must flow about them, the best methods must peep and pry till their secrets are found and put into the idea-pictures in which most men think.

This brings us, finally, to the highest and also immediately practical method of moral education, viz., training the will by and for intellectual work. Youth and childhood must not be subordinated as means to maturity. Learning is more useful than knowing. It is the way and not the goal, the work and not the product, the acquiring and not the acquisition, that educates will and character. To teach only results, which are so simple, without methods by which they were obtained, which are so complex and hard, to develop the sense of possession without the strain of activity, to teach great matters too easily or even as play, always to wind along the lines of least resistance into the child's mind, is imply to add another and most enervating luxury to child-life. Only the sense and power of effort, which made Lessing prefer the search to the possession of truth, which trains the will in the intellectual field, which is becoming more and more the field of its activity, counts for character and makes instruction really educating. This makes mental work a series of acts, or living thoughts, and not merely words. Real education, that we can really teach, and that which is really most examinable, is what we do, while those who acquire without effort may be extremely instructed without being truly educated.

It is those who have been trained to put forth mental power that come to the front later, while it is only those whose acquisitions are not transpeciated into power who are in danger of early collapse.

It is because of this imperfect appropriation through lack of volitional reaction that mental training is so often dangerous, especially in its higher grades. Especially wherever good precepts are allowed to rest peacefully beside undiscarded bad habits, moral weakness is directly cultivated. Volitional recollection, or forcing the mind to reproduce a train of impressions, strengthens what we may call the mental will; while if multifarious impressions which excite at the time are left to take their chances, at best, fragmentary reproduction, incipient amnesia, the prelude of mental decay, may be soon detected. Few can endure the long working over of ideas, especially if at all fundamental, which is needful to full maturity of mind, without grave moral danger. New standpoints and ideas require new combinations of the mental elements, with constant risk that during the process, what was already secured will fall back into its lower components. Even oar immigrants suffer morally from the change of manners and customs and ideas, and yet education menus change; the more training the more change, as a rule, and the more danger during the critical transition period while we oscillate between control by old habits, or association within the old circle of thought, and by the new insights, as a medical student often suffers from trying to bring the regulation of his physical functions under new and imperfect hygienic insights. Thus most especially if old questions, concerning which we have long since ceased to trust ourselves to give reasons, need to be reopened, there is especial danger that the new equilibrium about which the dynamic is to be re-resolved into static power will be established, if at all, with loss instead of with gain. Indeed, it is a question not of schools but of civilization, whether mental training, from the three R's to science and philosophy, shall really make men better, as the theory of popular education assumes, and whether the genius and talent of the few who can receive and bear it can be brought to the full maturity of a knowledge fully facultized—a question paramount, even in a republic, to the general education of the many.