DIFFICULT BOYS 34 1 



all proportion to that which should have followed. A critical, candid 

 self-survey will often astonish and alarm us at the close escapes we 

 have made from impulsions which swayed us forcefully. What conse- 

 quences have we escaped by sheer accident ? In short, how can we wisely 

 make allowances for forces potent in others, the nature of which we may 

 only dimly know and are practically unable to appreciate in all their 

 temporary despotism? The question is how far will the normal impulses 

 carry any one? We plume ourselves on our own individual solidarity, 

 poise, achievements, our importance in the community; yet we have 

 survived endless perils by means of some judgment and more luck. 



G. Stanley Hall, the master mind in childhood psychology, tells us 

 in this connection that: 



Many of the morbid mental phenomena are merely those of overaccentua- 

 tion of processes normal at puberty. The germs of many of these disturbances 

 lie in the common faults of childhood, which are now studied under the name 

 of pedagogic pathology. We must seek the key to these perversions by address- 

 ing ourselves to the larger underlying and preliminary problems of determining 

 the natural forms of psychic and somatic transitions from childhood to maturity, 

 and study what puberty and adolescence really mean as developmental stages 

 of human life. 



Adolescence begins with the new wave of vitality seen in growth; in the 

 modifications of nearly every organ; new interests, instincts, and tendencies 

 arise, increased appetites and curiosity, so that it is the physiologic second 

 birth. Passions and desires spring into vigorous life, but with them normally 

 comes, or should come, the evolution of higher powers of control and inhibition. 

 The momentum of inheritance may be sufficient and Binschwanger conceived 

 the psychic morbidities of this age as due to exhaustion or lack of capital. 



In the earliest education of all boys, whether in the family, the 

 kindergarten or the school, one definite principle, it seems to me, 

 should be held in mind as of paramount importance. This is motor 

 training. The potentiality of this postulate is readily demonstrable, 

 yet the history of education exhibits here a neglect, seeming to argue 

 that if the principle were so vital it would have been enforced long 

 ago. There is some modification in these later years. Froebel 

 makes partial use of motor training in his beautiful idealizations, 

 but it is subordinated to an optimistic expression of the good, the 

 beautiful, the divine, needful but lacking in robust practicability. 

 Man is put into the world to do something, to be something, and the 

 obvious way to accomplish this is by primitive forms of labor. He 

 may, and should, think, worship and aim for high ideals. In all this 

 he should achieve concrete things. It is by no means proved that he 

 can do this, except through the gradual process of fitting himself to 

 become a practical part of the divine scheme. In this there is no place 

 for drones. In due time he may devote himself, after earning the right, 

 to physical quiescence, to thought, to contemplation. Man may, if he 

 so elects, try to achieve a serene mental attitude (nirvana or kaaf ) until 



