Excerpt from The Education of Girls
The problem of the ages has been: Given, mind and matter in combination, how to make a man. This is the problem that educational theories try to solve. The solution, however, depends upon the conception of what a man is. It has been truly said that "among all nations the direction impressed upon education depends on the idea which they form of the perfect man. Among the Romans it is the brave soldier, inured to fatigue, and readily yielding to discipline; among the Athenians it is the man who united in himself the happy harmony of moral and physical perfection; among the Hebrews the perfect man is the pious, virtuous man, who is capable of attaining the ideal traced by God in these terms: 'Ye shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy."' There was a time when all the attention was given to the development of the physical powers; antithetic to this the time came when education was wholly absorbed in developing the intellectual side of man; but we make the synthesis, and hold that neither is complete, that each forms but a part of man no man can be produced in all his strength and beauty and glory with only one side developed. Complete development - of mind, of soul, of body - is the end of education.
Let us inquire more definitely into this. According to Davidson, education is the process by which man is enabled to transcend his original nature, or sensuous life, ruled over by instinct, and assume the ideal nature, or moral life, ruled by reason. Reflection shows that man's "original nature" may be almost diametrically opposed to his ideal nature. Hence, in order to develop the latter it may be necessary to resist, and, perhaps, almost entirely to suppress the former. But we must remember that the highest development is attained only when the reason and the will gain complete ascendency over the desires and passions; and that this power of reason and will is directly proportional to the number, frequency, strength, and complexity, of the inhibitions. The relation of the sensuous life to the moral is as servant to master.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Education of Girls (Classic Reprint) (Don Carlos Guffey)