G Stanley Hall Quotes

Gross well says that children are young because they play, and not vice versa; and he might have added, men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely, for play is, at bottom, growth, and at the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type of research from sheer love of truth.

People don't quit playing because they grow old. They grow old because they quit playing.

Adolescence is when the very worst and best impulses in the human soul struggle against each other for possession." ~ G. Stanley Hall

G. Stanley Hall, a creature of his times, believed strongly that adolescence was determined – a fixed feature of human development that could be explained and accounted for in scientific fashion. To make his case, he relied on Haeckel's faulty recapitulation idea, Lombroso's faulty phrenology-inspired theories of crime, a plethora of anecdotes and one-sided interpretations of data. Given the issues, theories, standards and data-handling methods of his day, he did a superb job. But when you take away the shoddy theories, put the anecdotes in their place, and look for alternate explanations of the data, the bronze statue tumbles hard. I have no doubt that many of the street teens of Hall's time were suffering or insufferable, but it's a serious mistake to develop a timeless, universal theory of human nature around the peculiarities of the people of one's own time and place.

...chuck-full of error, masturbation and Jesus.

Life is . . . a stream flowing from high mountain ranges which wring it from the clouds, coursing down through all the manifold ways in which the water comes down at Lodore to the sea of eternity. Adolescence is the chief rapids in this river of life which may cut a deep canyon and leave its shores a desert.

How much science fiction have you read?” “A little. Not much.” “Well, lucky for you, I’ve read quite a bit.” He grinned. “In fact, you could say that’s why I’m here. I got hooked on that stuff when I was a kid, and by the time I got out of college, I’d pretty much decided that I wanted to see Mars.” He became serious again. “Okay, try to follow me. Although people have been writing about Mars since the 1700’s, it wasn’t until the first Russian and American probes got out here in the 1960’s that anyone knew what this place is really like. That absence of knowledge gave writers and artists the liberty to fill in the gap with their imaginations… or at least until they learned better. Understand?” “Sure.” I shrugged. “Before the 1960’s, you could have Martians. After that, you couldn’t have Martians anymore.” “Umm… well, not exactly.” Karl lifted his hand, teetered it back and forth. “One of the best stories on the disk is ‘A Rose For Ecclesiastes’ by Roger Zelazny. It was written in 1963, and it has Martians in it. And some stories written before then were pretty close to getting it right. But for the most part, yes… the fictional view of Mars changed dramatically in the second half of the last century, and although it became more realistic, it also lost much of its romanticism.” Karl folded the penknife, dropped it on his desk. “Those aren’t the stories Jeff’s reading. Greg Bear’s ‘A Martian Ricorso’, Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Transit of Earth’, John Varley’s ‘In the Hall of the Martian Kings’… anything similar to the Mars we know, he ignores. Why? Because they remind him of where he is… and that’s not where he wants to be.” “So…” I thought about it for a moment. “He’s reading the older stuff instead?” “Right.” Karl nodded. “Stanley Weinbaum’s ‘A Martian Odyssey’, Otis Albert Kline’s ‘The Swordsman of Mars’, A.E. van Vogt’s ‘The Enchanted Village’… the more unreal, the more he likes them. Because those stories aren’t about the drab, lifeless planet where he’s stuck, but instead a planet of native Martians, lost cities, canal systems…” “Okay, I get it.” “No, I don’t think you do… because I’m not sure I do, either, except to say that Jeff appears to be leaving us. Every day, he’s taking one more step into this other world… and I don’t think he’s coming back again.

The teens are emotionally unstable and pathic. It is a natural impulse to experience hot and perfervid psychic states, and it is characterized by emotionalism. We see here the instability and fluctuations now so characteristic. The emotions develop by contrast and reaction into the opposite.

Education has now become the chief problem of the world, its one holy cause. The nations that see this will survive, and those that fail to do so will slowly perish. . . . There must be re-education of the will and of the heart as well as of the intellect; and the ideals of service must supplant those of selfishness and greed.

Oneness with Nature is the glory of childhood; oneness with childhood is the glory of the Teacher.

Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born." ~

Normal children often pass through stages of passionate cruelty, laziness, lying and thievery.

.. every step of the upward way is strewn with wreckage of body, mind, and morals.

The years from about eight to twelve constitute a unique period of human life.

Modern man was not meant to do his best work before forty but is by nature, and is becoming more so, an afternoon and evening worker.

Man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his activities are more or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environment." ~

Constant muscular activity was natural for the child, and, therefore, the immense effort of the drillmaster teachers to make children sit still was harmful and useless.

Adolescence as the time when an individual ‘recapitulates’ the savage stage of the race’s past.

Every theory of love, from Plato down teaches that each individual loves in the other sex what he lacks in himself.

Of all work-schools, a good farm is probably the best for motor developments.

Puberty for a girl is like floating down a broadening river into an open sea.