Knightly ideals and honor--Thirty adolescents from Shakespeare--Goethe--C.D. Warner--Aldrich--The fugitive nature of adolescent experience--Extravagance of autobiographies--Stories that attach to great names--Some typical crazes--Illustrations from George Eliot, Edison, Chatterton, Hawthorne, Whittier, Spencer, Huxley, Lyell, Byron, Heine, Napoleon, Darwin, Martineau, Agassiz, Madame Roland, Louisa Alcott, F.H. Burnett, Helen Keller, Marie Bashkirtseff, Mary MacLane, Ada Negri, De Quincey, Stuart Mill, Jefferies, and scores of others
Change from childish to adult friends--Influence of favorite teachers--What children wish or plan to do or be--Property and the money sense--Social judgments--The only child--First social organizations--Student life--Associations for youth controlled by adults
X.--INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK.
The general change and plasticity at puberty--English teaching--Causes of its failure, (1) too much time to other languages, (2) subordination of literary content to form, (3) too early stress on eye and hand instead of ear and mouth, (4) excessive use of concrete words--Children's interest in words--Their favorites--Slang--Story telling--Age of reading crazes--What to read--The historic sense--Growth of memory span
Equal opportunities of higher education now open--Brings new dangers to women--Ineradicable sex differences begin at puberty, when the sexes should and do diverge--Different interests--Sex tension--Girls more mature than boys at the same age--Radical psychic and physiological differences between the sexes--The bachelor women--Needed reconstruction--Food--Sleep--Regimen--Manners--Religion--Regularity-- The topics for a girls' curriculum--The eternally womanly
Dangers of muscular degeneration and overstimulus of brain--Difficulties in teaching morals--Methods in Europe--Obedience to commands--Good habits should be mechanized--Value of scolding--How to flog aright--Its dangers--Moral precepts and proverbs--Habituation--Training will through intellect--Examinations--Concentration--Originality--Froebel and the naive--First ideas of God--Conscience--Importance of Old and New Testaments--Sex dangers--Love and religion--Conversion
Introduction: Characterization of the age from eight to twelve--The era of recapitulating the stages of primitive human development--Life close to nature--The age also for drill, habituation, memory, work and regermination--Adolescence superposed upon this stage of life, but very distinct from it.