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Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene

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Title: Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene

Author: G. Stanley Hall


        
Release date: October 1, 2005 [eBook #9173]
                Most recently updated: October 17, 2012

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE ***




Produced by Stan Goodman, Shawn Wheeler and Distributed Proofreaders









YOUTH

ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE


BY
G. STANLEY HALL, Ph.D., LL.D.
President of Clark University and
Professor of Psychology
And Pedagogy



PREFACE


I have often been asked to select and epitomize the practical and
especially the pedagogical conclusions of my large volumes on
Adolescence, published in 1904, in such form that they may be
available at a minimum cost to parents, teachers, reading circles,
normal schools, and college classes, by whom even the larger volumes
have been often used. This, with the coöperation of the publishers and
with the valuable aid of Superintendent C.N. Kendall of Indianapolis,
I have tried to do, following in the main the original text, with only
such minor changes and additions as were necessary to bring the topics
up to date, and adding a new chapter on moral and religions education.
For the scientific justification of my educational conclusions I must,
of course, refer to the larger volumes. The last chapter is not in
"Adolescence," but is revised from a paper printed elsewhere. I am
indebted to Dr. Theodore L. Smith of Clark University for verification
of all references, proof-reading, and many minor changes.

G. STANLEY HALL.



CONTENTS


I.--PRE-ADOLESCENCE

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


II.--THE MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL

Muscles as organs of the will, of character, and even of thought--The
muscular virtues--Fundamental and accessory muscles and functions--The
development of the mind and of the upright position--Small muscles as
organs of thought--School lays too much stress upon these--Chorea--Vast
numbers of automatic movements in children--Great variety of
spontaneous activities--Poise, control, and spurtiness--Pen and tongue
wagging--Sedentary school life vs. free out-of-door activities--Modern
decay of muscles, especially in girls--Plasticity of motor habits at
puberty


III.--INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION.

Trade classes and schools, their importance in the international
market--Our dangers and the superiority of German workmen--The effects
of a tariff--Description of schools between the kindergarten and the
industrial school--Equal salaries for teachers in France--Dangers from
machinery--The advantages of life on the old New England farm--Its
resemblance to the education we now give negroes and Indians--Its
advantage for all-sided muscular development


IV.--MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD.

History of the movement--Its philosophy--The value of hand training in
the development of the brain and its significance in the making of
man--A grammar of our many industries hard--The best we do can reach
but few--Very great defects in manual training methods which do not
base on science and make nothing salable--The Leipzig system--Sloyd is
hypermethodic--These crude peasant industries can never satisfy
educational needs--The gospel of work; William Morris and the arts and
crafts movement--Its spirit desirable--The magic effects of a brief
period of intense work--The natural development of the drawing
instinct in the child


V.--GYMNASTICS

The story of Jahn and the Turners--The enthusiasm which this movement
generated in Germany--The ideal of bringing out latent powers--The
concept of more perfect voluntary control--Swedish gymnastics--Doing
everything possible for the body as a machine--Liberal physical
culture--Ling's orthogenic scheme of economic postures and movements
and correcting defects--The ideal of symmetry and prescribing
exercises to bring the body to a standard--Lamentable lack of
correlation between these four systems--Illustrations of the great
good that a systematic training can effect--Athletic records--Greek
physical training


VI.--PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES

The view of Groos partial, and a better explanation of play proposed
as rehearsing ancestral activities--The glory of Greek physical
training, its ideals and results--The first spontaneous movements of
infancy as keys to the past--Necessity of developing basal powers
before those that are later and peculiar to the individual--Plays that
interest due to their antiquity--Play with dolls--Play distinguished
by age--Play preferences of children and their reasons--The profound
significance of rhythm--The value of dancing and also its
significance, history, and the desirability of reintroducing
it--Fighting--Boxing--Wrestling--Bushido--Foot-ball--Military
ideals--Showing off--Cold baths--Hill climbing--The playground
movement--The psychology of play--Its relation to work


VII.--FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES.

Classification of children's faults--Peculiar children--Real fault as
distinguished from interference with the teacher's ease--Truancy, its
nature and effects--The genesis of crime--The lie, its classes and
relations to imagination--Predatory activities--Gangs--Causes of
crime--The effects of stories of crime--Temibility--Juvenile crime and
its treatment


VIII.--BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH.

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


IX.--THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS.

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


XI.--THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS.

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


XII.--MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING.

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




CHAPTER I


PRE-ADOLESCENCE


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.

The years from about eight to twelve constitute a unique period of
human life. The acute stage of teething is passing, the brain has
acquired nearly its adult size and weight, health is almost at its
best, activity is greater and more varied than it ever was before or
ever will be again, and there is peculiar endurance, vitality, and
resistance to fatigue. The child develops a life of its own outside
the home circle, and its natural interests are never so independent of
adult influence. Perception is very acute, and there is great immunity
to exposure, danger, accident, as well as to temptation. Reason, true
morality, religion, sympathy, love, and esthetic enjoyment are but
very slightly developed.

Everything, in short, suggests that this period may represent in the
individual what was once for a very protracted and relatively
stationary period an age of maturity in the remote ancestors of our
race, when the young of our species, who were perhaps pygmoid, shifted
for themselves independently of further parental aid. The qualities
developed during pre-adolescence are, in the evolutionary history of
the race, far older than hereditary traits of body and mind which
develop later and which may be compared to a new and higher story
built upon our primal nature. Heredity is so far both more stable and
more secure. The elements of personality are few, but are well
organised on a simple, effective plan. The momentum of these traits
inherited from our indefinitely remote ancestors is great, and they
are often clearly distinguishable from those to be added later. Thus
the boy is father of the man in a new sense, in that his qualities are
indefinitely older and existed, well compacted, untold ages before the
more distinctly human attributes were developed. Indeed there are a
few faint indications of an earlier age node, at about the age of six,
as if amid the instabilities of health we could detect signs that this
may have been the age of puberty in remote ages of the past. I have
also given reasons that lead me to the conclusion that, despite its
dominance, the function of sexual maturity and procreative power is
peculiarly mobile up and down the age-line independently of many of
the qualities usually so closely associated with it, so that much that
sex created in the phylum now precedes it in the individual.

Rousseau would leave prepubescent years to nature and to these primal
hereditary impulsions and allow the fundamental traits of savagery
their fling till twelve. Biological psychology finds many and cogent
reasons to confirm this view _if only a proper environment could be
provided_. The child revels in savagery; and if its tribal, predatory,
hunting, fishing, fighting, roving, idle, playing proclivities could
be indulged in the country and under conditions that now, alas! seem
hopelessly ideal, they could conceivably be so organized and directed
as to be far more truly humanistic and liberal than all that the best
modern school can provide. Rudimentary organs of the soul, now
suppressed, perverted, or delayed, to crop out in menacing forms
later, would be developed in their season so that we should be immune
to them in maturer years, on the principle of the Aristotelian
catharsis for which I have tried to suggest a far broader application
than the Stagirite could see in his day.

These inborn and more or less savage instincts can and should be
allowed some scope. The deep and strong cravings in the individual for
those primitive experiences and occupations in which his ancestors
became skilful through the pressure of necessity should not be
ignored, but can and should be, at least partially, satisfied in a
vicarious way, by tales from literature, history, and tradition which
present the crude and primitive virtues of the heroes of the world's
childhood. In this way, aided by his vivid visual imagination, the
child may enter upon his heritage from the past, live out each stage
of life to its fullest and realize in himself all its manifold
tendencies. Echoes only of the vaster, richer life of the remote past
of the race they must remain, but just these are the murmurings of the
only muse that can save from the omnipresent dangers of precocity.
Thus we not only rescue from the danger of loss, but utilize for
further psychic growth the results of the higher heredity, which are
the most precious and potential things on earth. So, too, in our
urbanized hothouse life, that tends to ripen everything before its
time, we must teach nature, although the very phrase is ominous. But
we must not, in so doing, wean still more from, but perpetually incite
to visit, field, forest, hill, shore, the water, flowers, animals, the
true homes of childhood in this wild, undomesticated stage from which
modern conditions have kidnapped and transported him. Books and
reading are distasteful, for the very soul and body cry out for a more
active, objective life, and to know nature and man at first hand.
These two staples, stories and nature, by these informal methods of
the home and the environment, constitute fundamental education.

But now another remove from nature seems to be made necessary by the
manifold knowledges and skills of our highly complex civilization. We
should transplant the human sapling, I concede reluctantly, as early
as eight, but not before, to the schoolhouse with its imperfect
lighting, ventilation, temperature. We must shut out nature and open
books. The child must sit on unhygienic benches and work the tiny
muscles that wag the tongue and pen, and let all the others, which
constitute nearly half its weight, decay. Even if it be prematurely,
he must be subjected to special disciplines and be apprenticed to the
higher qualities of adulthood; for he is not only a product of nature,
but a candidate for a highly developed humanity. To many, if not most,
of the influences here there can be at first but little inner
response. Insight, understanding, interest, sentiment, are for the
most part only nascent; and most that pertains to the true kingdom of
mature manhood is embryonic. The wisest requirements seem to the child
more or less alien, arbitrary, heteronomous, artificial, falsetto.
There is much passivity, often active resistance and evasion, and
perhaps spasms of obstinacy, to it all. But the senses are keen and
alert, reactions immediate and vigorous; and the memory is quick, sure
and lasting; and ideas of space, time, and physical causation, and of
many a moral and social licit and non-licit, are rapidly unfolding.
Never again will there be such susceptibility to drill and discipline,
such plasticity to habituation, or such ready adjustment to new
conditions. It is the age of external and mechanical training.
Reading, writing, drawing, manual training, musical technic, foreign
tongues and their pronunciations, the manipulation of numbers and of
geometrical elements, and many kinds of skill have now their golden
hour; and if it passes unimproved, all these can never be acquired
later without a heavy handicap of disadvantage and loss. These
necessities may be hard for the health of body, sense, mind, as well
as for morals; and pedagogic art consists in breaking the child into
them betimes as intensely and as quickly as possible with minimal
strain and with the least amount of explanation or coquetting for
natural interest, and in calling medicine confectionery. This is not
teaching in its true sense so much as it is drill, inculcation, and
regimentation. The method should be mechanical, repetitive,
authoritative, dogmatic. The automatic powers are now at their very
apex, and they can do and bear more than our degenerate pedagogy knows
or dreams of. Here we have something to learn from the schoolmasters
of the past back to the middle ages, and even from the ancients. The
greatest stress, with short periods and few hours, incessant
insistence, incitement, and little reliance upon interest, reason or
work done without the presence of the teacher, should be the guiding
principles for pressure in these essentially formal and, to the child,
contentless elements of knowledge. These should be sharply
distinguished from the indigenous, evoking, and more truly educational
factors described in the last paragraph, which are meaty,
content-full, and relatively formless as to time of day, method,
spirit, and perhaps environment and personnel of teacher, and possibly
somewhat in season of the year, almost as sharply as work differs from
play, or perhaps as the virility of man that loves to command a
phalanx, be a martinet and drill-master, differs from femininity which
excels in persuasion, sympathetic insight, story-telling, and in the
tact that discerns and utilizes spontaneous interests in the young.

Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human
traits are now born. The qualities of body and soul that now emerge
are far newer. The child comes from and harks back to a remoter past;
the adolescent is neo-atavistic, and in him the later acquisitions of
the race slowly become prepotent. Development is less gradual and more
saltatory, suggestive of some ancient period of storm and stress when
old moorings were broken and a higher level attained. The annual rate
of growth in height, weight, and strength is increased and often
doubled, and even more. Important functions, previously non-existent,
arise. Growth of parts and organs loses its former proportions, some
permanently and some for a season. Some of these are still growing in
old age and others are soon arrested and atrophy. The old measures of
dimensions become obsolete, and old harmonies are broken. The range of
individual differences and average errors in all physical measurements
and all psychic tests increases. Some linger long in the childish
stage and advance late or slowly, while others push on with a sudden
outburst of impulsion to early maturity. Bones and muscles lead all
other tissues, as if they vied with each other; and there is frequent
flabbiness or tension as one or the other leads. Nature arms youth for
conflict with all the resources at her command--speed, power of
shoulder, biceps, back, leg, jaw--strengthens and enlarges skull,
thorax, hips, makes man aggressive and prepares woman's frame for
maternity.

       *     *     *     *     *




CHAPTER II


THE MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL


Muscles as organs of the will, of character and even of thought--The
muscular virtues--Fundamental and accessory muscles and functions--The
development of the mind and of the upright position--Small
muscles as organs of thought--School lays too much stress upon
these--Chorea--vast numbers of automatic movements in children--Great
variety of spontaneous activities--Poise, control and spurtiness--Pen
and tongue wagging--Sedentary school life _vs_ free out-of-door
activities--Modern decay of muscles, especially in girls--Plasticity
of motor habits at puberty.

The muscles are by weight about forty-three per cent. of the average
adult male human body. They expend a large fraction of all the kinetic
energy of the adult body, which a recent estimate places as high as
one-fifth. The cortical centers for the voluntary muscles extend over
most of the lateral psychic zones of the brain, so that their culture
is brain building. In a sense they are organs of digestion, for which
function they play a very important rôle. Muscles are in a most
intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will. They have built
all the roads, cities, and machines in the world, written all the
books, spoken all the words, and, in fact, done everything that man
has accomplished with matter. If they are undeveloped or grow relaxed
and flabby, the dreadful chasm between good intentions and their
execution is liable to appear and widen. Character might be in a sense
defined as a plexus of motor habits. To call conduct three-fourths of
life, with Matthew Arnold; to describe man as one-third intellect and
two-thirds will, with Schopenhauer; to urge that man is what he does
or that he is the sum of his movements, with F.W. Robertson; that
character is simply muscle habits, with Maudsley; that the age of art
is now slowly superseding the age of science, and that the artist will
drive out with the professor, with the anonymous author of "Rembrandt
als Erzicher";[1] that history is consciously willed movements, with
Bluntschli; or that we could form no conception of force or energy in
the world but for our own muscular effort; to hold that most thought
involves change of muscle tension as more or less integral to it--all
this shows how we have modified the antique Ciceronian conception
_vivere est cogitari_, [To live is to think] to _vivere est velle_,
[To live is to will] and gives us a new sense of the importance of
muscular development and regimen.[2]

Modern psychology thus sees in muscles organs of expression for all
efferent processes. Beyond all their demonstrable functions, every
change of attention and of psychic states generally plays upon them
unconsciously, modifying their tension in subtle ways so that they may
be called organs of thought and feeling as well as of will, in which
some now see the true Kantian thing-in-itself the real substance of
the world, in the anthropomorphism of force. Habits even determine the
deeper strata of belief; thought is repressed action; and deeds, not
words, are the language of complete men. The motor areas are closely
related and largely identical with the psychic, and muscle culture
develops brain-centers as nothing else yet demonstrably does. Muscles
are the vehicles of habituation, imitation, obedience, character, and
even of manners and customs. For the young, motor education is
cardinal, and is now coming to due recognition; and, for all,
education is incomplete without a motor side. Skill, endurance, and
perseverance may almost be called muscular virtues; and fatigue,
velleity, caprice, _ennui_, restlessness, lack of control and poise,
muscular faults.

To understand the momentous changes of motor functions that
characterize adolescence we must consider other than the measurable
aspects of the subject. Perhaps the best scale on which to measure all
normal growth of muscle structure and functions is found in the
progress from fundamental to accessory. The former designates the
muscles and movements of the trunk and large joints, neck, back, hips,
shoulders, knees, and elbows, sometimes called central, and which in
general man has in common with the higher and larger animals. Their
activities are few, mostly simultaneous, alternating and rhythmic, as
of the legs in walking, and predominate in hard-working men and women
with little culture or intelligence, and often in idiots. The latter
or accessory movements are those of the hand, tongue, face, and
articulatory organs, and these may be connected into a long and
greatly diversified series, as those used in writing, talking,
piano-playing. They are represented by smaller and more numerous
muscles, whose functions develop later in life and represent a higher
standpoint of evolution. These smaller muscles for finer movements
come into function later and are chiefly associated with psychic
activity, which plays upon them by incessantly changing their
tensions, if not causing actual movement. It is these that are so
liable to disorder in the many automatisms and choreic tics we see in
school children, especially if excited or fatigued. General paralysis
usually begins in the higher levels by breaking these down, so that
the first symptom of its insidious and never interrupted progress is
inability to execute the more exact and delicate movements of tongue
or hand, or both. Starting with the latest evolutionary level, it is a
devolution that may work downward till very many of the fundamental
activities are lost before death.

Nothing better illustrates this distinction than the difference
between the fore foot of animals and the human hand. The first begins
as a fin or paddle or is armed with a hoof, and is used solely for
locomotion. Some carnivora with claws use the fore limb also for
holding well as tearing, and others for digging. Arboreal life seems
to have almost created the simian hand and to have wrought a
revolution in the form and use of the forearm and its accessory
organs, the fingers. Apes and other tree-climbing creatures must not
only adjust their prehensile organ to a wide variety of distances and
sizes of branches, but must use the hands more or less freely for
picking, transporting, and eating fruit; and this has probably been a
prime factor in lifting man to the erect position, without which human
intelligence as we know it could have hardly been possible. "When we
attempt to measure the gap between man and the lower animals in terms
of the form of movement, the wonder is no less great than when we use
the term of mentality."[3] The degree of approximation to human
intelligence in anthropoid animals follows very closely the degree of
approximation to human movements.

The gradual acquirement of the erect position by the human infant
admirably repeats this long phylogenetic evolution.[4] At first the
limbs are of almost no use in locomotion, but the fundamental trunk
muscles with those that move the large joints are more or less
spasmodically active. Then comes creeping, with use of the hip
muscles, while all below the knee is useless, as also are the fingers.
Slowly the leg and foot are degraded to locomotion, slowly the great
toe becomes more limited in its action, the thumb increases in
flexibility and strength of opposition, and the fingers grow more
mobile and controllable. As the body slowly assumes the vertical
attitude, the form of the chest changes till its greatest diameter is
transverse instead of from front to back. The shoulder-blades are less
parallel than in quadrupeds, and spread out till they approximate the
same plane. This gives the arm freedom of movement laterally, so that
it can be rotated one hundred and eighty degrees in man as contrasted
to one hundred degrees in apes, thus giving man the command of almost
any point within a sphere of which the two arms are radii. The power
of grasping was partly developed from and partly added to the old
locomotor function of the fore limbs; the jerky aimless automatisms,
as well as the slow rhythmic flexion and extension of the fingers and
hand, movements which are perhaps survivals of arboreal or of even
earlier aquatic life, are coördinated; and the bilateral and
simultaneous rhythmic movements of the heavier muscles are
supplemented by the more finely adjusted and specialized activities
which as the end of the growth period is approached are determined
less by heredity and more by environment. In a sense, a child or a man
is the sum total of his movements or tendencies to move; and nature
and instinct chiefly determine the basal, and education the accessory
parts of our activities.

The entire accessory system is thus of vital importance for the
development of all of the arts of expression. These smaller muscles
might almost be called organs of thought. Their tension is modified
with the faintest change of soul, such as is seen in accent,
inflection, facial expressions, handwriting, and many forms of
so-called mind-reading, which, in fact, is always muscle-reading. The
day-laborer of low intelligence, with a practical vocabulary of not
over five hundred words, who can hardly move each of his fingers
without moving others or all of them, who can not move his brows or
corrugate his forehead at will, and whose inflection is very
monotonous, illustrates a condition of arrest or atrophy of this
later, finer, accessory system of muscles. On the other hand, the
child, precocious in any or all of these later respects, is very
liable to be undeveloped in the larger and more fundamental parts and
functions. The full unfoldment of each is, in fact, an inexorable
condition precedent for the normal development to full and abiding
maturity of the higher and more refined muscularity, just as
conversely the awkwardness and clumsiness of adolescence mark a
temporary loss of balance in the opposite direction. If this general
conception be correct, then nature does not finish the basis of her
pyramid in the way Ross, Mercier, and others have assumed, but lays a
part of the foundation and, after carrying it to an apex, normally
goes back and adds to the foundation to carry up the apex still higher
and, if prevented from so doing, expends her energy in building the
apex up at a sharper angle till instability results. School and
kindergarten often lay a disproportionate strain on the tiny accessory
muscles, weighing altogether but a few ounces, that wag the tongue,
move the pen, and do fine work requiring accuracy. But still at this
stage prolonged work requiring great accuracy is irksome and brings
dangers homologous to those caused by too much fine work in the
kindergarten before the first adjustment of large to small muscles,
which lasts until adolescence, is established. Then disproportion
between function and growth often causes symptoms of chorea. The chief
danger is arrest of the development and control of the smaller
muscles. Many occupations and forms of athletics, on the contrary,
place the stress mainly upon groups of fundamental muscles to the
neglect of finer motor possibilities. Some who excel in heavy
athletics no doubt coarsen their motor reactions, become not only
inexact and heavy but unresponsive to finer stimuli, as if the large
muscles were hypertrophied and the small ones arrested. On the other
hand, many young men, and probably more young women, expend too little
of their available active energy upon basal and massive muscle work,
and cultivate too much, and above all too early, the delicate
responsive work. This is, perhaps, the best physiological
characterization of precocity and issues in excessive nervous and
muscular irritability. The great influx of muscular vigor that unfolds
during adolescent years and which was originally not only necessary to
successful propagation, but expressive of virility, seems to be a very
plastic quantity, so that motor regimen and exercise at this stage is
probably more important and all-conditioning for mentality, sexuality,
and health than at any other period of life. Intensity, and for a time
a spurty diathesis, is as instinctive and desirable as are the copious
minor automatisms which spontaneously give the alphabet out of which
complex and finer motor series are later spelled by the conscious
will. Mercier and others have pointed out that, as most skilled labor,
so school work and modern activities in civilized life generally lay
premature and disproportionate strains upon those kinds of movement
requiring exactness. Stress upon basal movements is not only
compensating but is of higher therapeutic value against the disorders
of the accessory system; it constitutes the best core or prophylactic
for fidgets and tense states, and directly develops poise, control,
and psycho-physical equilibrium. Even when contractions reach choreic
intensity the best treatment is to throw activities down the scale
that measures the difference between primary and secondary movements
and to make the former predominate.

The number of movements, the frequency with which they are repeated,
their diversity, the number of combinations, and their total kinetic
quantum in young children, whether we consider movements of the body
as a whole, fundamental movements of large limbs, or finer accessory
motions, is amazing. Nearly every external stimulus is answered by a
motor response. Dresslar[5] observed a thirteen months' old baby for
four hours, and found, to follow Preyer's classification, impulsive or
spontaneous, reflex, instinctive, imitative, inhibitive, expressive,
and even deliberative movements, with marked satisfaction in rhythm,
attempts to do almost anything which appealed to him, and almost
inexhaustible efferent resources. A friend has tried to record every
word uttered by a four-year-old girl during a portion of a day, and
finds nothing less than verbigerations. A teacher noted the activities
of a fourteen-year-old boy during the study time of a single school
day[6], with similar results.

Lindley[7] studied 897 common motor automatisms in children, which he
divided into 92 classes: 45 in the region of the head, 20 in the feet
and legs, 19 in the hands and fingers. Arranged in the order of
frequency with which each was found, the list stood as follows:
fingers, feet, lips, tongue, head, body, hands, mouth, eyes, jaws,
legs, forehead, face, arms, ears. In the last five alone adolescents
exceeded children, the latter excelling the former most in those of
head, mouth, legs, and tongue, in this order. The writer believes that
there are many more automatisms than appeared in his returns.

School life, especially in the lower grades, is a rich field for the
study of these activities. They are familiar, as licking things,
clicking with the tongue, grinding the teeth, scratching, tapping,
twirling a lock of hair or chewing it, biting the nails (Bérillon's
onychophagia), shrugging, corrugating, pulling buttons or twisting
garments, strings, etc., twirling pencils, thumbs, rotating, nodding
and shaking the head, squinting and winking, swaying, pouting and
grimacing, scraping the floor, rubbing hands, stroking, patting,
flicking the fingers, wagging, snapping the fingers, muffling,
squinting, picking the face, interlacing the fingers, cracking the
joints, finger plays, biting and nibbling, trotting the leg, sucking
things, etc.

The average number of automatisms per 100 persons Smith found to be in
children 176, in adolescents 110. Swaying is chiefly with children;
playing and drumming with the fingers is more common among
adolescents; the movements of fingers and feet decline little with
age, and those of eyes and forehead increase, which is significant for
the development of attention. Girls excel greatly in swaying, and
also, although less, in finger automatism; and boys lead in movements
of tongue, feet, and hands. Such movements increase, with too much
sitting, intensity of effort, such as to fix attention, and vary with
the nature of the activity willed, but involve few muscles directly
used in a given task. They increase up the kindergarten grades and
fall off rapidly in the primary grades; are greater with tasks
requiring fine and exact movements than with those involving large
movements. Automatisms are often a sign of the difficulty of tasks.
The restlessness that they often express is one of the commonest signs
of fatigue. They are mostly in the accessory muscles, while those of
the fundamental muscles (body, legs, and arms) disappear rapidly with
age; those of eye, brow, and jaw show greatest increase with age, but
their frequency in general declines with growing maturity, although
there is increased frequency of certain specialized contractions,
which indicate the gradual settling of expression in the face.

Often such movements pass over by insensible gradation into the morbid
automatism of chorea, and in yet lower levels of decay we see them in
the aimless picking and plucking movements of the fingers of the sick.
In idiots[8] arrest of higher powers often goes with hypertrophy of
these movements, as seen in head-beaters (as if, just as nature impels
those partially blind to rub the eyes for "light-hunger," so it
prompts the feeble-minded to strike the head for cerebrations),
rockers, rackers, shakers, biters, etc. Movements often pass to fixed
attitudes and postures of limbs or body, disturbing the normal balance
between flexors and extensors, the significance of which as nerve
signs or exponents of habitual brain states and tensions Warner has so
admirably shown.

Abundance and vigor of automatic movements are desirable, and even a
considerable degree of restlessness is a good sign in young children.
Many of what are now often called nerve signs and even choreic
symptoms, the fidgetiness in school on cloudy days and often after a
vacation, the motor superfluities of awkwardness, embarrassment,
extreme effort, excitement, fatigue, sleepiness, etc., are simply the
forms in which we receive the full momentum of heredity and mark a
natural richness of the raw material of intellect, feeling, and
especially of will. Hence they must be abundant. All parts should act
in all possible ways at first and untrammeled by the activity of all
other parts and functions. Some of these activities are more essential
for growth in size than are later and more conscious movements. Here
as everywhere the rule holds that powers themselves must be unfolded
before the ability to check or even to use them can develop. All
movements arising from spontaneous activity of nerve cells or centers
must be made in order even to avoid the atrophy of disease. Not only
so, but this purer kind of innateness must often be helped out to some
extent in some children by stimulating reflexes; a rich and wide
repertory of sensation must be made familiar; more or less and very
guarded, watched and limited experiences of hunger, thirst, cold,
heat, tastes, sounds, smells, colors, brightnesses, tactile
irritations, and perhaps even occasional tickling and pain to play off
the vastly complex function of laughing, crying, etc., may in some
cases be judicious. Conscious and unconscious imitation or repetition
of every sort of copy may also help to establish the immediate and
low-level connection between afferent and efferent processes that
brings the organism into direct _rapport_ and harmony with the whole
world of sense. Perhaps the more rankly and independently they are
developed to full functional integrity, each in its season, if we only
knew that season, the better. Premature control by higher centers, or
coördination into higher compounds of habits and ordered serial
activities, is repressive and wasteful, and the mature will of which
they are components, or which must at least domesticate them, is
stronger and more forcible if this serial stage is not unduly
abridged.

But, secondly, many, if not most, of these activities when developed a
little, group after group, as they arise, must be controlled, checked,
and organized into higher and often more serial compounds. The
inhibiting functions are at first hard. In trying to sit still the
child sets its teeth, holds the breath, clenches its fists and perhaps
makes every muscle tense with a great effort that very soon exhausts.
This repressive function is probably not worked from special nervous
centers, nor can we speak with confidence of collisions with "sums of
arrest" in a sense analogous to that of Herbart, or of stimuli that
normally cause catabolic molecular processes in the cell, being
mysteriously diverted to produce increased instability or anabolic
lability in the sense of Wundt's _Mechanik der Nerven_. The concept
now suggested by many facts is that inhibition is irradiation or long
circuiting to higher and more complex brain areas, so that the energy,
whether spontaneous or reflex, is diverted to be used elsewhere. These
combinations are of a higher order, more remote from reflex action,
and modified by some Jacksonian third level.[9] Action is now not from
independent centers, but these are slowly associated, so that
excitation may flow off from one point to any other and any reaction
may result from any stimulus.

The more unified the brain the less it suffers from localization, and
the lower is the level to which any one function can exhaust the
whole. The tendency of each group of cells to discharge or overflow
into those of lower tension than themselves increases as
correspondence in time and space widens. The more one of a number of
activities gains in power to draw on all the brain, or the more
readily the active parts are fed at cost of the resting parts, the
less is rest to be found in change from one of these activities to
another, and the less do concentration and specialization prove to be
dangerous. Before, the aim was to wake all parts to function; now it
is to connect them. Intensity of this cross-section activity now tends
to unity, so that all parts of the brain energize together. In a brain
with this switchboard function well organized, each reaction has grown
independent of its own stimulus and may result from any stimulation,
and each act, e.g., a finger movement of a peculiar nature, may tire
the whole brain. This helps us to understand why brain-workers so
often excel laborers not only in sudden dynamometric strength test,
but in sustained and long-enduring effort. In a good brain or in a
good machine, power may thus be developed over a large surface, and
all of it applied to a small one, and hence the dangers of
specialization are lessened in exact proportion as the elements of our
ego are thus compacted together. It is in the variety and delicacy of
these combinations and all that they imply, far more than in the
elements of which they are composed, that man rises farthest above the
higher animals; and of these powers later adolescence is the golden
age. The aimless and archaic movements of infancy, whether massive and
complex or in the form of isolated automatic tweaks or twinges, are
thus, by slow processes of combined analysis and synthesis, involving
changes as radical as any in all the world of growth, made over into
habits and conduct that fit the world of present environment.

But, thirdly, this long process carried out with all degrees of
completeness may be arrested at any unfinished stage. Some automatisms
refuse to be controlled by the will, and both they and it are often
overworked. Here we must distinguish constantly between (1) those
growing rankly in order to be later organized under the will, and (2)
those that have become feral after this domestication of them has lost
power from disease or fatigue, and (3) those that have never been
subjugated because the central power that should have used them to
weave the texture of willed action--the proper language of complete
manhood--was itself arrested or degenerate. With regard to many of
these movements these distinctions can be made with confidence, and in
some children more certainly than in others. In childhood, before
twelve, the efferent patterns should be developed into many more or
less indelible habits, and their colors set fast. Motor specialties
requiring exactness and grace like piano-playing, drawing, writing,
pronunciation of a foreign tongue, dancing, acting, singing, and a
host of virtuosities, must be well begun before the relative arrest of
accessory growth at the dawn of the ephebic regeneration and before
its great afflux of strength. The facts seem to show that children of
this age, such as Hancock[10] described, who could not stand with feet
close together and eyes closed without swaying much, could not walk
backward, sit still half a minute, dress alone, tie two ends of a
string together, interlace slats, wind thread, spin a top, stand on
toes or heels, hop on each foot, drive a nail, roll a hoop, skate, hit
fingers together rapidly in succession beginning at the little finger
and then reversing, etc., are the very ones in whom automatisms are
most marked or else they are those constitutionally inert, dull, or
uneducable.

In children these motor residua may persist as characteristic features
of inflection, accent, or manners; automatisms may become morbid in
stammering or stuttering, or they may be seen in gait, handwriting,
tics or tweaks, etc. Instead of disappearing with age, as they should,
they are seen in the blind as facial grimaces uncorrected by the
mirror or facial consciousness, in the deaf as inarticulate noises;
and they may tend to grow monstrous with age as if they were
disintegrated fragments of our personality, split off and aborted, or
motor parasites leaving our psycho-physic ego poorer in energy and
plasticity of adaptation, till the distraction and anarchy of the
individual nature becomes conspicuous and pathetic.

At puberty, however, when muscle habits are so plastic, when there is
a new relation between quantity or volume of motor energy and
qualitative differentiation, and between volitional control and reflex
activities, these kinetic remnants strongly tend to shoot together
into wrong aggregates if right ones are not formed. Good manners and
correct motor form generally, as well as skill, are the most economic
ways of doing things; but this is the age of wasteful ways,
awkwardness mannerisms, tensions that are a constant leakage of vital
energy, perhaps semi-imperative acts, contortions, quaint movements,
more elaborated than in childhood and often highly anesthetic and
disagreeable, motor coördinations that will need laborious
decomposition later. The avoidable factor in their causation is, with
some modification, not unlike that of the simpler feral movements and
faulty attitudes, carriage, and postures in children; viz., some form
of overpressure or misfit between environment and nature. As during
the years from four to eight there is great danger that overemphasis
of the activities of the accessory muscles will sow the seeds of
chorea, or aggravate predispositions to it, now again comes a greatly
increased danger, hardly existing from eight to twelve, that
overprecision, especially if fundamental activities are neglected,
will bring nervous strain and stunting precocity. This is again the
age of the basal, e.g., hill-climbing muscle, of leg and back and
shoulder work, and of the yet more fundamental heart, lung, and chest
muscles. Now again, the study of a book, under the usual conditions of
sitting in a closed space and using pen, tongue, and eye combined, has
a tendency to overstimulate the accessory muscles. This is especially
harmful for city children who are too prone to the distraction of
overmobility at an age especially exposed to maladjustment of motor
income and expenditure; and it constitutes not a liberal or
power-generating, but a highly and prematurely specialized, narrowing,
and weakening education unless offset by safeguards better than any
system of gymnastics, which is at best artificial and exaggerated.

As Bryan well says, "The efficiency of a machine depends so far as we
know upon the maximum force, rate, amplitude, and variety of direction
of its movements and upon the exactness with which below these maxima
the force, rate, amplitude, and direction of the movements can be
controlled." The motor efficiency of a man depends upon his ability in
all these respects. Moreover, the education of the small muscles and
fine adjustments of larger ones is as near mental training as physical
culture can get; for these are the thought-muscles and movements, and
their perfected function is to reflect and express by slight
modifications of tension and tone every psychic change. Only the brain
itself is more closely and immediately an organ of thought than are
these muscles and their activity, reflex, spontaneous, or imitative in
origin. Whether any of them are of value, as Lindley thinks, in
arousing the brain to activity, or as Müller suggests, in drawing off
sensations or venting efferent impulses that would otherwise distract,
we need not here discuss. If so, this is, of course, a secondary and
late function--nature's way of making the best of things and utilizing
remnants.

With these facts and their implications in mind we can next pass to
consider the conditions under which the adolescent muscles best
develop. Here we confront one of the greatest and most difficult
problems of our age. Changes in modern motor life have been so vast
and sudden as to present some of the most comprehensive and
all-conditioning dangers that threaten civilized races. Not only have
the forms of labor been radically changed within a generation or two,
but the basal activities that shaped the body of primitive man have
been suddenly swept away by the new methods of modern industry. Even
popular sports, games, and recreations, so abundant in the early life
of all progressive peoples, have been reduced and transformed; and the
play age, that once extended on to middle life and often old age, has
been restricted. Sedentary life in schools and offices, as we have
seen, is reducing the vigor and size of our lower limbs. Our industry
is no longer under hygienic conditions; and instead of being out of
doors, in the country, or of highly diversified kinds, it is now
specialized, monotonous, carried on in closed spaces, bad air, and
perhaps poor light, especially in cities. The diseases and arrest bred
in the young by life in shops, offices, factories, and schools
increase. Work is rigidly bound to fixed hours, uniform standards,
stints and piece-products; and instead of a finished article, each
individual now achieves a part of a single process and knows little of
those that precede or follow. Machinery has relieved the large basal
muscles and laid more stress upon fine and exact movements that
involve nerve strain. The coarser forms of work that involve hard
lifting, carrying, digging, etc., are themselves specialized, and
skilled labor requires more and more brain-work. It has been estimated
that "the diminution of manual labor required to do a given quantity
of work in 1884 as compared with 1870 is no less than 70 per
cent."[11] Personal interest in and the old native sense of
responsibility for results, ownership and use of the finished
products, which have been the inspiration and soul of work in all the
past, are in more and more fields gone. Those who realize how small a
proportion of the young male population train or even engage in
amateur sports with zest and regularity, how very few and picked men
strive for records, and how immediate and amazing are the results of
judicious training, can best understand how far below his
possibilities as a motor being the average modern man goes through
life, and how far short in this respect he falls from fulfilling
nature's design for him.

For unnumbered generations primitive man in the nomad age wandered,
made perhaps annual migrations, and bore heavy burdens, while we ride
relatively unencumbered. He tilled the reluctant soil, digging with
rude implements where we use machines of many man-power. In the stone,
iron, and bronze age, he shaped stone and metals, and wrought with
infinite pains and effort, products that we buy without even knowledge
of the processes by which they are made. As hunter he followed game,
which, when found, he chased, fought, and overcame in a struggle
perhaps desperate, while we shoot it at a distance with little risk or
effort. In warfare he fought hand to hand and eye to eye, while we
kill "with as much black powder as can be put in a woman's thimble."
He caught and domesticated scores of species of wild animals and
taught them to serve him; fished with patience and skill that
compensated his crude tools, weapons, implements, and tackle; danced
to exhaustion in the service of his gods or in memory of his forebears
imitating every animal, rehearsing all his own activities in mimic
form to the point of exhaustion, while we move through a few figures
in closed spaces. He dressed hides, wove baskets which we can not
reproduce, and fabrics which we only poorly imitate by machinery, made
pottery which set our fashions, played games that invigorated body and
soul. His courtship was with feats of prowess and skill, and meant
physical effort and endurance.

Adolescent girls, especially in the middle classes, in upper grammar
and high school grades, during the golden age for nascent muscular
development, suffer perhaps most of all in this respect. Grave as are
the evils of child labor, I believe far more pubescents in this
country now suffer from too little than from too much physical
exercise, while most who suffer from work do so because it is too
uniform, one-sided, accessory, or performed under unwholesome
conditions, and not because it is excessive in amount. Modern industry
has thus largely ceased to be a means of physical development and
needs to be offset by compensating modes of activity. Many
labor-saving devices increase neural strain, so that one of the
problems of our time is how to preserve and restore nerve energy.
Under present industrial systems this must grow worse and not better
in the future. Healthy natural industries will be less and less open
to the young. This is the new situation that now confronts those
concerned for motor education, if they would only make good what is
lost.

Some of the results of these conditions are seen in average
measurements of dimensions, proportions, strength, skill, and control.
Despite the excellence of the few, the testimony of those most
familiar with the bodies of children and adults, and their physical
powers, gives evidence of the ravages of modern modes of life that,
without a wide-spread motor revival, can bode only degeneration for
our nation and our race. The number of common things that can not be
done at all; the large proportion of our youth who must be exempted
from any kinds of activity or a great amount of any; the thin limbs,
collapsed shoulders or chests, the bilateral asymmetry, weak hearts,
lungs, eyes, puny and bad muddy or pallid complexions, tired ways,
automatism, dyspeptic stomachs, the effects of youthful error or of
impoverished heredity, delicate and tender nurture, often, alas, only
too necessary, show the lamentable and cumulative effects of long
neglect of the motor abilities, the most educable of all man's powers,
and perhaps the most important for his well-being. If the unfaithful
stewards of these puny and shameful bodies had again, as in Sparta, to
strip and stand before stern judges and render them account, and be
smitten with a conviction of their weakness, guilty deformity, and
arrest of growth; if they were brought to realize how they are fallen
beings, as weak as stern theologians once deemed them depraved, and
how great their need of physical salvation, we might hope again for a
physical renaissance. Such a rebirth the world has seen but twice or
perhaps thrice, and each was followed by the two or three of the
brightest culture periods of history, and formed an epoch in the
advancement of the kingdom of man. A vast body of evidence could be
collected from the writings of anthropologists showing how superior
unspoiled savages are to civilized man in correct or esthetic
proportions of body, in many forms of endurance of fatigue, hardship,
and power to bear exposure, in the development and preservation of
teeth and hair, in keenness of senses, absence of deformities, as well
as immunity to many of our diseases. Their women are stronger and bear
hardship and exposure, monthly periods and childbirth, better.
Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a
disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater
average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ
diseases.

The progressive realization of these tendencies has prompted most of
the best recent and great changes motor-ward in education and also in
personal regimen. Health- and strength-giving agencies have put to
school the large motor areas of the brain, so long neglected, and have
vastly enlarged their scope. Thousands of youth are now inspired with
new enthusiasm for physical development; and new institutions of many
kinds and grades have arisen, with a voluminous literature, unnumbered
specialists, specialties, new apparatus, tests, movements, methods,
and theories; and the press, the public, and the church are awakened
to a fresh interest in the body and its powers. All this is
magnificent, but sadly inadequate to cope with the new needs and
dangers, which are vastly greater.

[Footnote 1: Dieterich. Göttingen, 1886.]

[Footnote 2: See Chap. xii.]

[Footnote 3: F. Burk in From Fundamental to Accessory. Pedagogical
Seminary, Oct., 1898, vol. 6, pp. 5-64.]

[Footnote 4: Creeping and Walking, by A.W. Trettien. American Journal
of Psychology, October, 1900, vol. 12, pp. 1-57.]

[Footnote 5: A Morning Observation of a Baby. Pedagogical Seminary,
December 1901, vol. 8, pp. 469-481.]

[Footnote 6: Kate Carman. Notes on School Activity. Pedagogical
Seminary, March, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 106-117.]

[Footnote 7: A Preliminary Study of Some of the Motor Phenomena of
Mental Effort. American Journal of Psychology, July, 1896, vol. 7, pp.
491-517.]

[Footnote 8: G.E. Johnson. Psychology and Pegagogy of Feeble-Minded
Children. Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1895, vol. 3, pp. 246-301.]

[Footnote 9: Dr. Hughlings Jackson, the eminent English pathologist,
was the first to make practical application of the evolutionary theory
of the nervous system to the diagnosis and treatment of epilepsies and
mental diseases. The practical success of this application was so
great that the Hughlings-Jackson "three-level theory" is now the
established basis of English diagnosis. He conceived the nervous
mechanism as composed of three systems, arranged in the form of a
hierarchy, the higher including the lower, and yet each having a
certain degree of independence. The first level represents the type of
simplest reflex and involuntary movement and is localized in the gray
matter of the spinal cord, medulla, and pons. The second, or middle
level, comprises those structures which receive sensory impulses from
the cells of the lowest level instead of directly from the periphery
or the non-nervous tissues. The motor cells of this middle level also
discharge into the motor mechanisms of the lowest level. Jackson
located these middle level structures in the cortex of the central
convolutions, the basal ganglia and the centers of the special senses
in the cortex. The highest level bears the same relation to the middle
level that it bears to the lowest i.e., no continuous connection
between the highest and the lowest is assumed; the structures of the
middle level mediate between them as a system of relays. According to
this hierarchical arrangement of the nervous system, the lowest level
which is the simplest and oldest "contains the mechanism for the
simple fundamental movements in reflexes and involuntary reactions.
The second level regroups these simple movements by combinations and
associations of cortical structure in wider, more complex mechanisms,
producing a higher class of movements. The highest level unifies the
whole nervous system and, according to Jackson, is the anatomical
basis of mind."

For a fuller account of this theory see Burk: From Fundamental to
Accessory in the Nervous System and of Movements. Pedagogical
Seminary, October, 1898, vol. 6, pp. 17-23.]

[Footnote 10: A Preliminary Study of Some of the Motor Phenomena of
Mental Effort. American Journal of Psychology, July, 1896, vol. 7, pp.
491-517.]

[Footnote 11: Encyclopedia of Social Reform, Funk and Wagnalls, 1896,
p. 1095]

       *     *     *     *     *




CHAPTER III


INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION


Trade classes and schools, their importance in the international
market--Our dangers and the superiority of German workmen--The effects
of a tariff--Description of schools between the kindergarten and the
industrial school--Equal salaries for teachers in France--Dangers from
machinery--The advantages of life on the old New England farm--Its
resemblance to the education we now give negroes and Indians--Its
advantage for all-sided muscular development.

We must glance at a few of the best and most typical methods of
muscular development, following the order: industrial education,
manual training, gymnastics, and play, sports, and games.

Industrial education is now imperative for every nation that would
excel in agriculture, manufacture, and trade, not only because of the
growing intensity of competition, but because of the decline of the
apprentice system and the growing intricacy of processes, requiring
only the skill needed for livelihood. Thousands of our youth of late
have been diverted from secondary schools to the monotechnic or trade
classes now established for horology, glass-work, brick-laying,
carpentry, forging, dressmaking, cooking, typesetting, bookbinding,
brewing, seamanship, work in leather, rubber, horticulture, gardening,
photography, basketry, stock-raising, typewriting, stenography and
bookkeeping, elementary commercial training for practical preparation
for clerkships, etc. In this work not only is Boston, our most
advanced city, as President Pritchett[1] has shown in detail, far
behind Berlin, but German workmen and shopmen a slowly taking the best
places even in England; and but for a high tariff, which protects our
inferiority, the competitive pressure would be still greater. In
Germany, especially, this training is far more diversified than here,
always being colored if not determined by the prevalent industry of
the region and more specialised and helped out by evening and even
Sunday classes in the school buildings, and by the still strong
apprentice system. Froebelian influence in manual training reaches
through the eight school years and is in some respects better than
ours in lower grades, but is very rarely coeducational, girls' work of
sewing, knitting, crocheting, weaving, etc., not being considered
manual training. There are now over 1,500 schools and workshops in
Germany where manual training is taught; twenty-five of these are
independent schools. The work really began in 1875 with v. Kass, and
is promoted by the great Society for Boys' Handwork. Much stress is
laid on paper and pasteboard work in lower grades, under the influence
of Kurufa of Darmstadt. Many objects for illustrating science are
made, and one course embraces the Seyner water-wheel.[2]

In France it is made more effective by the equal salaries of teachers
everywhere, thus securing better instruction in the country.
Adolescence is the golden period for acquiring the skill that comes by
practice, so essential in the struggle for survival. In general this
kind of motor education is least of all free, but subservient to the
tool, machine, process, finished product, or end in view; and to these
health and development are subordinated, so that they tend to be ever
more narrow and special. The standard here is maximal efficiency of
the capacities that earn. It may favor bad habitual attitudes,
muscular development of but one part, excessive large or small
muscles, involve too much time or effort, unhealthful conditions,
etc., but it has the great advantage of utility, which is the
mainspring of all industry. In a very few departments and places this
training has felt the influence of the arts and crafts movement and
has been faintly touched with the inspiration of beauty. While such
courses give those who follow them marked advantage over those who do
not, they are chiefly utilitarian and do little to mature or unfold
the physical powers, and may involve arrest or degeneration.

Where not one but several or many professes are taught, the case is
far better. Of all work-schools, a good farm is probably the best for
motor development. This is due to its great variety of occupations,
healthful conditions, and the incalculable phyletic reënforcement from
immemorial times. I have computed some three-score industries[3] as
the census now classifies them; that were more or less generally known
and practiced sixty years ago in a little township, which not only in
this but in other respects has many features of an ideal educational
environment for adolescent boys, combining as it does not only
physical and industrial, but civil and religious elements in wise
proportions and with pedagogic objectivity, and representing the ideal
of such a state of intelligent citizen voters as was contemplated by
the framers of our Constitution.

Contrast this life with that of a "hand" in a modern shoe factory, who
does all day but one of the eighty-one stages or processes from a
tanned hide to a finished shoe, or of a man in a shirt shop who is one
of thirty-nine, each of whom does as piece-work a single step
requiring great exactness, speed, and skill, and who never knows how a
whole shirt is made, and we shall see that the present beginning of a
revival of interest in muscular development comes none too early. So
liberal is muscular education of this kind that its work in somewhat
primitive form has been restored and copied many features by many
educational institutions for adolescents, of the Abbotsholme type and
grade, and several others, whose purpose is to train for primitive
conditions of colonial life. Thousands of school gardens have also
been lately developed for lower grades, which have given a new impetus
to the study of nature. Farm training at its best instills love of
country, ruralizes taste, borrows some of its ideals from Goethe's
pedagogic province, and perhaps even from Gilman's pie-shaped
communities, with villages at the center irradiating to farms in all
directions. In England, where by the law of primogeniture holdings are
large and in few hands, this training has never flourished, as it has
greatly in France, where nearly every adult male may own land and a
large proportion will come to do so. So of processes. As a student in
Germany I took a few lessons each of a bookbinder, a glassblower, a
shoemaker, a plumber, and a blacksmith, and here I have learned in a
crude way the technique of the gold-beater and old-fashioned
broom-maker, etc., none of which come amiss in the laboratory; and I
am proud that I can still mow and keep my scythe sharp, chop, plow,
milk, churn, make cheese and soap, braid a palm-leaf hat complete,
knit, spin and even "put in a piece" in an old-fashioned hand loom,
and weave frocking. But thus pride bows low before the pupils of our
best institutions for negroes, Indians, and juvenile delinquents,
whose training is often in more than a score of industries and who
to-day in my judgment receive the best training in the land, if judged
by the annual growth in mind, morals, health, physique, ability, and
knowledge, all taken together. Instead of seeking soft, ready-made
places near home, such education impels to the frontier, to strike out
new careers, to start at the bottom and rise by merit, beginning so
low that every change must be a rise. Wherever youth thus trained are
thrown, they land like a cat on all-fours and are armed _cap-à-pie_
for the struggle of life. Agriculture, manufacture, and commerce are
the bases of national prosperity; and on them all professions,
institutions, and even culture, are more and more dependent, while the
old ideals of mere study and brain-work are fast becoming obsolete. We
really retain only the knowledge we apply. We should get up interest
in new processes like that of a naturalist in new species. Those who
leave school at any age or stage should be best fitted to take up
their life work instead of leaving unfitted for it, aimless and
discouraged. Instead of dropping out limp and disheartened, we should
train "struggle-for-lifeurs," in Daudet's phrase, and that betimes, so
that the young come back to it not too late for securing the best
benefits, after having wasted the years best fitted for it in
profitless studies or in the hard school of failure. By such methods
many of our flabby, undeveloped, anemic, easy-living city youth would
be regenerated in body and spirit. Some of the now oldest, richest,
and most famous schools of the world were at first established by
charity for poor boys who worked their way, and such institutions have
an undreamed-of future. No others so well fit for a life of
respectable and successful muscle work, and perhaps this should be
central for all at this stage. This diversity of training develops the
muscular activities rendered necessary by man's early development,
which were so largely concerned with food, shelter, clothing, making
and selling commodities necessary for life, comfort and safety. The
natural state of man is not war, hot peace; and perhaps Dawson[4] is
right in thinking that three-fourths of man's physical activities in
the past have gone into such vocations. Industry has determined the
nature and trend of muscular development; and youth, who have pets,
till the soil, build, manufacture, use tools, and master elementary
processes and skills, are most truly repeating the history of the
race. This, too, lays the best foundation for intellectual careers.
The study of pure science, as well as its higher technology, follows
rather than precedes this. In the largest sense this is the order of
nature, from fundamental and generalized to finer accessory and
specialized organs and functions; and such a sequence best weeds out
and subordinates automatisms. The age of stress in most of these kinds
of training is that of most rapid increment of muscular power, as we
have seen in the middle and later teens rather than childhood, as some
recent methods have mistakenly assumed; and this prepolytechnic work,
wherever and in whatever degree it is possible, is a better adjunct of
secondary courses than manual training, the sad fact being that,
according to the best estimates, only a fraction of one per cent of
those who need this training in this country are now receiving it.

[Footnote 1: The Place of Industrial and Technical Training in Public
Education. Technology Review, January, 1902, vol. 4, pp. 10-37.]

[Footnote 2: See an article by Dr. H.E. Kock, Education, December,
1902, vol. 23, pp. 193-203.]

[Footnote 3: See my Boy Life in a Massachusetts Country Town Forty
Years Ago. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1906, vol. 13, pp. 192-207.]

[Footnote 4: The Muscular Activities Rendered Necessary by Man's Early
Environment, American Physical Education Review, June, 1902, vol. 7,
pp. 80-85.]

       *     *     *     *     *




CHAPTER IV


MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD


History of the movement--Its philosophy--The value of hand training in
the development of the brain and its significance in the making of
man--A grammar of our many industries hard--The best we do can reach
but few--Very great defects in our manual training methods which do
not base on science and make nothing salable--The Leipzig
system--Sloyd is hypermethodic--These crude peasant industries can
never satisfy educational needs--The gospel of work, William Morris
and the arts and crafts movement--Its spirit desirable--The magic
effects of a brief period of intense work--The natural development of
the drawing instinct in the child.

Manual training has many origins; but in its now most widely accepted
form it came to us more than a generation ago from Moscow, and has its
best representation here in our new and often magnificent
manual-training high schools and in many courses in other public
schools. This work meets the growing demand of the country for a more
practical education, a demand which often greatly exceeds the
accommodations. The philosophy, if such it may be called, that
underlies the movement, is simple, forcible, and sound, and not unlike
Pestalozzi's "_keine Kentnisse ohne Fertigkeiten_," [No knowledge
without skill] in that it lessens the interval between thinking and
doing; helps to give control, dexterity, and skill an industrial trend
to taste; interests many not successful in ordinary school; tends to
the better appreciation of good, honest work; imparts new zest for
some studies; adds somewhat to the average length of the school
period; gives a sense of capacity and effectiveness, and is a useful
preparation for a number of vocations. These claims are all well
founded, and this work is a valuable addition to the pedagogic
agencies of any country or state. As man excels the higher anthropoids
perhaps almost as much in hand power as in mind, and since the manual
areas of the brain are wide near the psychic zones, and the cortical
centers are thus directly developed, the hand is a potent instrument
in opening the intellect as well as in training sense and will. It is
no reproach to these schools that, full as they are, they provide for
but an insignificant fraction of the nearly sixteen millions or twenty
per cent of the young people of the country between fifteen and
twenty-four.

When we turn to the needs of these pupils, the errors and limitations
of the method are painful to contemplate. The work is essentially
manual and offers little for the legs, where most of the muscular
tissues of the body lie, those which respond most to training and are
now most in danger of degeneration at this age; the back and trunk
also are little trained. Consideration of proportion and bilateral
asymmetry are practically ignored. Almost in proportion as these
schools have multiplied, the rage for uniformity, together with
motives of economy and administrative efficiency on account of
overcrowding, have made them rigid and inflexible, on the principle
that as the line lengthens the stake must be strengthened. This is a
double misfortune; for the courses were not sufficiently considered at
first and the plastic stage of adaptation was too short, while the
methods of industry have undergone vast changes since they were given
shape. There are now between three and four hundred occupations in the
census, more than half of these involving manual work, so that never
perhaps was there so great a pedagogic problem as to make these
natural developments into conscious art, to extract what may be called
basal types. This requires an effort not without analogy to
Aristotle's attempt to extract from the topics of the marketplace the
underlying categories eternally conditioning all thought, or to
construct a grammar of speech. Hardly an attempt worthy the name, not
even the very inadequate one of a committee, has been made in this
field to study the conditions and to meet them. Like Froebel's gifts
and occupations, deemed by their author the very roots of human
occupations in infant form, the processes selected are underived and
find their justification rather in their logical sequence and
coherence than in being true norms of work. If these latter be
attainable at all, it is not likely that they will fit so snugly in a
brief curriculum, so that its simplicity is suspicious. The wards of
the keys that lock the secrets of nature and human life are more
intricate and mazy. As H.T. Bailey well puts it in substance, a master
in any art-craft must have a fourfold equipment: 1. Ability to grasp
an idea and embody it. 2. Power to utilize all nerve, and a wide
repertory of methods, devices, recipes, discoveries, machines, etc. 3.
Knowledge of the history of the craft. 4. Skill in technical
processes. American schools emphasize chiefly only the last.

The actual result is thus a course rich in details representing wood
and iron chiefly, and mostly ignoring other materials; the part of the
course treating of the former, wooden in its teachings and distinctly
tending to make joiners, carpenters, and cabinet-makers; that of the
latter, iron in its rigidity and an excellent school for smiths,
mechanics, and machinists. These courses are not liberal because they
hardly touch science, which is rapidly becoming the real basis of
every industry. Almost nothing that can be called scientific knowledge
is required or even much favored, save some geometrical and mechanical
drawing and its implicates. These schools instinctively fear and
repudiate plain and direct utility, or suspect its educational value
or repute in the community because of this strong bias toward a few
trades. This tendency also they even fear, less often because
unfortunately trade-unions in this country sometimes jealously suspect
it and might vote down supplies, than because the teachers in these
schools were generally trained in older scholastic and even classic
methods and matter. Industry is everywhere and always for the sake of
the product, and to cut loose from this as if it were a contamination
is a fatal mistake. To focus on process only, with no reference to the
object made, is here an almost tragic case of the sacrifice of content
to form, which in all history has been the chief stigma of
degeneration in education. Man is a tool-using animal; but tools are
always only a means to an end, the latter prompting even their
invention. Hence a course in tool manipulation only, with persistent
refusal to consider the product lest features of trade-schools be
introduced, has made most of our manual-training high schools ghastly,
hollow, artificial institutions. Instead of making in the lower grades
certain toys which are masterpieces of mechanical simplification, as
tops and kites, and introducing such processes as glass-making and
photography, and in higher grades making simple scientific apparatus
more generic than machines, to open the great principles of the
material universe, all is sacrificed to supernormalized method.

As in all hypermethodic schemes, the thought side is feeble. There is
no control of the work of these schools by the higher technical
institutions such as the college exercises over the high school, so
that few of them do work that fits for advanced training or is thought
best by technical faculties. In most of its current narrow forms,
manual training will prove to be historically, as it is educationally,
extemporized and tentative, and will soon be superseded by broader
methods and be forgotten and obsolete, or cited only as a low point of
departure from which future progress will loom up.

Indeed in more progressive centers, many new departures are now in the
experimental stage. Goetze at Leipzig, as a result of long and
original studies and trials, has developed courses in which pasteboard
work and modeling are made of equal rank with wood and iron, and he
has connected them even with the kindergarten below. In general the
whole industrial life of our day is being slowly explored in the quest
of new educational elements; and rubber, lead, glass, textiles,
metallurgical operations, agriculture, every tool and many machines,
etc., are sure to contribute their choicest pedagogical factors to the
final result. In every detail the prime consideration should be the
nature and needs of the youthful body and will at each age, their
hygiene and fullest development; and next, the closest connection with
science at every point should do the same for the intellect. Each
operation and each tool--the saw, knife, plane, screw, hammer, chisel,
draw-shave, sandpaper, lathe--will be studied with reference to its
orthopedic value, bilateral asymmetry, the muscles it develops, and
the attitudes and motor habits it favors; and uniformity, which in
France often requires classes to saw, strike, plane up, down, right,
left, all together, upon count and command, will give place to
individuality.

Sloyd has certain special features and claims. The word means skilful,
deft. The movement was organised in Sweden a quarter of a century ago
as an effort to prevent the extinction by machinery of peasant home
industry during the long winter night. Home sloyd was installed in an
institution of its own for training teachers at Nääs. It works in wood
only, with little machinery, and is best developed for children of
from eleven to fifteen. It no longer aims to make artisans; but its
manipulations are meant to be developmental, to teach both sexes not
only to be useful but self-active and self-respecting, and to revere
exactness as a form of truthfulness. It assumes that all and
especially the motor-minded can really understand only what they make,
and that one can work like a peasant and think like a philosopher. It
aims to produce wholes rather than parts like the Russian system, and
to be so essentially educational that, as a leading exponent says, its
best effects would be conserved if the hands were cut off. This change
of its original utilitarianism from the lower to the liberal motor
development of the middle and upper classes and from the land where it
originated to another, has not eliminated the dominant marks of its
origin in its models, the Penates of the sloyd household, the unique
features of which persist like a national school of art, despite
transplantation and transformation.[1]

Sloyd at its best tries to correlate several series, viz., exercises,
tools, drawing, and models. Each must be progressive, so that every
new step in each series involves a new and next developmental step in
all the others, and all together, it is claimed, fit the order and
degree of development of each power appealed to in the child. Yet
there has been hardly an attempt to justify either the physiological
or the psychological reason of a single step in any of these series,
and the coördination of the series even with each other, to say
nothing of their adaptation to the stages of the child's development.
This, if as pat and complete as is urged, would indeed constitute on
the whole a paragon of all the harmony, beauty, totality in variety,
etc., which make it so magnificent in the admirer's eyes. But the "45
tools, 72 exercises, 31 models, 15 of which are joints," all learned
by teachers in one school year of daily work and by pupils in four
years, are overmethodic; and such correlation is impossible in so many
series at once. Every dual order, even of work and unfoldment of
powers, is hard enough, since the fall lost us Eden; and woodwork,
could it be upon that of the tree of knowledge itself, incompatible
with enjoying its fruit. Although a philosopher may see the whole
universe in its smallest part, all his theory can not reproduce
educational wholes from fragments of it. The real merits of sloyd have
caused its enthusiastic leaders to magnify its scope and claims far
beyond their modest bounds; and although its field covers the great
transition from childhood to youth, one searches in vain both its
literature and practise for the slightest recognition of the new
motives and methods that puberty suggests. Especially in its partially
acclimatized forms to American conditions, it is all adult and almost
scholastic; and as the most elaborate machinery may sometimes be run
by a poor power-wheel, if the stream be swift and copious enough, so
the mighty rent that sets toward motor education would give it some
degree of success were it worse and less economic of pedagogic
momentum than it is. It holds singularly aloof from other methods of
efferent training and resists coördination with them, and its
provisions for other than hand development are slight. It will be one
of the last to accept its true but modest place as contributing
certain few but precious elements in the greater synthesis that
impends. Indian industries, basketry, pottery, bead, leather, bows and
arrows, bark, etc., which our civilization is making lost arts by
forcing the white man's industries upon red men at reservation schools
and elsewhere, need only a small part of the systemization that
Swedish peasant work has received to develop even greater educational
values; and the same is true of the indigenous household work of the
old New England farm, the real worth and possibilities of which are
only now, and perhaps too late, beginning to be seen by a few
educators.

This brings us to the arts and crafts movement, originating with
Carlyle's gospel of work and Ruskin's medievalism, developed by
William Morris and his disciples at the Red House, checked awhile by
the ridicule of the comic opera "Patience," and lately revived in some
of its features by Cobden-Sanderson, and of late to some extent in
various centers in this country. Its ideal was to restore the day of
the seven ancient guilds and of Hans Sachs, the poet cobbler, when
conscience and beauty inspired work, and the hand did what machines
only imitate and vulgarize. In the past, which this school of motor
culture harks back to, work, for which our degenerate age lacks even
respect, was indeed praise. Refined men and women have remembered
these early days, when their race was in its prime, as a lost paradise
which they would regain by designing and even weaving tapestries and
muslins; experimenting in vats with dyes to rival Tyrian purple;
printing and binding by hand books that surpass the best of the
Aldine, and Elzevirs; carving in old oak; hammering brass; forging
locks, irons, and candlesticks; becoming artists in burned wood and
leather; seeking old effects of simplicity and solidity in furniture
and decoration, as well as architecture, stained glass, and to some
extent in dress and manners; and all this toil and moil was _ad
majorem gloriam hominis_ [To the greater glory of man] in a new
socialistic state, where the artist, and even the artisan, should take
his rightful place above the man who merely knows. The day of the mere
professor, who deals in knowledge, is gone; and the day of the doer,
who creates, has come. The brain and the hand, too long divorced and
each weak and mean without the other; use and beauty, each alone
vulgar; letters and labor, each soulless without the other, are
henceforth to be one and inseparable; and this union will lift man to
a higher level. The workman in his apron and paper hat, inspired by
the new socialism and the old spirit of chivalry as revived by Scott,
revering Wagner's revival of the old _Deutschenthum_ that was to
conquer _Christenthum_, or Tennyson's Arthurian cycle--this was its
ideal; even as the Jews rekindled their loyalty to the ancient
traditions of their race and made their Bible under Ezra; as we begin
to revere the day of the farmer-citizen, who made our institutions, or
as some of us would revive his vanishing industrial life for the red
man.

Although this movement was by older men and women and had in it
something of the longing regret of senescence for days that are no
more, it shows us the glory which invests racial adolescence when it
is recalled in maturity, the time when the soul can best appreciate
the value of its creations and its possibilities, and really lives
again in its glamour and finds in it its greatest inspiration. Hence
it has its lessons for us here. A touch, but not too much of it,
should be felt in all manual education, which is just as capable of
idealism as literary education. This gives soul, interest, content,
beauty, taste. If not a polyphrastic philosophy seeking to dignify the
occupation of the workshop by a pretentious Volapük of reasons and
abstract theories, we have here the pregnant suggestion of a
psychological quarry of motives and spirit opened and ready to be
worked. Thus the best forces from the past should be turned on to
shape and reinforce the best tendencies of the present. The writings
of the above gospelers of work not only could and should, but will be
used to inspire manual-training high schools, sloyd and even some of
the less scholastic industrial courses; but each is incomplete without
the other. These books and those that breathe their spirit should be
the mental workshop of all who do tool, lathe, and forge work; who
design and draw patterns, carve or mold; or of those who study how to
shape matter for human uses, and whose aim is to obtain diplomas or
certificates of fitness to teach all such things. The muse of art and
even of music will have some voice in the great synthesis which is to
gather up the scattered, hence ineffective, elements of secondary
motor training, in forms which shall represent all the needs of
adolescents in the order and proportion that nature and growth stages
indicate, drawing, with this end supreme, upon all the resources that
history and reform offer to our selection. All this can never make
work become play. Indeed it will and should make work harder and more
unlike play and of another genus, because the former is thus given its
own proper soul and leads its own distinct, but richer, and more
abounding life.

I must not close this section without brief mention of two important
studies that have supplied each a new and important determination
concerning laws of work peculiar to adolescence.

The main telegraphic line requires a speed of over seventy letters per
minute of all whom they will employ. As a sending rate this is not
very difficult and is often attained after two months' practise. This
standard for a receiving rate is harder and later, and inquiry at
schools where it is taught shows that about seventy-five per cent of
those who begin the study fail to reach this speed and so are not
employed. Bryan and Harter[2] explained the rate of improvement in
both sending and receiving, with results represented for one typical
subject in the curve on the following page.

From the first, sending improves most rapidly and crosses the
dead-line a few months before the receiving rate, which may fall
short. Curves 1 and 2 represent the same student. I have added line 3
to illustrate the three-fourths who fail. Receiving is far less
pleasant than sending, and years of daily practise at ordinary rates
will not bring a man to his maximum rate; he remains on the low
plateau with no progress beyond a certain point. If forced by stress
of work, danger of being dropped, or by will power to make a prolonged
and intense effort, he breaks through his hidebound rate and
permanently attains a faster pace. This is true at each step, and
every advance seems to cost even more intensive effort than the former
one. At length, for those who go on, the rate of receiving, which is a
more complex process, exceeds that of sending; and the curves of the
above figure would cross if prolonged. The expert receives so much
faster than he sends that abbreviated codes are used, and he may take
eighty to eighty-five words a minute on a typewriter in correct form.

[Illustration: Letters per Minute x Weeks of Practice.]

The motor curve seems to asymptotically approach a perhaps
physiological limit, which the receiving curve does not suggest. This
seems a special case of a general though not yet explained law. In
learning a foreign language, speaking is first and easiest, and
hearing takes a late but often sudden start to independence. Perhaps
this holds of every ability. To Bryan this suggests as a hierarchy of
habits, the plateau of little or no improvement, meaning that lower
order habits are approaching their maximum but are not yet automatic
enough to leave the attention free to attack higher order habits. The
second ascent from drudgery to freedom, which comes through
automatism, is often as sudden as the first ascent. One stroke of
attention comes to do what once took many. To attain such effective
speed is not dependent on reaction time. This shooting together of
units distinguishes the master from the man, the genius from the hack.
In many, if not all, skills where expertness is sought, there is a
long discouraging level, and then for the best a sudden ascent, as if
here, too, as we have reason to think in the growth of both the body
as a whole and in that of its parts, nature does make leaps and
attains her ends by alternate rests and rushes. Youth lives along on a
low level of interest and accomplishment and then starts onward, is
transformed, converted; the hard becomes easy; the old life sinks to a
lower stratum; and a new and higher order, perhaps a higher brain
level and functions, is evolved. The practical implication here of the
necessity of hard concentrative effort as a condition of advancement
is re-enforced by a quotation from Senator Stanford on the effect of
early and rather intensive work at not too long periods in training
colts for racing. Let-ups are especially dangerous. He says, "It is
the supreme effort that develops." This, I may add, suggests what is
developed elsewhere, that truly spontaneous attention is conditioned
by spontaneous muscle tension, which is a function of growth, and that
muscles are thus organs of the mind; and also that even voluntary
attention is motivated by the same nisus of development even in its
most adult form, and that the products of science, invention,
discovery, as well as the association plexus of all that was
originally determined in the form of consciousness, are made by
rhythmic alternation of attack, as it moves from point to point
creating diversions and recurrence.

The other study, although quite independent, is part a special
application and illustration of the same principle.

At the age of four or five, when they can do little more than
scribble, children's chief interest in pictures is as finished
products; but in the second period, which Lange calls that of artistic
illusion, the child sees in his own work not merely what it
represents, but an image of fancy back of it. This, then, is the
golden period for the development of power to create artistically. The
child loves to draw everything with the pleasure chiefly in the act,
and he cares little for the finished picture. He draws out of his own
head, and not from copy before his eye. Anything and everything is
attempted in bold lines in this golden age of drawing. If he followed
the teacher, looked carefully and drew what he saw, he would be
abashed at his production. Indians, conflagrations, games, brownies,
trains, pageants, battles--everything is graphically portrayed; but
only the little artist himself sees the full meaning of his lines.
Criticism or drawing strictly after nature breaks this charm, since it
gives place to mechanical reproduction in which the child has little
interest. Thus awakens him from his dream to a realization that he can
not draw, and from ten to fifteen his power of perceiving things
steadily increases and he makes almost no progress in drawing.
Adolescence arouses the creative faculty and the desire and ability to
draw are checked and decline after thirteen or fourteen. The curve is
the plateau which Barnes has described. The child has measured his own
productions upon the object they reproduced and found them wanting, is
discouraged and dislikes drawing. From twelve on, Barnes found drawing
more and more distasteful; and this, too, Lukens found to be the
opinion of our art teachers. The pupils may draw very properly and
improve in technique, but the interest is gone. This is the condition
in which most men remain all their lives. Their power to appreciate
steadily increases. Only a few gifted adolescents about this age begin
a to develop a new zest in production, rivaling that of the period
from five to ten, when their satisfaction is again chiefly in
creation. These are the artists whose active powers dominate.

Lukens[3] finds in his studies of drawing, that in what he calls his
fourth period of artistic development, there are those "who during
adolescence experience a rebirth of creative power." Zest in creation
then often becomes a stronger incentive to work than any pleasure or
profit to be derived from the finished product, so that in this the
propitious conditions of the first golden age of childhood are
repeated and the deepest satisfaction is again found in the work
itself. At about fourteen or fifteen, which is the transition period,
nascent faculties sometimes develop very rapidly. Lukens[4] draws the
interesting curve shown on the following page.

[Illustration: Motor, creative or productive power. Sensory or
receptive interest in the finished product.]

The reciprocity between the power to produce and that to appreciate,
roughly represented in the above curve, likely is true also in the
domain of music, and may be, perhaps, a general law of development.
Certain it is that the adolescent power to apperceive and appreciate
never so far outstrips his power to produce or reproduce as about
midway in the teens. Now impressions sink deepest. The greatest
artists are usually those who paint later, when the expressive powers
are developed, what they have felt most deeply and known best at this
age, and not those who in the late twenties, or still later, have gone
to new environments and sought to depict them. All young people draw
best those objects they love most, and their proficiency should be
some test of the contents of their minds. They must put their own
consciousness into a picture. At the dawn of this stage of
appreciation the esthetic tastes should be stimulated by exposure to,
and instructed in feeling for, the subject-matter of masterpieces; and
instruction in technique, detail, criticism, and learned
discrimination of schools of painting should be given intermittently.
Art should not now be for art's sake, but for the sake of feeling and
character, life, and conduct; it should be adjunct to morals, history,
and literature; and in all, edification should be the goal; and
personal interest, and not that of the teacher, should be the guide.
Insistence on production should be eased, and the receptive
imagination, now so hungry, should be fed and reinforced by story and
all other accessories. By such a curriculum, potential creativeness,
if it exists, will surely be evoked in its own good time. It will, at
first, attempt no commonplace drawing-master themes, but will essay
the highest that the imagination can bode forth. It may be crude and
lame in execution, but it will be lofty, perhaps grand; and if it is
original in consciousness, it will be in effect. Most creative
painters before twenty have grappled with the greatest scenes in
literature or turning points in history, representations of the
loftiest truths, embodiments of the most inspiring ideals. None who
deserve the name of artist copy anything now, and least of all with
objective fidelity to nature; and the teacher that represses or
criticizes this first point of genius, or who can not pardon the grave
faults of technique inevitable at this age when ambition ought to be
too great for power, is not an educator but a repressor, a pedagogic
Philistine committing, like so many of his calling in other fields,
the unpardonable sin against budding promise, always at this age so
easily blighted. Just as the child of six or seven should be
encouraged in his strong instinct to draw the most complex scenes of
his daily life, so now the inner life should find graphic utterance in
all its intricacy up to the full limit of unrepressed courage. For the
great majority, on the other hand, who only appreciate and will never
create, the mind, if it have its rights, will be stored with the best
images and sentiments of art; for at this time they are best
remembered and sink deepest into heart and life. Now, although the
hand may refuse, the fancy paints the world in brightest hues and
fairest forms; and such an opportunity for infecting the soul with
vaccine of ideality, hope, optimism, and courage in adversity, will
never come again. I believe that in few departments are current
educational theories and practises so hard on youth of superior gifts,
just at the age when all become geniuses for a season, very brief for
most, prolonged for some, and permanent for the best. We do not know
how to teach to, see, hear, and feel when the sense centers are most
indelibly impressible, and to give relative rest to the hand during
the years when its power of accuracy is abated and when all that is
good is idealized furthest, and confidence in ability to produce is at
its lowest ebb.

Finally, our divorce between industrial and manual training is
abnormal, and higher technical education is the chief sufferer.
Professor Thurston, of Cornell, who has lately returned from a tour of
inspection abroad, reported that to equal Germany we now need: "1.
Twenty technical universities, having in their schools of engineering
50 instructors and 500 students each. 2. Two thousand technical high
schools or manual-training schools, each having not less than 200
students and 10 instructors." If we have elementary trade-schools,
this would mean technical high schools enough to accommodate 700,000
students, served by 20,000 teachers. With the strong economic
arguments in this direction we are not here concerned; but that there
are tendencies to unfit youth for life by educational method and
matter shown in strong relief from this standpoint, we shall point out
in a later chapter.

[Footnote 1: This I have elsewhere tried to show in detail. Criticisms
of High School Physics and Manual Training and Mechanic Arts in High
Schools. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 193-204.]

[Footnote 2: Studies in the Physiology and Psychology of the
Telegraphic Language. Psychological Review, January, 1897, vol. 4, pp.
27-53, and July, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 344-375.]

[Footnote 3: A Study of Children's Drawings in the Early Years.
Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 79-101. See also
Drawing in the Early Years, Proceedings of the National Educational
Association, 1899, pp. 946-953. Das Kind als Künstler, von C. Götze.
Hamburg, 1898. The Genetic _vs._ the Logical Order in Drawing, by F.
Burk. Pedagogical Seminary, September, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 296-323.]

[Footnote 4: Die Entwickelungsstufen beim Zeichnen. Die Kinderfehler,
September, 1897, vol. 2, pp. 166-179.]

       *     *     *     *     *




CHAPTER V


GYMNASTICS


The story of Jahn and the Turners--The enthusiasm which this movement
generated in Germany--The ideal of bringing out latent powers--The
concept of more perfect voluntary control--Swedish gymnastics--Doing
everything possible for the body as a machine--Liberal physical
culture--Ling's orthogenic scheme of economic postures and movements
and correcting defects--The ideal of symmetry and prescribing
exercises to bring the body to a standard--Lamentable lack of
correlation between these four systems--Illustrations of the great
good that a systematic training can effect--Athletic records--Greek
physical training.

Under the term gymnastics, literally naked exercises, we here include
those denuded of all utilities or ulterior ends save those of physical
culture. This is essentially modern and was unknown in antiquity,
where training was for games, for war, etc. Several ideals underlie
this movement, which although closely related are distinct and as yet
by no means entirely harmonized. These may be described as follows:

A. One aim of Jahn, more developed by Spiess, and their successors,
was to do everything physically possible for the body as a mechanism.
Many postures and attitudes are assumed and many movements made that
are never called for in life. Some of these are so novel that a great
variety of new apparatus had to be devised to bring them out; and Jahn
invented many new names, some of them without etymologies, to
designate the repertory of his discoveries and inventions that
extended the range of motor life. Common movements, industries, and
even games, train only a limited number of muscles, activities, and
coördinations, and leave more or less unused groups and combinations,
so that many latent possibilities slumber, and powers slowly lapse
through disuse. Not only must these be rescued, but the new nascent
possibilities of modern progressive man must be addressed and
developed. Even the common things that the average untrained youth can
not do are legion, and each of these should be a new incentive to the
trainer as he realizes how very far below their motor possibilities
meet men live. The man of the future may, and even must, do things
impossible in the past and acquire new motor variations not given by
heredity. Our somatic frame and its powers must therefore be carefully
studied, inventoried, and assessed afresh, and a kind and amount of
exercise required that is exactly proportioned, not perhaps to the
size but to the capability of each voluntary muscle. Thus only can we
have a truly humanistic physical development, analogous to the
training of all the powers of the mind in a broad, truly liberal, and
non-professional or non-vocational educational curriculum. The body
will thus have its rightful share in the pedagogic traditions and
inspirations of the renaissance. Thus only can we have a true scale of
standardised culture values for efferent processes; and from this we
can measure the degrees of departure, both in the direction of excess
and defect, of each form of work, motor habit; and even play. Many
modern Epigoni in the wake of this great ideal, where its momentum was
early spent, feeling that new activities might be discovered with
virtues hitherto undreamed of, have almost made fetiches of special
disciplines, both developmental and corrective, that are pictured and
landed in scores of manuals. Others have had expectations no less
excessive in the opposite direction and have argued that the greatest
possible variety of movements best developed the greatest total of
motor energy. Jahn especially thus made gymnastics a special art and
inspired great enthusiasm of humanity, and the songs of his pupils
were of a better race of man and a greater and united fatherland. It
was this feature that made his work unique in the world, and his
disciples are fond of reminding us of the fact that it was just about
one generation of men after the acme of influence of his system that,
in 1870, Germany showed herself the greatest military power since
ancient Rome, and took the acknowledged leadership of the world both
in education and science.

These theorizations even in their extreme forms have been not only
highly suggestive but have brought great and new enthusiasms and
ideals into the educational world that admirably fit adolescence. The
motive of bringing out latent, decaying, or even new powers, skills,
knacks, and feats, is full of inspiration. Patriotism is aroused, for
thus the country can be better served; thus the German Fatherland was
to be restored and unified after the dark days that followed the
humiliation of Jena. Now the ideals of religion are invoked that the
soul may have a better and regenerated somatic organism with which to
serve Jesus and the Church. Exercise is made a form of praise to God
and of service to man, and these motives are reënforced by those of
the new hygiene which strives for a new wholeness-holiness, and would
purify the body as the temple of the Holy Ghost. Thus in Young Men's
Christian Association training schools and gymnasiums the gospel of
Christianity is preached anew and seeks to bring salvation to man's
physical frame, which the still lingering effects of asceticism have
caused to be too long neglected in its progressive degeneration. As
the Greek games were in honor of the gods, so now the body is trained
to better glorify God; and regimen, chastity, and temperance are given
a new momentum. The physical salvation thus wrought will be, when
adequately written, one of the most splendid chapters in the modern
history of Christianity. Military ideals have been revived in cult and
song to hearten the warfare against evil within and without. Strength
is prayed for as well as worked for, and consecrated to the highest
uses. Last but not least, power thus developed over a large surface
may be applied to athletic contests in the field, and victories here
are valuable as fore-gleams of how sweet the glory of achievements in
higher moral and spiritual tasks will taste later.

The dangers and sources of error in this ideal of all-sided training
are, alas, only too obvious, although they only qualify its paramount
good. First, it is impossible thus to measure the quanta of training
needed so as rightly to assign to each its modicum and best modality
of training. Indeed no method of doing this has ever been attempted,
but the assessments have been arbitrary and conjectural, probably
right in some and wrong in other respects, with no adequate criterion
or test for either save only empirical experience. Secondly, heredity,
which lays its heavy ictus upon some neglected forms of activity and
fails of all support for others, has been ignored. As we shall see
later, one of the best norms here is phyletic emphasis, and what lacks
this must at best be feeble; and if new powers are unfolding, their
growth must be very slow and they must be nurtured as tender buds for
generations. Thirdly, too little regard is had for the vast
differences in individuals, most of whom need much personal
prescription.

B. In practise the above ideal is never isolated from others. Perhaps
the most closely associated with it is that of increased volitional
control. Man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his
activities are more or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his
environment. Every new power of controlling these by the will frees
man from slavery and widens the field of freedom. To acquire the power
of doing all with consciousness and volition mentalizes the body,
gives control over to higher brain levels, and develops them by
rescuing activities from the dominance of lower centers. Thus _mens
agitat molem._ [Footnote: Mind rules the body.] This end is favored by
the Swedish _commando_ exercises, which require great alertness of
attention to translate instantly a verbal order into an act and also,
although in somewhat less degree, by quick imitation of a leader. The
stimulus of music and rhythm are excluded because thought to interfere
with this end. A somewhat sophisticated form of this goal is sought by
several Delsartian schemes of relaxation, decomposition, and
recomposition of movements. To do all things with consciousness and to
encroach on the field of instinct involves new and more vivid sense
impressions, the range of which is increased directly as that of
motion, the more closely it approaches the focus of attention. By thus
analyzing settled and established coördinations, their elements are
set free and may be organized into new combinations, so that the
former is the first stage toward becoming a virtuoso with new special
skills. This is the road to inner secrets or intellectual rules of
professional and expert successes, such as older athletes often rely
upon when their strength begins to wane. Every untrained automatism
must be domesticated, and every striated muscle capable of direct
muscular control must be dominated by volition. Thus tensions and
incipient contractures that drain off energy can be relaxed by fiat.
Sandow's "muscle dance," the differentiation of movements of the
right and left hand--one, e.g., writing a French madrigal while the
other is drawing a picture of a country dance, or each playing
tunes of disparate rhythm and character simultaneously on the
piano--controlling heart rate, moving the ears, crying, laughing,
blushing, moving the bowels, etc., at will, feats of inhibition of
reflexes, stunts of all kinds, proficiency with many tools, deftness
in sports--these altogether would mark the extremes in this direction.

This, too, has its inspiration for youth. To be a universal adept like
Hippias suggests Diderot and the encyclopedists in the intellectual
realm. To do all with consciousness is a means to both remedial and
expert ends. Motor life often needs to be made over to a greater or
less extent; and that possibilities of vastly greater accomplishments
exist than are at present realized, is undoubted, even in manners and
morals, which are both at root only motor habits. Indeed consciousness
itself is largely and perhaps wholly corrective in its very essence
and origin. Thus life is adjusted to new environments; and if the
Platonic postulate be correct, that untaught virtues that come by
nature and instinct are no virtues, but must be made products of
reflection and reason, the sphere and need of this principle is great
indeed. But this implies a distrust of physical human nature as
deep-seated and radical as that of Calvinism for the unregenerate
heart, against which modern common sense, so often the best muse of
both psychophysics and pedagogy, protests. Individual prescription is
here as imperative as it is difficult. Wonders that now seem to be
most incredible, both of hurt and help, can undoubtedly be wrought,
but analysis should always be for the sake of synthesis and never be
beyond its need and assured completion. No thoughtful student fully
informed of the facts and tentatives in this field can doubt that here
lies one of the most promising fields of future development, full of
far-reaching and rich results for those, as yet far too few, experts
in physical training, who have philosophic minds, command the facts of
modern psychology, and whom the world awaits now as never before.

C. Another yet closely correlated ideal is that of economic postures
and movements. The system of Ling is less orthopedic than orthogenic,
although he sought primarily to correct bad attitudes and perverted
growth. Starting from the respiratory and proceeding to the muscular
system, he and his immediate pupils were content to refer to the
ill-shapen bodies of most men about them. One of their important aims
was to relax the flexor and tone up the extensor muscles and to open
the human form into postures as opposite as possible to those of the
embryo, which it tends so persistently to approximate in sitting, and
in fatigue and collapse attitudes generally. The head must balance on
the cervical vertebra and not call upon the muscles of the neck to
keep it from rolling off; the weight of the shoulders must be thrown
back off the thorax; the spine be erect to allow the abdomen free
action; the joints of the thigh extended; the hand and arm supinated,
etc. Bones must relieve muscles and nerves. Thus an erect,
self-respecting carriage must be given, and the unfortunate
association, so difficult to overcome, between effort and an involuted
posture must be broken up. This means economy and a great saving of
vital energy. Extensor action goes with expansive, flexor with
depressive states of mind; hence courage, buoyancy, hope, are favored
and handicaps removed. All that is done with great effort causes wide
irradiation of tensions to the other half of the body and also
sympathetic activities in those not involved; the law of maximal ease
and minimal expenditure of energy must be always striven for, and the
interests of the viscera never lost sight of. This involves educating
weak and neglected muscles, and like the next ideal, often shades over
by almost imperceptible gradation into the passive movements by the
Zander machines. Realizing that certain activities are sufficiently or
too much emphasized in ordinary life, stress is laid upon those which
are complemental to them, so that there is no pretense of taking
charge of the totality of motor processes, the intention being
principally to supplement deficiencies, to insure men against being
warped, distorted, or deformed by their work in life, to compensate
specialties and perform more exactly what recreation to some extent
aims at.

This wholesome but less inspiring endeavor, which combats one of the
greatest evils that under modern civilization threatens man's physical
weal, is in some respects as easy and practical as it is useful. The
great majority of city bred men, as well as all students, are prone to
deleterious effects from too much sitting; and indeed there is
anatomical evidence in the structure of the tissues, and especially
the blood-vessels of the groins, that, at his best, man is not yet
entirely adjusted to the upright position. So a method that
straightens knees, hips, spine, and shoulders, or combats the
school-desk attitude, is a most salutary contribution to a great and
growing need. In the very act of stretching, and perhaps yawning, for
which much is to be said, nature itself suggests such correctives and
preventives. To save men from being victims of their occupations is
often to add a better and larger half to their motor development. The
danger of the system, which now best represents this ideal, is
inflexibility and overscholastic treatment. It needs a great range of
individual variations if it would do more than increase circulation,
respiration, and health, or the normal functions of internal organs
and fundamental physiological activities. To clothe the frame with
honest muscles that are faithful servants of the will adds not only
strength, more active habits and efficiency, but health; and in its
material installation this system is financially economic. Personal
faults and shortcomings are constantly pointed out where this work is
best represented, and it has a distinct advantage in inciting an
acquaintance with physiology and inviting the larger fields of medical
knowledge.

D. The fourth gymnastic aim is symmetry and correct proportions.
Anthropometry and average girths and dimensions, strength, etc., of
the parts of the body are first charted in percentile grades; and each
individual is referred to the apparatus and exercises best fitted to
correct weaknesses and subnormalities. The norms here followed are not
the canons of Greek art, but those established by the measurement of
the largest numbers properly grouped by age, weight, height, etc.
Young men are found to differ very widely. Some can lift 1,000 pounds,
and some not 100; some can lift their weight between twenty and forty
times, and some not once; some are most deficient in legs, others in
shoulders, arms, backs, chests. By photography, tape, and scales, each
is interested in his own bodily condition and incited to overcome his
greatest defects; and those best endowed by nature to attain ideal
dimensions and make new records are encouraged along these lines. Thus
this ideal is also largely though not exclusively remedial.

This system can arouse youth to the greatest pitch of zest in watching
their own rapidly multiplying curves of growth in dimensions and
capacities, in plotting curves that record their own increment in
girths, lifts, and other tests, and in observing the effects of sleep,
food, correct and incorrect living upon a system so exquisitely
responsive to all these influences as are the muscles. To learn to
know and grade excellence and defect, to be known for the list of
things one can do and to have a record, or to realize what we lack of
power to break best records, even to know that we are strengthening
some point where heredity has left us with some shortage and perhaps
danger, the realization of all this may bring the first real and deep
feeling for growth that may become a passion later in things of the
soul. Growth always has its selfish aspects, and to be constantly
passing our own examination in this respect is a new and perhaps
sometimes too self-conscious endeavor of our young college barbarians;
but it is on the whole a healthful regulative, and this form of the
struggle toward perfection and escape from the handicap of birth will
later move upward to the intellectual and moral plane. To kindle a
sense of physical beauty of form in every part, such as a sculptor
has, may be to start youth on the lowest round of the Platonic ladder
that leads up to the vision of ideal beauty of soul, if his ideal be
not excess of brawn, or mere brute strength, but the true proportion
represented by the classic or mean temperance balanced like justice
between all extremes. Hard, patient, regular work, with the right
dosage for this self-cultural end, has thus at the same time a unique
moral effect.

The dangers of this system are also obvious. Nature's intent can not
be too far thwarted; and as in mental training the question is always
pertinent, so here we may ask whether it be not best in all cases to
some extent, and in some cases almost exclusively, to develop in the
direction in which we most excel, to emphasize physical individuality
and even idiosyncrasy, rather than to strive for monotonous
uniformity. Weaknesses and parts that lag behind are the most easily
overworked to the point of reaction and perhaps permanent injury.
Again, work for curative purposes lacks the exuberance of free sports:
it is not inspiring to make up areas; and therapeutic exercises
imposed like a sentence for the shortcomings of our forebears bring a
whiff of the atmosphere of the hospital, if not of the prison, into
the gymnasium.

These four ideals, while so closely interrelated, are as yet far from
harmonized. Swedish, Turner, Sargent, and American systems are each,
most unfortunately, still too blind to the others' merits and too
conscious of the others' shortcomings. To some extent they are
prevented from getting together by narrow devotion to a single cult,
aided sometimes by a pecuniary interest in the sale of their own
apparatus and books or in the training of teachers according to one
set of rubrics. The real elephant is neither a fan, a rope, a tree nor
a log, as the blind men in the fable contended, each thinking the part
he had touched to be the whole. This inability of leaders to combine
causes uncertainty and lack of confidence in, and of enthusiastic
support for, any system on the part of the public. Even the radically
different needs of the sexes have failed of recognition from the same
partisanship. All together represent only a fraction of the nature and
needs of youth. The world now demands what this country has never had,
a man who, knowing the human body, gymnastic history, and the various
great athletic traditions of the past, shall study anew the whole
motor field, as a few great leaders early in the last century tried to
do; who shall gather and correlate the literature and experiences of
the past and present with a deep sense of responsibility to the
future; who shall examine martial training with all the inspirations,
warnings, and new demands; and who shall know how to revive the
inspiration of the past animated by the same spirit as the Turners,
who were almost inflamed by referring back to the hardy life of the
early Teutons and trying to reproduce its best features; who shall
catch the spirit of, and make due connections with, popular sports
past and present, study both industry and education to compensate
their debilitating effects, and be himself animated by a great ethical
and humanistic hope and faith in a better future. Such a man, if he
ever walks the earth, will be the idol of youth, will know their
physical secrets, will come almost as a savior to the bodies of men,
and will, like Jahn, feel his calling and work sacred, and his
institution a temple in which every physical act will be for the sake
of the soul. The world of adolescence, especially that part which sits
in closed spaces conning books, groans and travails all the more
grievously and yearningly, because unconsciously, waiting for a
redeemer for its body. Till he appears, our culture must remain for
most a little hollow, falsetto, and handicapped by school-bred
diseases. The modern gymnasium performs its chief service during
adolescence and is one of the most beneficent agencies of which not a
few, but every youth, should make large use. Its spirit should be
instinct with euphoria, where the joy of being alive reaches a point
of high, although not quite its highest, intensity. While the stimulus
of rivalry and even of records is not excluded, and social feelings
may be appealed to by unison exercises and by the club spirit, and
while competitions, tournaments, and the artificial motives of prizes
and exhibitions may be invoked, the culture is in fact largely
individual. And yet in this country the annual _Turnerfest_ brings
4,000 or 5,000 men from all parts of the Union, who sometimes all
deploy and go through some of the standard exercises together under
one leader. Instead of training a few athletes, the real problem now
presented is how to raise the general level of vitality so that
children and youth may be fitted to stand the strain of modern
civilization, resist zymotic diseases, and overcome the deleterious
influences of city life. The almost immediate effects of systematic
training are surprising and would hardly be inferred from the annual
increments tabled earlier in this chapter. Sandow was a rather weakly
boy and ascribes his development chiefly to systematic training.

We have space but for two reports believed to be typical. Enebuske
reports on the effects of seven months' training on young women
averaging 22.3 years. The figures are based on the 50 percentile
column.

----------------+--------+----------------------------------+--------
                |        | Strength of                      |
                |Lung    |      |     |     |right  |left   |Total
                |capacity| legs |back |chest|forearm|forearm|Strength
----------------+--------+------+-----+-----+-------+-------+--------
Before training |  2.65  |   93 |65.5 | 27  |  26   | 23    |  230
After six months|  2.87  |  120 |81.5 | 32  |  28   | 25    |  293
----------------+--------+------+-----+-----+-------+-------+--------

By comparing records of what he deems standard normal growth with that
of 188 naval cadets from sixteen to twenty-one, who had special and
systematic training, just after the period of most rapid growth in
height, Beyer concluded that the effect of four years of this added a
little over an inch of stature, and that this gain as greatest at the
beginning. This increase was greatest for the youngest cadets. He
found also a marked increase in weight, nearly the same for each year
from seventeen to twenty one. This he thought more easily influenced
by exercise than height. A high vital index ratio of lung capacity to
weight is a very important attribute of good training. Beyer[1] found,
however, that the addition of lung area gained by exercise did not
keep up with the increase thus caused in muscular substance, and that
the vital index always became smaller in those who had gained weight
and strength by special physical training. How much gain in weight is
desirable beyond the point where the lung capacity increases at an
equal rate is unknown. If such measurements were applied to the
different gymnastic systems, we might be able to compare their
efficiency, which would be a great desideratum in view of the
unfortunate rivalry between them. Total strength, too, can be greatly
increased. Beyer thinks that from sixteen to twenty-one it may exceed
the average or normal increment fivefold, and he adds, "I firmly
believe that the now so wonderful performances of most of our strong
men are well within the reach of the majority of healthy men, if such
performances were a serious enough part of their ambition
to make them do the exercises necessary to develop them." Power of the
organs to respond to good training by increased strength probably
reaches well into middle life.

It is not encouraging to learn that, according to a recent writer,[2]
we now have seventy times as many physicians in proportion to the
general population as there are physical directors, even for the
school population alone considered. We have twice as many physicians
per population as Great Britain, four times a many as Germany, or 2
physicians, 1.8 ministers, 1.4 lawyers per thousand of the general
population; while even if all male teachers of physical training
taught only males of the military age, we should have but 0.05 of a
teacher per thousand, or if the school population alone be considered,
20 teachers per million pupils. Hence, it is inferred that the need of
wise and classified teachers in this field is at present greater than
in any other. But fortunately while spontaneous, unsystematic exercise
in a well-equipped modern gymnasium may in rare cases do harm, so far
from sharing the prejudice often felt for it by professional trainers,
we believe that free access to it without control or direction is
unquestionably a boon to youth. Even if its use be sporadic and
occasional, as it is likely to be with equal opportunity for
out-of-door exercises and especially sports, practise is sometimes
hygienic almost inversely to its amount, while even lameness from
initial excess has its lessons, and the sense of manifoldness of
inferiorities brought home by experiences gives a wholesome
self-knowledge and stimulus.

In this country more than elsewhere, especially in high school and
college, gymnasium work has been brought into healthful connection
with field sports and record competitions for both teams and
individuals who aspire to championship. This has given the former a
healthful stimulus although it is felt only by a picked few. Scores of
records have been established for running, walking, hurdling,
throwing, putting, swimming, rowing, skating, etc., each for various
shorter and longer distances and under manifold conditions, and for
both amateurs and professionals, who are easily accessible. These, in
general, show a slow but steady advance in this country since 1876,
when athletics were established here. In that year there was not a
single world's best record held by an American amateur, and
high-school boys of to-day could in most, though not in all lines,
have won the American championship twenty-five years ago. Of course,
in a strict sense, intercollegiate contests do not show the real
advance in athletics, because it is not necessary for a man in order
to win a championship to do his best; but they do show general
improvement.

We select for our purpose a few of those records longest kept. Not
dependent on external conditions like boat-racing, or on improved
apparatus like bicycling, we have interesting data of a very different
order for physical measurements. These down to present writing--July,
1906--are as follows: For the 100-yard dash, every annual record from
1876 to 1895 is 10 or 11 seconds, or between these, save in 1890,
where Owen's record of 9-4/5 seconds still stands. In the 220-yard run
there is slight improvement since 1877, but here the record of 1896
(Wefers, 21-1/5 seconds) has not been surpassed. In the quarter-mile
run, the beet record was in 1900 (Long, 47 seconds). The half-mile
record, which still stands, was made in 1895 (Kilpatrick, 1 minute
52-2/5 seconds); the mile run in 1895 (Conneff, 4 minutes 15-3/5
seconds). The running broad jump shows a very steady improvement, with
the best record in 1900 (Prinstein, 24 feet 7-1/4 inches). The running
high jump shows improvement, but less, with the record of 1895 still
standing (Sweeney, 6 feet 5-5/8 inches). The record for pole vaulting,
corrected to November, 1905, is 12 feet 132/100 inches (Dole); for
throwing the 16-pound hammer head, 100 feet 5 inches (Queckberner);
for putting the 16-pound shot, 49 feet 6 inches (Coe, 1905); the
standing high jump, 5 feet 5-1/2 inches (Ewry); for the running high
jump, 6 feet 5-5/8 inches (Sweeney). We also find that if we extend
our purview to include all kinds of records for physical achievement,
that not a few of the amateur records for activities involving
strength combined with rapid rhythm movement are held by young men of
twenty or even less.

In putting the 16-pound shot under uniform conditions the record has
improved since the early years nearly 10 feet (Coe, 49 feet 6 inches,
best at present writing, 1906). Pole vaulting shows a very marked
advance culminating in 1904 (Dole, 12 feet 132/100 inches). Most
marked of all perhaps is the great advance in throwing the 16-pound
hammer. Beginning between 70 and 80 feet in the early years, the
record is now 172 feet 11 inches (Flanagan, 1904). The two-mile
bicycle race also shows marked gain, partly, of course, due to
improvement in the wheel, the early records being nearly 7 minutes,
and the best being 2 minutes 19 seconds (McLean, 1903). Some of these
are world records, and more exceed professional records.[3] These, of
course, no more indicate general improvement than the steady reduction
of time in horse-racing suggests betterment in horses generally.

In Panhellenic games as well as at present, athleticism in its
manifold forms was one of the most characteristic expressions of
adolescent nature and needs. Not a single time or distance record of
antiquity has been preserved, although Grasberger[4] and other writers
would have us believe that in those that are comparable, ancient
youthful champions greatly excelled ours, especially in leaping and
running. While we are far from cultivating mere strength, our training
is very one-sided from the Greek norm of unity or of the ideals that
develop the body only for the salve of the soul. While gymnastics in
our sense, with apparatus, exercises, and measurements independently
of games was unknown, the ideal and motive were as different from ours
as was its method. Nothing, so far as is known, was done for
correcting the ravages of work, or for overcoming hereditary defects;
and until athletics degenerated there were Do exercises for the sole
purpose of developing muscle.

On the whole, while modern gymnastics has done more for the trunk,
shoulders, and arms than for the legs, it is now too selfish and
ego-centric, deficient on the side of psychic impulsion, and but
little subordinated to ethical or intellectual development. Yet it
does a great physical service to all who cultivate it, and is a
safeguard of virtue and temperance. Its need is radical revision and
coordination of various cults and theories in the light of the latest
psycho-physiological science.

Gymnastics allies itself to biometric work. The present academic zeal
for physical development is in great need of closer affiliation with
anthropometry. This important and growing department will be
represented in the ideal gymnasium of the future--First, by courses,
if not by a chair, devoted to the apparatus of measurements of human
proportions and symmetry, with a kinesological cabinet where young men
are instructed in the elements of auscultation, the use of calipers,
the sphygmograph, spirometer, plethysmograph, kinesometer to plot
graphic curves, compute average errors, and tables of percentile
grades and in statistical methods, etc. Second, anatomy, especially of
muscles, bones, heart, and skin, will be taught, and also their
physiology, with stress upon myology, the effects of exercise on the
flow of blood and lymph, not excluding the development of the upright
position, and all that it involves and implies. Third, hygiene will be
prominent and comprehensive enough to cover all that pertains to
body-keeping, regimen, sleep, connecting with school and domestic and
public hygiene--all on the basis of modern as distinct from the
archaic physiology of Ling, who, it is sufficient to remember, died in
1839, before this science was recreated, and the persistence of whose
concepts are an anomalous survival to-day. Mechanico-therapeutics, the
purpose and service of each chief kind of apparatus and exercise, the
value of work on stall bars with chest weights, of chinning, use of
the quarter-staff, somersaults, rings, clubs, dumb-bells, work with
straight and flexed knees on machinery, etc., will be taught. Fourth,
the history of gymnastics from the time of its highest development in
Greece to the present is full of interest and has a very high and not
yet developed culture value for youth. This department, both in its
practical and theoretical side, should have its full share of prizes
and scholarships to stimulate the seventy to seventy-five per cent of
students who are now unaffected by the influence of athletics. By
these methods the motivation of gymnastics, which now in large measure
goes to waste in enthusiasm, could be utilised to aid the greatly
needed intellectualization of those exercises which in their nature
are more akin to work than play. Indeed, Gutsmuths's first definition
of athletics was "work under the garb of youthful pleasure." So to
develop these courses that they could chiefly, if not entirely,
satisfy the requirements for the A.B. degree, would coordinate the
work of the now isolated curriculum of the training-schools with that
of the college and thus broaden the sphere of the latter; but besides
its culture value, which I hold very high, such a step would prepare
for the new, important, and, as we have seen, very inadequately manned
profession of physical trainers. This has, moreover, great but yet
latent and even unsuspected capacities for the morals of our academic
youth. Grote states that among the ancient Greeks one-half of all
education as devoted to the body, and Galton urges that they as much
excelled us as we do the African negro. They held that if physical
perfection was cultivated, moral and mental excellence would follow;
and that, without this, national culture rests on an insecure basis.
In our day there are many new reasons to believe that the best nations
of the future will be those which give most intelligent care to the
body.

[Footnote 1: See H.G. Beyer. The Influence of Exercise on Growth.
American Physical Education Review, September-December, 1896, vol. I,
pp. 76-87.]

[Footnote 2: J.H. McCurdy, Physical Training as a Profession.
Association Seminar, March, 1902, vol. 10, pp. 11-24.]

[Footnote 3: These records are taken from the World Almanac, 1906, and
Olympic Games of 1906 at Athens. Edited by J.E. Sullivan, Commissioner
from the United States to the Olympic Games. Spalding's Athletic
Library, New York, July, 1906.]

[Footnote 4: O.H. Jaeger, Die Gymnastik der Hellenen. Heitz,
Stuttgart 1881. L. Grasberger's great standard work, Erziehung und
Untericht im klassischen Alterthum. Würzburg, 1864-81, 3 vols.]

       *     *     *     *     *




CHAPTER VI


PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES


The view of Groos partial and a better explanation of play proposed as
rehearsing ancestral activities--The glory of Greek physical training,
its ideals and results--The first spontaneous movements of infancy as
keys to the past--Necessity of developing basal powers before those
that are later and peculiar to the individual--Plays that interest due
to their antiquity--Play with dolls--Play distinguished by age--Play
preferences of children and their reasons--The profound
significance of rhythm--The value of dancing and also its
significance, history, and the desirability of re-introducing
it--Fighting--Boxing--Wrestling--Bushido--Foot-ball--Military
ideals--Showing off--Cold baths--Hill climbing--The playground
movement--The psychology of play--Its relation to work.

Play, sports, and games constitute a more varied, far older, and more
popular field. Here a very different spirit of joy and gladness rules.
Artifacts often enter but can not survive unless based upon pretty
purely hereditary momentum. Thus our first problem is to seek both the
motor tendencies and the psychic motives bequeathed to us from the
past. The view of Groos that play is practise for future adult
activities is very partial, superficial, and perverse. It ignores the
past where lie the keys to all play activities. True play never
practises what is phyletically new; and this, industrial life often
calls for. It exercises many atavistic and rudimentary functions, a
number of which will abort before maturity, but which live themselves
out in play like the tadpole's tail, that must be both developed and
used as a stimulus to the growth of legs which will otherwise never
mature. In place of this mistaken and misleading view, I regard play
as the motor habits and spirit of the past of the race, persisting in
the present, as rudimentary functions sometimes of and always akin to
rudimentary organs. The best index and guide to the stated activities
of adults in past ages is found in the instinctive, untaught, and
non-imitative plays of children which are the most spontaneous and
exact expressions of their motor needs. The young grow up into the
same forms of motor activity, as did generations that have long
preceded them, only to a limited extent; and if the form of every
human occupation were to change to-day, play would be unaffected save
in some of its superficial imitative forms. It would develop the motor
capacities, impulses, and fundamental forms of our past heritage, and
the transformation of these into later acquired adult forms is
progressively later. In play every mood and movement is instinct with
heredity. Thus we rehearse the activities of our ancestors, back we
know not how far, and repeat their life work in summative and
adumbrated ways. It is reminiscent albeit unconsciously, of our line
of descent; and each is the key to the other. The psycho-motive
impulses that prompt it are the forms in which our forebears have
transmitted to us their habitual activities. Thus stage by stage we
reënact their lives. Once in the phylon many of these activities were
elaborated in the life and death struggle for existence. Now the
elements and combinations oldest in the muscle history of the race are
rerepresented earliest in the individual, and those later follow in
order. This is why the heart of youth goes out into play as into
nothing else, as if in it man remembered a lost paradise. This is why,
unlike gymnastics, play has as much soul as body, and also why it so
makes for unity of body and soul that the proverb "Man is whole only
when he plays" suggests that the purest plays are those that enlist
both alike. To address the body predominantly strengthens unduly the
fleshy elements, and to overemphasize the soul causes weakness and
automatisms. Thus understood, play is the ideal type of exercise for
the young, most favorable for growth, and most self-regulating in both
kind and amount. For its forms the pulse of adolescent enthusiasm
beats highest. It is unconstrained and free to follow any outer or
inner impulse. The zest of it vents and satisfies the strong passion
of youth for intense erethic and perhaps orgiastic states, gives an
exaltation of self-feeling so craved that with no vicarious outlet it
often impels to drink, and best of all realizes the watchword of the
Turners, _frisch, frei, fröhlich, fromm_ [Fresh, free, jovial,
pious.].

Ancient Greece, the history and literature of which owe their
perennial charm for all later ages to the fact that they represent the
eternal adolescence of the world, best illustrates what this
enthusiasm means for youth. Jäger and Guildersleeve, and yet better
Grasberger, would have us believe that the Panhellenic and especially
the Olympic games combined many of the best features of a modern prize
exhibition, a camp-meeting, fair, Derby day, a Wagner festival, a
meeting of the British Association, a country cattle show,
intercollegiate games, and medieval tournament; that they were the
"acme of festive life" and drew all who loved gold and glory, and that
night and death never seemed so black as by contrast with their
splendor. The deeds of the young athletes were ascribed to the
inspiration of the gods, whose abodes they lit up with glory; and in
doing them honor these discordant states found a bond of unity. The
victor was crowned with a simple spray of laurel; cities vied with
each other for the honor of having given him birth, their walls were
taken down for his entry and immediately rebuilt; sculptors, for whom
the five ancient games were schools of posture, competed in the
representation of his form; poets gave him a pedigree reaching back to
the gods, and Pindar, who sang that only he is great who is great with
his hands and feet, raised his victory to symbolize the eternal
prevalence of good over evil. The best body implied the best mind; and
even Plato, to whom tradition gives not only one of the fairest souls,
but a body remarkable for both strength and beauty, and for whom
weakness was perilously near to wickedness, and ugliness to sin,
argues that education must be so conducted that the body can be safely
entrusted to the care of the soul and suggests, what later became a
slogan of a more degenerate gladiatorial athleticism, that to be well
and strong is to be a philosopher--_valare est philosophari_. The
Greeks could hardly conceive bodily apart from psychic education, and
physical was for the sake of mental training. A sane, whole mind could
hardly reside in an unsound body upon the integrity of which it was
dependent. Knowledge for its own sake, from this standpoint, is a
dangerous superstition, for what frees the mind is disastrous if it
does not give self-control; better ignorance than knowledge that does
not develop a motor side. Body culture is ultimately only for the sake
of the mind and soul, for body is only its other ego. Not only is all
muscle culture at the same time brain-building, but a book-worm with
soft hands, tender feet, and tough rump from much sitting, or an
anemic girl prodigy, "in the morning hectic, in the evening electric,"
is a monster. Play at its best is only a school of ethics. It gives
not only strength but courage and confidence, tends to simplify life
and habits, gives energy, decision, and promptness to the will, brings
consolation and peace of mind in evil days, is a resource in trouble
and brings out individuality.

How the ideals of physical preformed those of moral and mental
training in the land and day of Socrates is seen in the identification
of knowledge and virtue, "_Kennen und Können_." [To know and to have
the power to do] Only an extreme and one-sided intellectualism
separates them and assumes that it is easy to know and hard to do.
From the ethical standpoint, philosophy, and indeed all knowledge, is
the art of being and doing good, conduct is the only real subject of
knowledge, and there is no science but morals. He is the best man,
says Xenophon, who is always studying how to improve, and he is the
happiest who feels that he is improving. Life is a skill, an art like
a handicraft, and true knowledge a form of will. Good moral and
physical development are more than analogous; and where intelligence
is separated from action the former becomes mystic, abstract, and
desiccated, and the latter formal routine. Thus mere conscience and
psychological integrity and righteousness are allied and mutually
inspiring.

Not only play, which is the purest expression of motor heredity, but
work and all exercise owe most of whatever pleasure they bring to the
past. The first influence of all right exercise for those in health is
feeling of well-being and exhilaration. This is one chief source of
the strange enthusiasm felt for many special forms of activity, and
the feeling is so strong that it animates many forms of it that are
hygienically unfit. To act vigorously from a full store of energy
gives a reflex of pleasure that is sometimes a passion and may fairly
intoxicate. Animals must move or cease growing and die. While to be
weak is to be miserable, to feel strong is a joy and glory. It gives a
sense of superiority, dignity, endurance, courage, confidence,
enterprise, power, personal validity, virility, and virtue in the
etymological sense of that noble word. To be active, agile, strong, is
especially the glory of young men. Our nature and history have so
disposed our frame that thus all physiological and psychic processes
are stimulated, products of decomposition are washed out by
oxygenation and elimination, the best reaction of all the ganglionic
and sympathetic activities is accused, and vegetative processes are
normalized. Activity may exalt the spirit almost to the point of
ecstasy, and the physical pleasure of it diffuse, irradiate, and
mitigate the sexual stress just at the age when its premature
localization is most deleterious. Just enough at the proper time and
rate contributes to permanent elasticity of mood and disposition,
gives moral self-control, rouses a love of freedom with all that that
great word means, and favors all higher human aspirations.

In all these modes of developing our efferent powers, we conceive that
the race comes very close to the individual youth, and that ancestral
momenta animate motor neurons and muscles and preside over most of the
combinations. Some of the elements speak with a still small voice
raucous with age. The first spontaneous movements of infancy are
hieroglyphs, to most of which we have as yet no good key. Many
elements are so impacted and felted together that we can not analyze
them. Many are extinct and many perhaps made but once and only hint
things we can not apprehend. Later the rehearsals are fuller, and
their significance more intelligible, and in boyhood and youth the
correspondences are plain to all who have eyes to see. Pleasure is
always exactly proportional to the directness and force of the current
of heredity, and in play we feel most fully and intensely ancestral
joys. The pain of toil died with our forebears; its vestiges in our
play give pure delight. Its variety prompts to diversity that enlarges
our life. Primitive men and animals played, and that too has left its
traces in us. Some urge that work was evolved or degenerated from
play; but the play field broadens with succeeding generations youth is
prolonged, for play is always and everywhere the best synonym of
youth. All are young at play and only in play, and the best possible
characterization of old age is the absence of the soul and body of
play. Only senile and overspecialized tissues of brain, heart, and
muscles know it not.

Gulick[1] has urged that what makes certain exercises more interesting
than others is to be found in the phylon. The power to throw with
accuracy and speed was once pivotal for survival, and non-throwers
were eliminated. Those who could throw unusually well best overcame
enemies, killed game, and sheltered family. The nervous and muscular
systems are organized with certain definite tendencies and have back
of them a racial setting. So running and dodging with speed and
endurance, and hitting with a club, were also basal to hunting and
fighting. Now that the need of these is leas urgent for utilitarian
purposes, they are still necessary for perfecting the organism. This
makes, for instance, baseball racially familiar, because it represents
activities that were once and for a long time necessary for survival.
We inherit tendencies of muscular coördination that have been of great
racial utility. The best athletic sports and games a composed of these
racially old elements, so that phylogenetic muscular history is of
great importance. Why is it, this writer asks, that a city man so
loves to sit all day and fish! It is because this interest dates back
to time immemorial. We are the sons of fishermen, and early life was
by the water's side, and this is our food supply. This explains why
certain exercises are more interesting than others. It is because they
touch and revive the deep basic emotions of the race. Thus we see that
play is not doing things to be useful later, but it is rehearsing
racial history. Plays and games change only in their external form,
but the underlying neuro-muscular activities, and also the psychic
content of them, are the same. Just as psychic states must be lived
out up through the grades, so the physical activities most be played
off, each in its own time.

The best exercise for the young should thus be more directed to
develop the basal powers old to the race than those peculiar to the
individual, and it should enforce those psycho-neural and muscular
forms which race habit has banded down rather than insist upon those
arbitrarily designed to develop our ideas of symmetry regardless of
heredity. The best guide to the former is _interest_, zest, and
spontaneity. Hereditary moment, really determine, too, the order in
which nerve centers come into function. The oldest, racial parts come
first, and those which are higher and represent volition come in much
later.[2] As Hughlings Jackson has well shown, speech uses most of the
same organs as does eating, but those concerned with the former are
controlled from a higher level of nerve-cells. By right mastication,
deglutition, etc., we are thus developing speech organs. Thus not only
the kind but the time of forms and degrees of exercise is best
prescribed by heredity. All growth is more or less rhythmic. There are
seasons of rapid increment followed by rest and then perhaps succeeded
by a period of augmentation, and this may occur several times.
Roberts's fifth parliamentary report shows that systematic gymnastics,
which, if applied at the right age, produce such immediate and often
surprising development of lung capacity, utterly fail with boys of
twelve, because this nascent period has not yet come. Donaldson showed
that if the eyelid of a young kitten be forced open prematurely at
birth and stimulated with light, medullation was premature and
imperfect; so, too, if proper exercise is deferred too long, we know
that little result is achieved. The sequence in which the maturation
of levels, nerve areas, and bundles of fibers develop may be, as
Flechsig thinks, causal; or, according to Cajal, energy, originally
employed in growth by cell division, later passes to fiber extension
and the development of latent cells; or as in young children, the
nascent period of finger movements may stimulate that of the thumb
which comes later, and the independent movement of the two eyes, their
subsequent coördination, and so on to perhaps a third and yet higher
level. Thus exercise ought to develop nature's first intention and
fulfil the law of nascent periods, or else not only no good but great
harm may be done. Hence every determination of these periods is of
great practical as well as scientific importance. The following are
the chief attempts yet made to fix them, which show the significance
of adolescence.

The doll curve reaches its point of highest intensity between eight
and nine,[3] and it is nearly ended at fifteen, although it may
persist. Children can give no better reason why they stop playing with
dolls than because other things are liked better, or they are too old,
ashamed, love real babies, etc. The Roman girl, when ripe for
marriage, hung up her childhood doll as a votive offering to Venus.
Mrs. Carlyle, who was compelled to stop, made sumptuous dresses and a
four-post bed, and made her doll die upon a funeral pyre like Dido,
after speaking her last farewell and stabbing herself with a penknife
by way of Tyrian sword. At thirteen or fourteen it is more distinctly
realized that dolls are not real, because they have no inner life or
feeling, yet many continue to play with them with great pleasure, in
secret, till well on in the teens or twenties. Occasionally single
women or married women with no children, and in rare cases even those
who have children, play dolls all their lives. Gales's[4] student
concluded that the girls who played with dolls up to or into pubescent
years were usually those who had the fewest number, that they played
with them in the most realistic manner, kept them because actually
most fond of them, and were likely to be more scientific, steady, and
less sentimental than those who dropped them early. But the instinct
that "dollifies" new or most unfit things is gone, as also the subtle
points of contact between doll play and idolatry. Before puberty dolls
are more likely to be adults; after puberty they are almost always
children or babies. There is no longer a struggle between doubt and
reality in the doll cosmos, no more abandon to the doll illusion; but
where it lingers it is a more atavistic rudiment, and just as at the
height of the fever dolls are only in small part representatives of
future children, the saying that the first child is the last doll is
probably false. Nor are doll and child comparable to first and second
dentition, and it is doubtful if children who play with dolls as
children with too great abandonment are those who make the best
mothers later, or if it has any value as a preliminary practise of
motherhood. The number of motor activities that are both inspired and
unified by this form of play and that can always be given wholesome
direction is almost incredible, and has been too long neglected both
by psychologists and teachers. Few purer types of the rehearsal by the
individual of the history of the race can probably be found even
though we can not yet analyze the many elements involved and assign to
each its phyletic correlate.

In an interesting paper Dr. Gulick[5] divides play into three childish
periods, separated by the ages three and seven, and attempts to
characterize the plays of early adolescence from twelve to seventeen and
of later adolescence from seventeen to twenty-three. Of the first two
periods he says, children before seven rarely play games spontaneously,
but often do so under the stimulus of older persons. From seven to
twelve, games are almost exclusively individualistic and competitive,
but in early adolescence "two elements predominate--first, the plays are
predominantly team games, in which the individual is more or less
sacrificed for the whole, in which there is obedience to a captain, in
which there is coöperation among a number for a given end, in which play
has a program and an end. The second characteristic of the period is
with reference to its plays, and there seems to be all of savage
out-of-door life--hunting, fishing, stealing, swimming, rowing, sailing,
fighting, hero-worship, adventure, love of animals, etc. This
characteristic obtains more with boys than with girls." "The plays of
adolescence are socialistic, demanding the heathen virtues of courage,
endurance, self-control, bravery, loyalty, enthusiasm."

Croswell[6] found that among 2,000 children familiar with 700 kinds of
amusements, those involving physical exercises predominated over all
others, and that "at every age after the eighth year they were
represented as almost two to one and in the sixteenth year rose among
boys as four to one." The age of the greatest number of different
amusements is from ten to eleven, nearly fifteen being mentioned, but
for the next eight or nine years there is a steady decline of number,
and progressive specialisation occurs. The games of chase, which are
suggestive on the recapitulation theory, rise from eleven per cent in
boys of six to nineteen per cent at nine, but soon after decline, and
at sixteen have fallen to less than four per cent. Toys and original
make-believe games decline still earlier, while ball rises steadily
and rapidly to eighteen, and card and table games rise very steadily
from ten to fifteen in girls, but the increment is much less in boys.
"A third or more of all the amusements of boys just entering their
teens are games of contest--games in which the end is in one way or
another to gain an advantage one's fellows, in which the interest is n
the struggle between peers." "As children approach the teens, a
tendency arises that is well expressed by one of the girls who no
longer makes playthings but things that are useful." Parents and
society must, therefore, provide the most favorable conditions for the
kind of amusement fitting at each age. As the child grows older,
society plays a larger rôle in all the child's amusements, and from
the thirteenth year "amusements take on a decidedly coöperative and
competitive character, and efforts are ore and more confined to the
accomplishments of some definite aim. The course for this period will
concentrate the effort upon fewer lines," and more time will be
devoted to each. The desire for mastery is now at its height. The
instinct is to maintain one's self independently and ask no odds. At
fourteen, especially, the impulse is, in manual training, to make
something and perhaps to coöperate.

McGhee[7] collected the play preferences of 15,718 children, and found
a very steady decline in running plays among girls from nine to
eighteen, but a far more rapid rise in plays of chance from eleven to
fifteen, and a very rapid rise from sixteen to eighteen. From eleven
onward with the most marked fall before fourteen, there was a distinct
decline in imitative games for girls and a slower one for boys. Games
involving rivalry increased rapidly among boys from eleven to sixteen
and still more rapidly among girls, their percentage of preference
even exceeding that of boys at eighteen, when it reached nearly
seventy per cent. With adolescence, specialization upon a few plays
was markedly increased in the teens among boys, whereas with girls in
general there were a large number of plays which were popular with
none preëminent. Even at this age the principle of organization in
games so strong with boys is very slight with girls. Puberty showed
the greatest increase of interest among pubescent girls for croquet,
and among boys for swimming, although baseball and football, the most
favored for boys, rose rapidly. Although the author does not state it,
it would seem from his data that plays peculiar to the different
seasons were most marked among boys, in part, at least, because their
activities are more out of doors.

Ferrero and others have shown that the more intense activities of
primitive people tend to be rhythmic and with strongly automatic
features. No form of activity is more universal than the dance, which
is not only intense but may express chiefly in terms of fundamental
movements, stripped of their accessory finish and detail, every
important act, vocation, sentiment, or event in the life of man in
language so universal and symbolic that music and poetry themselves
seem to have arisen out of it. Before it became specialized much labor
was cast in rhythmic form and often accompanied by time-marking and
even tone to secure the stimulus of concert on both economic and
social principles. In the dark background of history there is now much
evidence that at some point, play, art, and work were not divorced.
They all may have sprung from rhythmic movement which is so
deep-seated in biology because it secures most joy of life with least
expense. By it Eros of old ordered chaos, and by its judicious use the
human soul is cadenced to great efforts toward high ideals. The many
work-songs to secure concerted action in lifting, pulling, stepping,
the use of flail, lever, saw, ax, hammer, hoe, loom, etc., show that
areas and thesis represent flexion and extension, that accent
originated in the acme of muscular stress, as well as how rhythm eases
work and also makes it social. Most of the old work-canticles are
lost, and machines have made work more serial, while rhythms are
obscured or imposed from without so as to limit the freedom they used
to express. Now all basal, central, or strength movements tend to be
oscillatory, automatically repetitive, or rhythmic like savage music,
as if the waves of the primeval sea whence we came still beat in them,
just as all fine peripheral and late movements tend to be serial,
special, vastly complex, end diversified. It is thus natural that
during the period of greatest strength increment in muscular
development, the rhythmic function of nearly all fundamental movements
should be strongly accentuated. At the dawn of this age boys love
marching; and, as our returns show, there is a very remarkable rise in
the passion for beating time, jigging, double shuffling, rhythmic
clapping, etc. The more prominent the factor of repetition the more
automatic and the less strenuous is the hard and new effort of
constant psychic adjustment and attention. College yells, cheers,
rowing, marching, processions, bicycling, running, tug-of-war,
calisthenics and class gymnastics with counting, and especially with
music, horseback riding, etc., are rhythmic; tennis, baseball and
football, basketball, golf, polo, etc., are less rhythmic, but are
concerted and intense. These latter emphasise the conflict factor,
best brought out in fencing, boxing, and wrestling, and lay more
stress on the psychic elements of attention and skill. The effect of
musical accompaniment, which the Swedish system wrongly rejects, is to
make the exercises more fundamental and automatic, and to
proportionately diminish the conscious effort and relieve the
neuro-muscular mechanism involved in fine movements.

Adolescence is the golden period of nascency for rhythm. Before this
change many children have a very imperfect sense of it, and even those
who march, sing, play, or read poetry with correct and overemphasised
time marking, experience a great broadening of the horizon of
consciousness, and a marked, and, for mental power and scope,
all-conditioning increase in the carrying power of attention and the
sentence-sense. The soul now feels the beauty of cadences, good
ascension, and the symmetry of well-developed periods--and all, as I
am convinced, because this is the springtime of the strength movements
which are predominantly rhythmic. Not only does music start in time
marking, the drum being the oldest instrument, but quantity long took
precedence of sense and form of content, both melody and words coming
later. Even rhythmic tapping or beating of the foot (whence the poetic
feet of prosody and meter thus later imposed monotonous prose to make
poetry) exhilarates, makes glad the soul and inspires it to attack,
gives compulsion and a sense of unity. The psychology of rhythm shows
its basal value in cadencing the soul. We can not conceive what war,
love, and religion would be without it. The old adage that "the parent
of prose is poetry, the parent of poetry is music, the parent of music
is rhythm, and the parent of rhythm is God" seems borne out not only
in history, but by the nature of thought and attention that does not
move in a continuum, but flies and perches alternately, or on
stepping-stones and as if influenced by the tempo of the leg swinging
as a compound pendulum.

Dancing is one of the best expressions of pure play and of the motor
needs of youth. Perhaps it is the most liberal of all forms of motor
education. Schopenhauer thought it the apex of physiological
irritability and that it made animal life most vividly conscious of
its existence and most exultant in exhibiting it. In very ancient
times China ritualised it in the spring and made it a large part of
the education of boys after the age of thirteen. Neale thinks it was
originally circular or orbicular worship, which he deems oldest. In
Japan, in the priestly Salic College of ancient Rome, in Egypt, in the
Greek Apollo cult, it was a form of worship. St. Basil advised it; St.
Gregory introduced it into religious services. The early Christian
bishops, called præsuls, led the sacred dance around the altar; and
only in 692, and again in 1617, was it forbidden in church. Neale and
others have shown how the choral processionals with all the added
charm of vestment and intonation have had far more to do in
Christianizing many low tribes, who could not understand the language
of the church, than has preaching. Savages are nearly all great
dancers, imitating every animal they know, dancing out their own
legends, with ritual sometimes so exacting that error means death. The
character of people is often learned from their dances, and Molière
says the destiny of nations depends on them. The gayest dancers are
often among the most downtrodden and unhappy people. Some mysteries
can be revealed only in them, as holy passion-plays. If we consider
the history of secular dances, we find that some of them, when first
invented or in vogue, evoked the greatest enthusiasm. One writer says
that the polka so delighted France and England that statesmen forgot
politics. The spirit of the old Polish aristocracy still lives in the
polonaise. The gipsy dances have inspired a new school of music. The
Greek drama grew out of the evolution of the tragic chorus. National
dances like the hornpipe and reel of Scotland, the _Reihen_, of
Germany, the _rondes_ of France, the Spanish tarantella and
_chaconne_, the strathspey from the Spey Valley, the Irish jig, etc.,
express racial traits. Instead of the former vast repertory, the
stately pavone, the graceful and dignified saraband, the wild
_salterrelle_, the bourrée with song and strong rhythm, the light and
skippy bolero, the courtly bayedere, the dramatic plugge, gavotte, and
other peasant dances in costume, the fast and furious fandango, weapon
and military dances; in place of the pristine power to express love,
mourning, justice, penalty, fear, anger, consolation, divine service,
symbolic and philosophical conceptions, and every industry or
characteristic act of life in pantomime and gesture, we have in the
dance of the modern ballroom only a degenerate relict, with at best
but a very insignificant culture value, and too often stained with bad
associations. This is most unfortunate for youth, and for their sake a
work of rescue and revival is greatly needed; for it is perhaps, not
excepting even music, the completest language of the emotions and can
be made one of the best schools of sentiment and even will,
inculcating good states of mind and exorcising bad ones as few other
agencies have power to do. Right dancing can cadence the very soul,
give nervous poise and control, bring harmony between basal and finer
muscles, and also between feeling and intellect, body and mind. It can
serve both as an awakener and a test of intelligence, predispose the
heart against vice, and turn the springs of character toward virtue.
That its present decadent forms, for those too devitalized to dance
aright, can be demoralizing, we know in this day too well, although
even questionable dances may sometimes work off vicious propensities
in ways more harmless than those in which they would otherwise find
vent. Its utilization for and influence on the insane would be another
interesting chapter.

Very interesting scientifically and suggestive practically is another
correspondence which I believe to be new, between the mode of
spontaneous activity in youth and that of labor in the early history
of the race. One of the most marked distinctions between savage and
civilized races is in the longer rhythm of work and relaxation. The
former are idle and lazy for days, weeks, and perhaps months, and then
put forth intense and prolonged effort in dance, hunt, warfare,
migration, or construction, sometimes dispensing with sleep and
manifesting remarkable endurance. As civilization and specialization
advance, hours become regular. The cultured man is less desultory in
all his habits, from eating and sleeping to performing social and
religious duties, although he may put forth no more aggregate energy
in a year than the savage. Women are schooled to regular work long
before men, and the difficulty of imposing civilization upon low races
is compared by Bücher[8] to that of training a eat to work when
harnessed to a dog-cart. It is not dread of fatigue but of the
monotony of method makes them hate labor. The effort of savages is
more intense and their periods of rest more prolonged and inert.
Darwin thinks all vital function bred to go in periods, as vertebrates
are descended from tidal ascidian.[9] There is indeed much that
suggests some other irregular rhythm more or less independent of day
and night, and perhaps sexual in its nature, but not lunar, and for
males. This mode of life not only preceded the industrial and
commercial period of which regularity is a prime condition, but it
lasted indefinitely longer than the latter has yet existed; during
this early time great exertion, sometimes to the point of utter
exhaustion and collapse, alternated with seasons of almost vegetative
existence. We see abundant traces of this psychosis in the muscle
habits of adolescents, and, I think, in student and particularly in
college life, which can enforce regularity only to a limited extent.
This is not reversion, but partly expression of the nature and perhaps
the needs of this stage of immaturity, and partly the same instinct of
revolt against uniformity imposed from without, which rob life of
variety and extinguish the spirit of adventure and untrammeled
freedom, and make the savage hard to break to the harness of
civilization. The hunger for fatigue, too, can become a veritable
passion and is quite distinct from either the impulse for activity for
its own sake or the desire of achievement. To shout and put forth the
utmost possible strength in crude ways is erethic intoxication at a
stage when every tissue can become erectile and seems, like the crying
of infants, to have a legitimate function in causing tension and
flushing, enlarging the caliber of blood vessels, and forcing the
blood perhaps even to the point of extravasation to irrigate newly
growing fibers, cells, and organs which atrophy if not thus fed. When
maturity is complete this need abates. If this be correct, the
phenomenon of second breath, so characteristic of adolescence, and one
factor in the inebriate's propensity, is ontogenetic expression of a
rhythm trait of a long racial period. Youth needs overexertion to
compensate for underexertion, to undersleep in order to offset
oversleep at times. This seems to be nature's provision to expand in
all directions its possibilities of the body and soul in this plastic
period when, without this occasional excess, powers would atrophy or
suffer arrest for want of use, or larger possibilities world not be
realized without this regimen peculiar to nascent periods. This is
treated more fully elsewhere.

Perhaps next to dancing in phyletic motivation come personal
conflicts, such as wrestling, fighting, boxing, dueling, and in some
sense, hunting. The animal world is full of struggle for survival, and
primitive warfare is a wager of battle, of personal combat of foes
contesting eye to eye and hand to hand, where victory of one is the
defeat and perhaps death of the other, and where life is often staked
against life. In its more brutal forms we see one of the most
degrading of all the aspects of human nature. Burk[10] has shown how
the most bestial of these instincts survive and crop out irresistibly
in boyhood, where fights are often engaged in with desperate abandon.
Noses are bitten, ears torn, sensitive places kicked, hair pulled,
arms twisted, the head stamped on and pounded on stones, fingers
twisted, and hoodlums sometimes deliberately try to strangle, gouge
out an eye, pull off an ear, pull out the tongue, break teeth, nose,
or bones, or dislocate jaws or other joints, wring the neck, bite off
a lip, and torture in utterly nameless ways. In unrestrained anger,
man becomes a demon in love with the blood of his victim. The face is
distorted, and there are yells, oaths, animal snorts and grunts,
cries, and then exultant laughter at pain, and each is bruised, dirty,
disheveled and panting with exhaustion. For coarser natures, the
spectacle of such conflicts has an intense attraction, while some
morbid souls are scarred by a distinct phobia for everything
suggestive of even lower degrees of opposition. These instincts, more
or less developed in boyhood, are repressed in normal cases before
strength and skill are sufficiently developed to inflict serious
bodily injury, while without the reductives that orthogenetic growth
brings they become criminal. Repulsive as are these grosser and animal
manifestations of anger, its impulsion can not and should not be
eliminated, but its expression transformed and directed toward evils
that need all its antagonism. To be angry aright is a good part of
moral education, and non-resistance under all provocations is unmanly,
craven, and cowardly.[11] An able-bodied young man, who can not fight
physically, can hardly have a high and true sense of honor, and is
generally a milksop, a lady-boy, or sneak. He lacks virility, his
masculinity does not ring true, his honesty can not be sound to the
core. Hence, instead of eradicating this instinct, one of the great
problems of physical and moral pedagogy is rightly to temper and
direct it.

Sparta sedulously cultivated it in boys; and in the great English
schools, where for generations it has been more or less tacitly
recognized, it is regulated by custom, and their literature and
traditions abound in illustrations of its man-making and often
transforming influence in ways well appreciated by Hughes and Arnold.
It makes against degeneration, the essential feature of which is
weakening of will and loss of honor. Real virtue requires enemies, and
women and effeminate and old men want placid, comfortable peace, while
a real man rejoices in noble strife which sanctifies all great causes,
casts out fear, and is the chief school of courage. Bad as is
overpugnacity, a scrapping boy is better than one who funks a fight,
and I have no patience with the sentimentality that would here "pour
out the child with the bath," but would have every healthy boy taught
boxing at adolescence if not before. The prize-ring is degrading and
brutal, but in lieu of better illustrations of the spirit of personal
contest I would interest a certain class of boys in it and try to
devise modes of pedagogic utilization of the immense store of interest
it generates. Like dancing it should be rescued from its evil
associations, and its educational force put to do moral work, even
though it be by way of individual prescriptions for specific defects
of character. At its best, it is indeed a manly art, a superb school
for quickness of eye and hand, decision, force of will, and
self-control. The moment this is lost stinging punishment follows.
Hence it is the surest of all cures for excessive irascibility and has
been found to have a most beneficent effect upon a peevish or unmanly
disposition. It has no mean theoretic side, of rules, kinds of blow
and counters, arts of drawing out and tiring an opponent, hindering
but not injuring him, defensive and offensive tactics, etc., and it
addresses chiefly the fundamental muscles in both training and
conflict. I do not underestimate the many and great difficulties of
proper purgation, but I know from both personal practise and
observation that they are not unconquerable.

This form of personal conflict is better than dueling even in its
comparatively harmless German student form, although this has been
warmly defended by Jacob Grimm, Bismarck, and Treitschke, while
Paulsen, Professor of Philosophy and Pedagogy, and Schrempf, of
Theology, have pronounced it but a slight evil, and several Americans
have thought it better than hazing, which it makes impossible. The
dark side of dueling is seen in the hypertrophied sense of honor which
under the code of the corps becomes an intricate and fantastic thing,
prompting, according to Ziegler,[12] a club of sixteen students to
fight over two hundred duels in four weeks in Jena early in this
century. It is prone to degenerate to an artificial etiquette
demanding satisfaction for slight and unintended offenses. Although
this professor who had his own face scarred on the _mensur_, pleaded
for a student court of honor, with power to brand acts as infamous and
even to expel students, on the ground that honor had grown more
inward, the traditions in favor of dueling were too strong. The duel
had a religious romantic origin as revealing God's judgment, and means
that the victim of an insult is ready to stake body, or even life, and
this is still its ideal side. Anachronism as it now is and
degenerating readily to sport or spectacle, overpunishing what is
often mere awkwardness or ignorance, it still impresses a certain
sense of responsibility for conduct and gives some physical training,
slight and specialized though it be. The code is conventional, drawn
directly from old French military life, and is not true to the line
that separates real honor from dishonor, deliberate insult that wounds
normal self-respect from injury fancied by oversensitiveness or
feigned by arrogance; so that in its present form it is not the best
safeguard of the sacred shrine of personality against invasion of ifs
rights. If, as is claimed, it is some diversion from or fortification
against corrosive sensuality, it has generally allied itself with
excessive beer-drinking. Fencing, while an art susceptible of high
development and valuable for both pose and poise, and requiring great
quickness of eye, arm, and wrist, is unilateral and robbed of the vest
of inflicting real pain on an antagonist.

Bushido,[13] which means military-knightly ways, designates the
Japanese conception of honor in behavior and in fighting. The youth is
inspired by the ideal of Tom Brown "to leave behind him the name of a
fellow who never bullied a little boy or turned his back on a big
one." It expresses the race ideal of justice, patriotism, and the duty
of living aright and dying nobly. It means also sympathy, pity, and
love, for only the bravest can be the tenderest, and those most in
love are most daring, and it includes politeness and the art of
poetry. Honor is a sense of personal dignity and worth, so the _bushi_
is truthful without an oath. At the tender age of five the _samurai_
is given a real sword, and this gives self-respect and responsibility.
At fifteen, two sharp and artistic ones, long and short, are given
him, which must be his companions for life. They were made by a smith
whose shop is a sanctuary and who begins his work with prayer. They
have the finest hilts and scabbards, and are besung as invested with a
charm or spell, and symbolic of loyalty and self-control, for they
must never be drawn lightly. He is taught fencing, archery,
horsemanship, tactics, the spear, ethics and literature, anatomy, for
offence and defense; he must be indifferent to money, hold his life
cheap beside honor, and die if it is gone. This chivalry is called the
soul of Japan, and if it fades life is vulgarised. It is a code of
ethics and physical training.

Football is a magnificent game if played on honor. An English tennis
champion was lately playing a rubber game with the American champion.
They were even and near the end when the American made a bad fluke
which would have lost this country its championship. The English
player, scorning to win on an accident, intentionally made a similar
mistake that the best man might win. The chief evil of modern American
football which now threatens its suppression in some colleges is the
lust to win at any price, and results in tricks and secret practise.
These sneaky methods impair the sentiment of honor which is the best
and most potent of all the moral safeguards of youth, so that a young
man can not be a true gentleman on the gridiron. This ethical
degeneration is far worse than all the braises, sprains, broken bones
and even deaths it causes.

Wrestling is a form of personal encounter which in antiquity reached a
high development, and which, although now more known and practised as
athletics of the body than of the soul, has certain special
disciplinary capacities in its various forms. It represents the most
primitive type of the struggle of unarmed and unprotected man with
man. Purged of its barbarities, and in its Greco-Roman form and
properly subject to rules, it cultivates more kinds of movements than
any other form--for limbs, trunk, neck, hand, foot, and all in the
upright and in every prone position. It, too, has its manual of
feints, holds, tricks, and specialties, and calls out wariness,
quickness, strength, and shiftiness. Victory need involve no cruelty
or even pain to the vanquished. The very closeness of body to body,
emphasizing flexor rather than extensor arm muscles, imparts to it a
peculiar tone, gives it a vast variety of possible activities,
developing many alternatives at every stage, and tempts to many
undiscovered forms of permanent mayhem. Its struggle is usually longer
and less interrupted by pauses than pugilism, and its situations and
conclusions often develop slowly, so that all in all, its character
among contests is unique. As a school of posture for art, its
varieties are extremely manifold and by no means developed, for it
contains every kind of emphasis of every part and calls out every
muscle group and attitude of the human body; hence its training is
most generic and least specialized, and victories have been won by
very many kinds of excellence.

Perhaps nothing is more opposed to the idea of a gentleman than the
_sæva animi tempestas_ [Fierce tempest of the soul] of anger. A testy,
quarrelsome, mucky humor is antisocial, and an outburst of rage is
repulsive. Even non-resistance, turning the other cheek, has its
victories and may be a method of moral combat. A strong temper well
controlled and kept in leash makes a kinetic character; but in view of
bullying, unfair play, cruel injustice to the weak and defenseless, of
outrageous wrong that the law can not reach, patience and forbearance
may cease to be virtues, and summary redress may have a distinct
advantage to the ethical nature of man and to social order, and the
strenuous soul must fight or grow stagnant or flabby. If too
repressed, righteous indignation may turn to sourness and sulks, and
the disposition be spoiled. Hence the relief and exhilaration of an
outbreak that often clears the psychic atmosphere like a thunderstorm,
and gives the "peace that passeth understanding" so often dilated on
by our correspondents. Rather than the abject fear of making enemies
whatever the provocation, I would praise those whose best title of
honor is the kind of enemies they make. Better even an occasional nose
dented by a fist, a broken bone, a rapier-scarred face, or even
sometimes the sacrifice of the life of one of our best academic youth
than stagnation, general cynicism and censoriousness, bodily and
psychic cowardice, and moral corruption, if this indeed be, as it
sometimes is, its real alternative.

So closely are love and war connected that not only is individual
pugnacity greatly increased at the period of sexual maturity, when
animals acquire or develop horns, fangs, claws, spurs, and weapons of
offense and defense, but a new spirit of organization arises which
makes teams possible or more permanent. Football, baseball, cricket,
etc., and even boating can become schools of mental and moral
training. First, the rules of the game are often intricate, and to
master and observe them effectively is no mean training for the mind
controlling the body. These are steadily being revised and improved,
and the reasons for each detail of construction and conduct of the
game require experience and insight into human nature. Then the
subordination of each member to the whole and to a leader cultivates
the social and coöperative instincts, while the honor of the school,
college, or city, which each team represents, is confided to each and
all. Group loyalty in Anglo-Saxon games, which shows such a marked
increment in coördination and self-subordination at the dawn of
puberty as to constitute a distinct change in the character of sports
at this age, can be so utilized as to develop a spirit of service and
devotion not only to town, country, and race, but to God and the
church. Self must be merged and a sportsmanlike spirit cultivated that
prefers defeat to tricks and secret practise, and a clean game to the
applause of rooters and fans, intent only on victory, however won. The
long, hard fight against professionalism that brings in husky muckers,
who by every rule of true courtesy and chivalry belong outside
academic circles, scrapping and underhand advantages, is a sad comment
on the character and spirit of these games, and eliminates the best of
their educational advantages. The necessity of intervention, which has
imposed such great burdens on faculties and brought so much friction
with the frenzy of scholastic sentiment in the hot stage of seasonal
enthusiasms, when fanned to a white heat by the excessive interest of
friends and patrons and the injurious exploitation of the press, bears
sad testimony to the strength and persistence of warlike instincts
from our heredity. But even thus the good far predominates. The
elective system has destroyed the class games, and our institutions
have no units like the English colleges to be pitted against each
other, and so colleges grow, an ever smaller percentage of students
obtain the benefit of practise on the teams, while electioneering
methods often place second-best men in place of the best. But both
students and teachers are slowly learning wisdom in the dear school of
experience. On the whole, there is less license in "breaking training"
and in celebrating victories, and even at their worst, good probably
predominates, while the progress of recent years bids us hope.

Finally, military ideals and methods of psycho-physical education are
helpful regulations of the appetite for combat, and on the whole more
wholesome and robust than those which are merely esthetic. Marching in
step gives proper and uniform movement of legs, arms, and carriage of
body; the manual of arms, with evolution and involution of figures in
the ranks, gives each a corporate feeling of membership, and involves
care of personal appearance and accouterments, while the uniform
levels social distinction in dress. For the French and Italian and
especially the German and Russian adolescent of the lower classes, the
two or three years of compulsory military service is often compared to
an academic course, and the army is called, not without some
justification, the poor man's university. It gives severe drill,
strict discipline, good and regular hours, plain but wholesome fare
and out-of-door exercise, exposure, travel, habits of neatness, many
useful knacks and devices, tournaments and mimic or play battles;
these, apart from its other functions, make this system a great
promoter of national health and intelligence. Naval schools for
midshipmen, who serve before the mast, schools on board ship that
visit a wide curriculum of ports each year, cavalry schools, where
each boy is given a horse to care for, study and train, artillery
courses and even an army drill-master in an academy, or uniform, and a
few exterior features of soldierly life, all give a distinct character
to the spirit of any institution. The very fancy of being in any sense
a soldier opens up a new range of interests too seldom utilized; and
tactics, army life and service, military history, battles, patriotism,
the flag, and duties to country, should always erect a new standard of
honor. Youth should embrace every opportunity that offers in this
line, and instruction should greatly increase the intellectual
opportunities created by every interest in warfare. It would be easy
to create pregnant courses on how soldiers down the course of history
have lived, thought, felt, fought, and died, how great battles were
won and what causes triumphed in them, and to generalize many of the
best things taught in detail in the best schools of war in different
grades and lands.

A subtle but potent intersexual influence is among the strongest
factors of all adolescent sport. Male birds and beasts show off their
charms of beauty and accomplishment in many a liturgy of love antics
in the presence of the female. This instinct seems somehow continuous
with the growth of ornaments in the mating season. Song, tumbling,
balking, mock fights, etc., are forms of animal courtship. The boy who
turns cartwheels past the home of the girl of his fancy, is brilliant,
brave, witty, erect, strong in her presence, and elsewhere dull and
commonplace enough, illustrates the same principle. The true cake-walk
as seen in the South is perhaps the purest expression of this impulse
to courtship antics seen in man, but its irradiations are many and
pervasive. The presence of the fair sex gives tonicity to youth's
muscles and tension to his arteries to a degree of which he is rarely
conscious. Defeat in all contests is more humiliating and victory more
glorious thereby. Each sex is constantly passing the examination of
the other, and each judges the other by standards different from its
own. Alas for the young people who are not different with the other
sex from what they are with their own!--and some are transformed into
different beings. Achievement proclaims ability to support, defend,
bring credit and even fame to the object of future choice, and no good
point is lost. Physical force and skill, and above all, victory and
glory, make a hero and invest him with a romantic glamour, which, even
though concealed by conventionality or etiquette, is profoundly felt
and makes the winner more or less irresistible. The applause of men
and of mates is sweet and even intoxicating, but that of ladies is
ravishing. By universal acclaim the fair belong to the brave, strong,
and victorious. This stimulus is wholesome and refining. As is shown
later, a bashful youth often selects a maiden onlooker and is
sometimes quite unconsciously dominated in his every movement by a
sense of her presence, stranger and apparently unnoticed though she
be, although in the intellectual work of coeducation girls are most
influenced thus. In athletics this motive makes for refinement and
good form. The ideal knight, however fierce and terrible, must not be
brutal, but show capacity for fine feeling, tenderness, magnanimity,
and forbearance. Evolutionists tell us that woman has domesticated and
educated savage man and taught him all his virtues by exercising her
royal prerogative of selecting in her mate just those qualities that
pleased her for transmission to future generations and eliminating
others distasteful to her. If so, she is still engaged in this work as
much as ever, and in his dull, slow way man feels that her presence
enforces her standards, abhorrent though it would be to him to
compromise in one iota his masculinity. Most plays and games in which
both sexes participate have some of the advantages with some of the
disadvantages of coeducation. Where both are partners rather than
antagonists, there is less eviration. A gallant man would do his best
to help, but his worst not to beat a lady. Thus, in general, the
latter performs her best in her true rule of sympathetic spectator
rather than as fellow player, and is now an important factor in the
physical education of adolescents.

How pervasive this femininity is, which is slowly transforming our
schools, is strikingly seen in the church. Gulick holds that the
reason why only some seven per cent of the young men of the country
are in the churches, while most members and workers are women, is that
the qualities demanded are the feminine ones of love, rest, prayer,
trust, desire for fortitude to endure, a sense of atonement--traits
not involving ideals that most stir young men. The church has not yet
learned to appeal to the more virile qualities. Fielding Hall[14] asks
why Christ and Buddha alone of great religious teachers were rejected
by their own race and accepted elsewhere. He answers that these mild
beliefs of peace, nonresistance, and submission, rejected by virile
warrior races, Jews and ancient Hindus, were adopted where women were
free and led in these matters. Confucianism, Mohammedanism, etc., are
virile, and so indigenous, and in such forms of faith and worship
women have small place. This again suggests how the sex that rules the
heart controls men.

Too much can hardly be said in favor of cold baths and swimming at
this age. Marro[15] quotes Father Kneipp, and almost rivals his
hydrotherapeutic enthusiasm. Cold bathing sends the blood inward
partly by the cold which contracts the capillaries of the skin and
tissue immediately underlying it, and partly by the pressure of the
water over all the dermal surface, quickens the activity of kidneys,
lungs, and digestive apparatus, and the reactive glow is the best
possible tonic for dermal circulation. It is the best of all
gymnastics for the nonstriated or involuntary muscles and for the
heart and blood vessels. This and the removal of the products of
excretion preserve all the important dermal functions which are so
easily and so often impaired in modern life, lessen the liability to
skin diseases, promote freshness of complexion; and the moral effects
of plunging into cold and supporting the body in deep water is not
inconsiderable in strengthening a spirit of hardihood and reducing
overtenderness to sensory discomforts. The exercise of swimming is
unique in that nearly all the movements and combinations are such as
are rarely used otherwise, and are perhaps in a sense ancestral and
liberal rather than directly preparatory for future avocations. Its
stimulus for heart and lungs is, by general consent of all writers
upon the subject, most wholesome and beneficial. Nothing so directly
or quickly reduces to the lowest point the plethora of the sex organs.
The very absence of clothes and running on the beach is exhilarating
and gives a sense of freedom. Where practicable it is well to dispense
with bathing suits, even the scantiest. The warm bath tub is
enfeebling and degenerative, despite the cold spray later, while the
free swim in cold water is most invigorating.

Happily, city officials, teachers, and sanitarians are now slowly
realizing the great improvement in health and temper that comes from
bathing and are establishing beach and surf, spray, floating and
plunge summer baths and swimming pools; often providing instruction
even in swimming in clothes, undressing in the water, treading water,
and rescue work, free as well as fee days, bathing suits, and, in
London, places for nude bathing after dark; establishing time and
distance standards with certificates and even prizes; annexing
toboggan slides, swings, etc., realizing that in both the preference
of youth and in healthful and moral effects, probably nothing outranks
this form of exercise. Such is its strange fascination that, according
to one comprehensive census, the passion to get to the water outranks
all other causes of truancy, and plays an important part in the
motivation of runaways. In the immense public establishment near San
Francisco, provided by private munificence, there are accommodations
for all kinds of bathing in hot and cold and in various degrees of
fresh and salt water, in closed spaces and in the open sea, for small
children and adults, with many appliances and instructors, all in one
great covered arena with seats in an amphitheater for two thousand
spectators, and many adjuncts and accessories. So elsewhere the
presence of visitors is now often invited and provided for. Sometimes
wash-houses and public laundries are annexed. Open hours and longer
evenings and seasons are being prolonged.

Prominent among the favorite games of early puberty and the years just
before are those that involve passive motion and falling, like
swinging in its many forms, including the May-pole and single rope
varieties. Mr. Lee reports that children wait late in the evening and
in cold weather for a turn at a park swing. Psychologically allied to
these are wheeling and skating. Places for the latter are now often
provided by the fire department, which in many cities floods hundreds
of empty lots. Ponds are cleared of snow and horse-plowed, perhaps by
the park commission, which often provides lights and perhaps ices the
walks and streets for coasting, erects shelters, and devises space
economy for as many diamonds, bleachers, etc., as possible. Games of
hitting, striking, and throwing balls and other objects, hockey,
tennis, all the courts of which are usually crowded, golf and croquet,
and sometimes fives, cricket, bowling, quoits, curling, etc., have
great "thumogenic" or emotional power.

Leg exercise has perhaps a higher value than that of any other part.
Man is by definition an upright being, but only after a long
apprenticeship.[16] Thus the hand was freed from the necessity of
loco

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