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.]
Extract from Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene, by G. Stanley Hall
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