Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 12

Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 12

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 __EXPRESSION__s 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.