Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 5

Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 5

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."