Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 9

Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 9

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.