Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 10

Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 10

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.