The
Nature of Physical Training and the Best Means of Securing its Ends
By Edward Mussey Hartwell, Ph.D., M.D.
1850-1922
Dr. Hartwell was the Associate in Physical Training and Director of the Gymnasium in the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.
In ordinary speech it
is convenient to speak of moral, mental and physical training as if they had
little or nothing in common; though, strictly speaking, the principles which
underlie each are practically the same. My main contention in regard to
the nature of physical training is that bodily exercise constitutes so considerable
and necessary an element in all human training that physical training is
entitled to be recognized and provided for as an integral and indispensable
factor in the education of all children and youth.
The aim of any and of all human training is to educate
faculty, to develop power. As the means of developing power, certain
actions are selected, taught, and practiced as exercises; and power when
developed takes the form of some action or exercise due to muscular
contractions. Viewed thus, muscular exercise is at once a means and an end
of mental power, artistic feeling, or spiritual insight. Without muscular
tissue we cannot live or move.
It behooves us then, at the outset, if we wish to discuss intelligently
the means of securing the needs of physical training, to consider somewhat
closely the nature and proper effects of muscular exercise. We need
consider here only such muscular tissue as is found in the voluntary muscles,
which constitute nearly one-half of the human body by weight.
Contractility, the distinctive endowment of muscular tissue, has its seat in the
protoplasmic contents of the muscle cells. The amount of motion which is
transmitted by a contracting muscle to the bones of a joint--or whatever parts
of the body the muscle is set apart to set in motion--depends upon the number
and arraignment of it component cells. These muscle cells are
sausage-shaped bodies, varying from 1/600 to 1/100 of an inch in diameter, and
are seldom more than 1.5 inches long. The cell protoplasm is contained in
a tubular sheath of tough, elastic, connective tissue, and is closed at both
ends. Sarcolemma has a single opening, through which the essential central
strand--the so-called axis cylinder of a nerve fibre--finds its way into the
muscle fibre or cell. the terminal portion of the nerve fibre spreads out
under the sarcolemma, forming a flat protuberance known as the motor end plate,
and them ramifies in fine fibrils throughout the contractile
cell-substance. At its hither, or central end, the axial fibre of the
nerve is continuous with the irritable gray matter of a nerve cell. We
have, then, the contractile substance of the muscle cell connected with the
irritable stimulus-generating and transmitting substance of the central nerve
cell, the connecting link being the axis cylinder of the muscle or motor nerve,
which cylinder is simply a portion of the nerve cell's irritable contents long
drawn out, in the form of a strand (which is protected and insulated by
appropriate sheaths which we need not here describe) until it reaches the muscle
fibre in which it takes the form of the end-plate and its ultimate
fibrils. What is true of a single muscle fibre is true of all the fibres
of a given muscle; and what is true of one voluntary muscle is true of the
entire five hundred. Voluntary muscles have sensory as well as motor nerve
fibres. They are channels for the impulses which give rise to muscular
sensibility, and are connected with centrally situated nerve cells which
minister to our muscular sense,--the sense, that is, which keeps us informed
concerning the condition of the muscles, and the extent to which they are
contracted.
Under normal conditions the muscle cell shortens only when it
is stimulated through the discharge of some portion of the energy of a motor
nerve cell into it. Muscular contractions are therefore dependent upon the
action of the nerve cells in which they are initiated and controlled.
Without dwelling upon details of structure presented by muscles and their
nervous connections, it is sufficient to recall to mind that a single muscle is
a vast aggregation of contractile cells, arranged in myriads of linear series
called fibres, which in turn are gathered into packets, technically termed
fasiculi; that muscle arteries and veins usually lie alongside of each other
amongst the fasiculi, while their capillaries form a fine mesh-work lying
between and upon the fibres and cells, without penetrating the sarcolemma of any
cell; that the walls of the capillaries are permeable to lymph, as the fluid
portion of the blood is called, so that muscle fibres are enabled to derive
their food-supply from the lymph in which they are bathed; that fibres and
fasiculi, together with their accompanying nerve fibres and nutrient
blood-vessels, are supported and bound together by elastic connective tissue;
and that the muscle so made up has its own special sheath and is bound by
inelastic tendons to the parts which are approximated through its action.
The effects of exercise upon a muscle and its nervous
connections now demand our attention. Immediately a muscle begins working,
under whatever stimulus, the blood stream passing through it becomes
changed. The arterial twigs dilate; more blood is poured into the
capillary vessels which surround its fibres; and more blood flows away from it,
through the veins, towards the heart. If the supply of arterial blood to a
muscle is cut off or diminished, its irritability is lowered i.e., a stronger
stimulus is required to make it contract. The same result follows also, if
it is fed with blood deprived of oxygen, or otherwise poisoned; or if the muscle
vein is tied and the waste products, normally drained off through the veins, are
retained in the muscle. The irritability of muscle is also lowered by
prolonged or excessive stimulation, even when its in-going and out-going blood stream
are unobstructed. These, then, are the main conditions for the health of a
working muscle: a full supply of proper food and of oxygen, unimpeded and
sufficient drainage, and rest at due intervals. Given these three
conditions in the body, and exercise of a working muscle causes it to increase
in size and weight, though an increase of the size and number of its
fibres. Furthermore, a working muscle differs from a resting muscle in
that it is appreciably hotter; by the presence of a low murmur, called the
muscle sound; and on account of certain electrical peculiarities which it
presents. Now a healthy muscle habituated to exercise, a trained muscle,
that is, can do more work, and do it better, than an unexercised muscle for two
reasons. Exercise makes the muscle larger, harder, and stronger, improving
it simply as a tool in all its structure; and secondly, the muscle becomes more
responsive and obedient to its stimulators, the nerve centres, through its
better acquaintance with them. Growth, or increase in the size and number
of its structural elements, and development, or increased facility in its
functional activity, are the main effects of exercise in the case of a single
muscle. the same is true of the muscular system as a whole. Exercise
enlarges and strengthens it on the one hand, and renders it more readily
discriminative and responsive as regards stimuli, on the other.
Muscular activity, too, is one of the chief agents in
promoting wholesome tissue changes in all of the bodily organs, and determining
the normal growth and development of the organism as a whole.
The normal growth and balanced working of the organs concerned in the
digestion and assimilation of the food; the circulation and oxygenation of the
blood; and the secretion and excretion of waste or noxious products of tissue
changes, are all largely promoted by well-regulated muscular exercise. The influence of exercise in these respects, and in
securing the full and symmetrical growth
of the bones and muscles is somewhat generally, though vaguely appreciated, and
constitutes the burden of eulogy and exhortation of most of the articles and
addresses of those who advocate physical training.
The nervous element
involved in muscular exercise is oftener overlooked or neglected than recognized
and set forth. Maclaren, whose book
on “Training in Theory and
Practice " is the best of its class in English, defines exercise as "
muscular movement " simply, and declares its object to be the
"destruction and renovation of tissue." This is the ordinary view, from which you will find but
little deviation. “We seek in
vain in most physiological text-books,” says Du Bois Reymond, Professor of
Physiology in the university of Berlin, "for instruction respecting
exercise. If it is given, only the
so-called bodily exercises are generally considered, and they are represented as
merely exercises of the muscular system. Therefore
it is not strange that laymen in medicine, teachers of gymnastics, and school
teachers believe that. Yet it is
easy to show the error of this view, and demonstrate that such bodily exercises
as gymnastics, fencing, swimming, riding, dancing, and skating, are much more
exercises of the central nervous system, of the brain and spinal marrow.
It is true that their movements involve a certain degree of muscular
power, but we can conceive of a man with muscles like those of the Farnesian
Hercules, who would yet be incompetent to stand or walk, to say nothing of his
executing more complicated movements."
The arm of the blacksmith
has been brought into play so often, by writers and talkers upon exercise, that
every school boy credits the statement that muscles grow larger, harder, and
stronger when duly exercised, and become weak, flabby, and wasted if they are
suffered or forced to remain inactive. It is less obvious, though it can hardly be doubted, that use
and disuse work similar effects in the case of nerve cells and fibres, both
sensory and motor. There is
abundant evidence, though much of it is of the negative sort, to show that the
exercise of the muscles not only reacts upon the nerves and centres with which
they are connected, in such wise as to enhance the power and ease with which
they originate and transmit stimuli, but that it also leads to an increase in
the size, number, and elaboration of their parts.
But this evidence is chiefly to be sought in the writings of those who
have made the normal and diseased conditions of the nervous system their special
field of study; since text-book makers and the writers of popular articles
seldom make use of the material which has been accumulated by professional
physiologists, and those who devote themselves to the study and care of the
idiotic, the paralyzed, and the insane.
The fact should never
be lost sight of that a single muscle is not a simple organ, but is made up of
two clearly distinguishable, though conjoined, mechanisms; a contractile,
executive mechanism, the muscle proper, and a stimulating, regulative mechanism
consisting of nerve fibres and gray-matter nerve cells.
Each mechanism has its blood vessels for supplying food and drainage; and
the amount of blood supplied to each is proportionate to its functional
activity. If in life the two
mechanisms become dissociated, or if either suffer from mal-nutrition,
unregulated exercise, or structural depravity, the dual organ is thrown out of
gear, and its working becomes disordered or abolished in much the same way as in
a human being, when it is attempted to split him into a mental part and a bodily
part, and to train the dissevered fractions to functionate as entities.
Muscular action is then a resultant effect due to the
balanced working of the conjoined mechanisms alluded to.
The nervous mechanism is concerned in a somewhat higher kind of work than
that of its merely muscular colleague, and may be said to represent the
movements of which the latter is the seat and instrument.
Between the nervous arrangement which represents the twitch of a single
muscle inserted into the base of a hair follicle, and that which represents and
governs the varied and rapid muscular adjustments which characterize the hand
and fingers of a cunning craftsman or artist, there exists every grade of
complication. If we compare an adult man and
one of the highest of the lower animals, in respect of the movements of which
they are capable, we find that they possess many in common, such as those of
locomotion, respiration, and the like, but that man is distinguished from the
brute by certain movements such as those involved in maintaining the erect
posture, and in the action of the hands and vocal organs; and that,
corresponding to these two classes of movements, there are two classes of
nervous mechanisms by means of which they are represented.
These mechanisms have been well termed fundamental and accessory
respectively.
Similarly it is demonstrable
that while the human infant and adult possess many nervous mechanisms
identically alike in structure and function, the adult is characterized by
certain other mechanisms whose structural peculiarities, connections, and powers
have been evolved and superadded as the result of growth and training.
The law of evolution, as applied to the nervous system, is now very
generally recognized by neurologists. In
Ross's "Diseases of the Nervous System," for instance, this law, which
was originally enunciated by Herbert Spencer, is described as "a
progressive integration, both of structure and function, during which there is a
passage from the uniform to the multiform, the simple to the complex; from the
general to the special. The nervous
system of man is at first similar to that possessed by all animals which possess
a nervous system, or, at any rate, all those which are sufficiently elevated to
possess a spinal cord; but as development proceeds, the nervous system of man
becomes differentiated from that of an ever-increasing number of the lower
animals, while still maintaining a general likeness to the nervous system of the
higher animals up to the time of birth. This,
then, constitutes the fundamental portion of the nervous system of man; but
after birth the accessory portion which, up till this time only appears in a
rudimentary condition, now undergoes progressive development.
It will then be seen that the fundamental portion is first developed, and
that the superaddition of the accessory portion greatly increases the
multiformity, the complexity, and the specialty of the human nervous system, and
that it is the latest product of its evolution."
There are certain areas in
the gray matter of the forebrain of man whence proceed, it is now
generally held, stimuli to the most important groups of voluntary muscles. In one of these regions are the centres which control the
different groups of muscles of the upper extremity; and for the sake of
simplicity we may consider that the centres of the muscles which move the
shoulder, elbow, wrist, and fingers lie near to and are connected with one
another. The movements of the
shoulder and elbow, as well as those of the trunk, are fundamental and well
organized in the infant, as compared with those of the wrist and fingers, which
are accessory, and later acquired. In
order that the movements of the different segments of the fore-limb should be
properly coordinated as to force, direction, and degree, their motor centers
habitually discharge their stimuli in due sequence and degree.
This comes only through practice. Experiments
on young puppies show that their motor areas are not sufficiently developed,
until they re ten days, old, for them to make voluntary movements with their
limbs. Ferrier declares that “the
degree of development and control which a puppy reaches in ten days or a
fortnight is not attained by the human infant under a year or more.”
The infant, through the growth and development of the appropriate
accessory centres, first gains control over its foot and leg, then over its arm
and hand, and, later, over tongue and lips.
It is evident that the arms of a blacksmith, and those of a five-year-old
boy, and of an infant differ greatly as regards size, strength, and skill; but
the essential differences which exist between them reside in the nervous
mechanisms which represent the movements of which their respective muscles are
capable, rather than in the muscles themselves.
Not only are the motor nerves of the blacksmith the largest, but the
cells in his motor areas are also more numerous, larger, more branched, and more
widely connected with other cells. Exercise
plays, if not the predominant, at least a very considerable, part in producing
this result; and the still more important result, viz., that the motor centers
of the blacksmith discharge their stimuli more directly, steadily, accurately,
and tirelessly into their appropriate muscles than do those of his apprentice.
It is hardly necessary to show, though it could easily be done, did time
permit, that the organs of special sense and the sensory centers are similarly
affected and improved by exercise.
The obvious
effects of exercise are at once seen, if one compares the right and left arms of
the average blacksmith with one another.
It is well known that the centers which control the right hand are
situated in the cortex or outer layer of gray matter of certain portions of the
left fore-brain; and that those which control the left hand are in the right
fore-brain. Flechsig,
who has made exhaustive studies as to the course and number of the motor fibres
which connect the muscles of the two extremities with their respective main
centers, concludes that the
number of fibres going to the right hand is, to the number of fibres
going to the left hand, as three to two.
The mere disuse of a
muscle causes it to diminish in size. This wasting is technically called
atrophy. the most extreme forms of muscular atrophy and paralysis are due
to diseased conditions which originate in nerve centres or nerve fibres, though
to the uninstructed eye the muscles would appear to be the only organs
affected. Lesions in the central nerve system may cause the bones to atrophy,
as well as the muscles. The development of a group of muscles, of an
entire limb, or even of ones side of the body, may be arrested by reason of
certain forms of central nervous disease which occur in infancy and
childhood. Observations made upon the brains of persons born with an arm
or hand lacking, taken in connection with those made upon the brains of persons
who had had an arm or hand amputated, go to prove that the suppression or considerable
diminution of certain movements brings about a condition of atrophy, or arrested
development, as the case may be, in those centres which would normally represent
such movements. One may attain the stature and semblance of manhood, and
yet, by reason of the arrested development of certain of his motor centres, be
nothing better than an infant, or a mere animal, as regards his powers of
action; while epilepsy, paralysis, and atrophy may reduce a man, stage by stage,
to the condition of an untrained child, or of a helpless idiot, or even to that
of a living corpse.
The functional improvement of
the nervous mechanism which represents any movement, whether it be simple or
complicated, reflex, automatic, or voluntary, is the most important effect of muscular
exercise; or, in other words, muscular training which fails to develop brain
power, falls short of its aim. It is not altogether clear just how it
comes about that, through trial and repetition, an action which is at first a
difficult or impossible feat becomes a pleasurable accomplishment, then a
routine performance, and at least an almost instinctive act. But there is
a settled conviction among those who know most about healthy and diseased
nerves, that the frequent or habitual passage of stimuli from a given group in a
given movement, leads to some kind of a rearrangement of the molecules composing
the irritable protoplasm of fibres and cells, so that less and less resistance
is offered to the passage of subsequent impulses from the same source.
Somehow or other the memory of past actions and the stimuli which evoked them becomes
imbedded or organized in the motor centres. His once too vividly impressed
sensory centres cause the burnt child to dread flame; and the difficulty of
interesting an old dog in new tricks, except so far as he delights to criticize and decry them, arises from the preoccupation of his centres by old impressions,
rather than from their increasing insusceptibility to fresh ones.
From
careful studies made as to the character of the dreams of the blind, it appears
that the memory of visual objects is not organized until between the fifth and
seventh year of life. Persons born blind do not dream of objects in the
outer world; and those who become blind before attaining their fifth year do not
dream of objects seen by them before their loss of sight. They are
blind-minded as well as blind-eyed as regards such objects. There are
authentic cases recorded of persons whose memory of objects--seen before the
access of their blindness--persisted for twenty, thirty, and even fifty years;
then the record of their visual impressions became effaced, and they ceased to
bream of objects in the outer world. The case of a man born without either
hands or feet is in point here. Although he had eyesight he did not dream
of executing hand or foot movements; yet he had sufficient use of his stumps to
write what is termed "good hand." There was no record of hand or
foot movements in the centres which ordinarily control such movements; so that
he was unable to dream of movements which he had never executed. On the other
hand, the instances are very numerous in which men, who, having lost a limb by
amputation, could feel their fingers or toes while awake, and dream in sleep, or
when awake, of making complicated movements with their lost members.
"Persons who have had an arm amputated," says, Dr. Weir Mitchell,
"are frequently able to will a movement of the hand, and apparently to execute
it to a greater or less extent. A small number have entire and painless
freedom as regards all parts of the hand." They must be blind-minded,
indeed, who can deny in the face such facts that muscular exercise plays a part
in the development of brain power.
"The muscles," says
Dr. Crichton-Browne, an eminent English writer on insanity and kindred diseases,
"not only, by the locomotions which they render possible, widen the field
from which our sense impressions are gathered, but also by the experiences which
their own activities involve, expand our mental resources a thousand fold.
An analysis of our ideas at once reveals to us that we have few that are of
purely sensory origin, which are properly limited to color, but ocular
impressions combined with ideal colored outline with an ideal circular sweep of
the eyeballs, or it may be of the tactile impressions coinciding with an ideal
circumduction of the arm or hand, or perhaps both these factors combined.
And so it is with our ideas of weight, distance, and resistance, which all
involve sensory and motor factors and to revive in memory any such ideas is to
revive both the sensory and motor elements of their composition, and to repeat
definitely in certain nerve centres the processes which correspond with certain
motor acts."
From this we might deduce that
swaddling bands so applied at birth as to restrain all muscular movements, and
kept on during infancy and childhood, would result in idiocy--a speculation to
which the wretched muscular development of most idiots and imbeciles, and the fact their mental training is most successfully begun and carried out through
muscular lessons, give some countenance. We should also have to infer,
that in order to hold up a sound and vigorous brain, we must insure free
exercise to the different groups of muscles in the order of the development of
their centres, and must in no degree interfere with the natural sequence of
their evolution. That being so, we must necessarily ascertain what that natural
sequence is which is so important a guide to education; for. in our present
ignorance of it, we may unwittingly be doing much mischief.
Suppose that we are encroaching on a time at which hand
centres ought to receive their most valuable education,--their nascent
period,--and are devoting that time to the cultivation of the tongue and lip
centres, then we should be impairing the full development of the brain; for the
hand-controlling centre, if not fully exercised at its nascent period, can never
afterwards attain to the highest cunning. But it seems that not only
tongue, but hand, and foot, and eye, and arm, and every muscle of the body, must
be trained in due season, if education is do what we expect of it, and result,
not in headaches, and imbecilities, and nervousness, and insanity, but in
well-balanced growth of body and mind.
It seems to me evident that muscular exercise deserves more
attention than educators in this country have ever been willing to give it, and
that when properly chosen, regulated, and guided, it may make a boy into a
better man, in many respects, than his father was, and enable him to transmit to
his progeny a veritable aptitude for better thoughts and actions. Herein
lies the power of the race for self-improvement, and the evolution of a higher
type of man upon the earth.
"I do not think," says Bagehot, in his
"Physics and Politics," "that any who do not acquire this notion
of a transmitted nerve-element will ever understand the connective tissue of civilization.
We have here the continuous force which binds age to age, which enables each to
begin with some improvement on the last, if the last did itself improve, which
makes each civilization, not a set of detached dots, but a line of color surely
enhancing shad by shade. there is by this doctrine a physical cause of
improvement form generation to generation, and no imagination which has
apprehended it can forget it; but unless you appreciate that cause in its subtle
materialism; unless you see it, as it were playing upon the nerves of men, and
age after age making nicer music from finer chords, you cannot comprehend the
principles of inheritance, either in its mystery or its power."
We have seen that the effects of exercise upon a single
muscle are chiefly two. On the one hand, there results a general condition
which may be termed the heightened health of the neuromuscular machine, which
state of health involves the attainment and maintenance of a normal degree of
size, strength, and working power in its structural parts; and on the other
hand, a more complex ands special effect, viz. the acquisition of organization,
transmission, and regulation of stimuli. The ends of exercise may then be
characterized as the promotion of health and acquisition of correct habits of
action. The first is a hygienic end, while the second is a distinctly
educational end. It matters not whether we consider a single muscle, which
admits of only a single limited motion, or a group of muscles, or the communal
structure we call the human body, or a class of school children, or a regiment
of soldiers; the end of exercise in each case are the same and can only be
attained by a combination of hygienic and educational measures.
The main field of education is, then, the nervous system, and
the especial province of physical training is found in its accessory
portions. The principles of all forms of physical training, however
various and divergent their special ends may be, are based upon the power of the
nervous system to receive impressions and register them on their effects; in
other words, upon its ability to memorize the part it has played in acquired movements,
and on occasions to recall and revive such movements.
It is coming to be clearly recognized that the function of
our public and preparatory schools and colleges is not fit their scholars to
engage in as specialists in either intellectual, commercial, or industrial
pursuits. The same rule holds good as to the kind, or, rather, degree of
physical training which should be aimed at in our schools and colleges. It
is not their business to train up ball-players, carpenters, clerks, or
professionals of any kind. General bodily training is the kind demanded;
but training so general that it is vaguely, or spasmodically, or half-heartedly
carried out, or worse still, that is left to run itself in accordance with the
whim of frenzy of the persons to be trained, will surely and deservedly fall
short of success. Intelligence, system, organization, funds, and patience
are just as imperatively required in physical training as in the training of
engineers, musicians, or philologians.
The law of the evolution of the nervous system seems to me to
furnish a sufficient criterion by which to estimate the worth or success of any
scheme or system of physical training. Any system that does not provide
first of all and continuously for the training and exercise of the central or
fundamental groups of muscles will fail utterly in securing either the hygienic
or the educational end of exercise; and any system which substitutes training of
the accessory neuro-muscular mechanisms for that of the fundamental ones, or
which exacts undue work of underdeveloped accessory centres, or attempts their
training out of the proper order of their ripening, is bound to contribute more towards
the promotion of brain forcing than towards its prevention.
The most fundamental mechanisms of the trunk are those which
are concerned in the movements of respiration and of circulation. They are
quite fully organized at birth; but the need for their exercise ceases only with
the life of the organism. The centres which represent the muscles by means
of which the trunk is kept erect and balanced upon the pelvis are accessory, if compared
with those which represent the muscles of locomotion. The muscles of the trunk
are called into fuller and more frequent play as soon as the child ceases to go
on all-fours, and it must then learn, after a fashion, which may exigently
demand correction or further training later on, to co-ordinate the movements of
its limbs with those of its trunk. The child learns to flex its thigh upon
the body, the leg upon the thigh, and to elevate the hell from the ground considerably
earlier than it can raise its toes, so that the foot shall swing clear of the ground
and it be enabled to begin another step. What folly it would be to try to teach
a toddling infant to run, or jump, or dance!
Similarly the training of the hand
and fingers should not only be preceded, but accompanied by exercise of the
muscles of the forearm, arm, shoulder and trunk. You shall not gather ripe
manual cunning from a limb whose trunk attachments are undersized, untrained, or
deformed. this fact points to the danger of exacting genuine manual
training from young pupils, especially if it be divorced from its proper
adjuvant and corrective general gymnastics. It is simply impossible to
make any technical drill, such as wood-turning, penmanship, singing, piano
exercises, or even the manual of arms, meet the proper ends of bodily education
either for children, adolescents, or adults. Technical training, appealing
as it does to the most accessory mechanisms, should be grounded on general
hygienic and educational training; should not be pushed too early a stage; and
should be left, where it belongs, in the hands of special trainers.
Pastimes, out-of-doors sports, and systematic gymnastics are
the forms of exercise which yield the best results in the physical training of
school children and college students. The plays of the kindergarten, the
athletic sports to which British and American youth are so devoted, and the
systematic gymnastics of the Swedes and Germans have all developed from one
germ, from healthful play, that is; the vital energy of this germ is found in
the universal and ineradicable impulse of all healthy children to play.
The children of every generation, no matter how prim, or sour, or ascetic their
parents may be, are always playing animals. That it is so is a most
fortunate thing for the race; were it not so, the victims of war, pestilence,
and education, and of that voracious monster men call business, would be vastly
more numerous than they are.
In
the athletic sports of young men we see the highest and fullest expression of
the play instinct. The essential difference between athletics and
gymnastics is one of aim. The aim of athletics, unless of the illegitimate
professional sort, is pleasurable activity for the sake of recreation; that of
gymnastics is discipline or training for pleasure, health, and skill. We
have but to compare the aims, methods, and results of each, and to call to mind
the characteristics of the nations which have
affected athletics on the one hand and gymnastics on the other, to perceive that
gymnastics are more highly developed, and present more features of educational
value. Gymnastics, as compared with athletics, are more comprehensive in
there aims, more formal, elaborate, and systematic in their methods, and are productive
of more solid and considerable results.
I have no disposition to disparage athletic sports. I
would that they were more general and better regulated than they are in our
country. I believe that they are valuable as a means of recreation; that
they conduce to bodily growth and improvement; and that their moral effects are
of value, since they call for self-subordination, public spirit, and
co-operative effort, and serve to reveal the dominant characteristics and
tendencies, as regards the temper, disposition, and force of will of those who
engage in them. But they bear so indelibly the marks of their childish origin,
they are so crude and unspecialized as to their methods, as to render them inadequate
for the purposes of a thorough-going and broad system of bodily education.
It is well to promote them, and it is becoming increasingly necessary to regulate
them; but it is unwise and short-sighted to consider them as constituting
anything more than a single stage in the best bodily training.
Gymnastics have been most popular and genera, among the most
highly trained nations, such as the Greeks, of old and the Germans of
to-day. The most athletic, and, at the same time, one of the most
ill-trained of modern nations, is the British. I mean simply this, that an
Englishman believes, and acts upon the belief, that you come to do to a right
thing by doing it; whereas, the Germans leave little or nothing to the rule of
thumb, not even in bodily education. German gymnastics embrace three well-marked
fields or departments; viz., popular gymnastics, school gymnastics, and military
gymnastics. The organization of the last two departments is maintained and
controlled by the government for strictly educational purposes; while the
Turnvereine, as the popular gymnastics societies are called, are voluntary
associations of a social and semi-educational but wholly popular and patriotic
character. The fondness of the German people for gymnastics is as marked a
national trait as is the liking of the British for athletic sports. The
German system of gymnastics has been most highly developed in Prussia, where not
far from a fifth of the population is undergoing systematic physical training at
the present time, under the combined agencies of the schools, the army, and the
Turnvereine. In Switzerland and in Norway and Sweden, you will find school
and military gymnastics, especially in Sweden, quite as fully developed as in
Germany, and popular gymnastics not so much so.
One of the main defects of our school training hitherto is
found in the fact that lessons and tasks are set which involve the activity of the
accessory parts of the nervous system, before its fundamental portions have been
properly built up and trained. The result of this inverted and unnatural
order of teaching is seen in myriad forms of nervous disease which find
expression in St. Vitus' dance, grimaces, spasms, as well as in the protean
forms of headache, nervous exhaustion, and mental derangement, so common
nowadays amongst sedentary people and brain-workers. For the purpose of
forestalling such results, I would encourage games for boys and girls during
their school life; and would require of them compulsory attendance upon
instruction in gymnastics, drawing and modeling, and in the elements of certain
selected handicrafts for general educational purposes. Physical training
has long been recognized as an indispensable means for awakening and developing
mental faculty in idiots; and has been employed with astonishing success, for
several years, in the training of criminal dullards in the State Reformatory at
Elmira, New York. Did time permit, it would be interesting to consider the
methods and results of teaching gymnastics to idiots and criminals. I must
content myself with referring you to the writings of the late Dr. Edward Seguin,
of New York, the reports of the managers of the Elmira Reformatory, and the
brochures of Dr. H. D. Wey.
My plea is, that inasmuch as physical training enters of
necessity into the training of every school child, every apprentice, every
recruit, those who undertake to train scholars or craftsmen, artists or authors,
should see to it that mental training should not be pursued to the neglect of
detriment of bodily training; that each kind of training should be given its
proper place in the compulsory curriculum of our public schools; and that bodily
training should be given in appropriately fitted places, by specially trained
and well-qualified teachers, in a systematic, well-ordered, and rational way.
It is not within the scope of this presentation to set forth
the lessons to be learned from the best European systems of physical training,
or to show how fragmentary and defective our so-called American systems have
been and are; but I may remark, in passing, that a careful study of the German
and Swedish systems of school gymnastics will be found an indispensable
preliminary step for those who propose to organize a natural, rational, safe and
effective system of American physical education.
The price of wisdom may be beyond that of rubies; but the
price of health, which Plato conceived to the natural order of governance of one
another, in the parts of the body, its price is above that of either gems or
wisdom.