Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene by G. Stanley Hall
page 76 of 425 (17%)
page 76 of 425 (17%)
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students who are now unaffected by the influence of athletics. By
these methods the motivation of gymnastics, which now in large measure goes to waste in enthusiasm, could be utilised to aid the greatly needed intellectualization of those exercises which in their nature are more akin to work than play. Indeed, Gutsmuths's first definition of athletics was "work under the garb of youthful pleasure." So to develop these courses that they could chiefly, if not entirely, satisfy the requirements for the A.B. degree, would coordinate the work of the now isolated curriculum of the training-schools with that of the college and thus broaden the sphere of the latter; but besides its culture value, which I hold very high, such a step would prepare for the new, important, and, as we have seen, very inadequately manned profession of physical trainers. This has, moreover, great but yet latent and even unsuspected capacities for the morals of our academic youth. Grote states that among the ancient Greeks one-half of all education as devoted to the body, and Galton urges that they as much excelled us as we do the African negro. They held that if physical perfection was cultivated, moral and mental excellence would follow; and that, without this, national culture rests on an insecure basis. In our day there are many new reasons to believe that the best nations of the future will be those which give most intelligent care to the body. [Footnote 1: See H.G. Beyer. The Influence of Exercise on Growth. American Physical Education Review, September-December, 1896, vol. I, pp. 76-87.] [Footnote 2: J.H. McCurdy, Physical Training as a Profession. Association Seminar, March, 1902, vol. 10, pp. 11-24.] |
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