COMPLETE LIVING
The question raised.—That education is a preparation for complete living has been quoted by every teacher who lays any sort of claim to the standard definitions. Indeed, so often and so glibly has the quotation been made that it is well-nigh axiomatic and altogether trite. But we still await any clear explanation of what is meant by complete living. On this point we are still groping, with no prophetic voice to tell us the way. By implication we have had hints, and much has been said on the negative side, but the positive side still lies fallow. When asked for an explanation, those who give the quotation resort to circumlocution and, at length, give another definition of education, apparently conscious of the mathematical dictum that things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. So we continue to travel in a circle, with but feeble attempts to deviate from the course.
The vitalized school an exemplification.—Nor will this chapter attempt to resolve the difficult situation in which we are placed. It is not easy to define living, much less complete living. All that is hoped for here is to bring the matter to the attention of all teachers and to cause them to realize that the quest for a definition of complete living will be for them and for their pupils an exhilarating experience. The vitalized school will belie its name if it does not strive toward a solution of the difficulty, and any school that approximates a satisfactory definition will be proclaimed a public benefactor. In fact, the school cannot lay claim to the distinction of being vitalized if it fails to exemplify complete living, in some appreciable degree, and if it fails to groove this sort of living into a habit that will persist throughout the years. This is the big task that the school must essay if it would emancipate itself from the trammels of tradition and become a leader in the larger, better way. Complete living must become the ideal of the school if it would realize the conception of education of which it is a professed exponent.
Incomplete living.—The man who walks with a crutch; the man who is afflicted with a felon; the man who lacks a hand or even a finger,—cannot experience complete living. Through the power of adaptation the man with a crutch may compass more difficult situations than the man with sound legs will attempt, but he cannot realize all the possibilities of life that a sound body would vouchsafe to him. The man without hands may learn to write with his toes, but he is not employed as a teacher of penmanship. His life is a restricted one and, therefore, less than complete. We marvel at the exhibitions of skill displayed by the maimed, but we feel no envy. We may not be able to duplicate their achievements, but we feel that we have ample compensation in the normal use of our members. We know instinctively that, in the solitude of their meditations, they must experience poignant regrets that they are not as other people, and that they must pass through life under a handicap.
The sound body.—It is evident, therefore, that soundness of body is a condition precedent to complete living. The body is the organism by means of which the mind and the spirit function in terms of life; and, if this organism is imperfect, the functioning will prove less than complete. Hence, it is the province of the school to so organize all its activities that the physical powers of the pupils shall be fully conserved. The president of a large university says that during his incumbency of seventeen years they have found only one young woman of physical perfection and not a single young man, although the tests have been applied to thousands. College students, it will be readily conceded, are a selected group; and yet even in such a group not a physically perfect young man was found in tests extending over seventeen years. If a like condition should be discovered in the scoring of live stock at our fairs, there would ensue a careful investigation of causes in the hope of finding a remedy.
Personal efficiency.—We shall not achieve national efficiency until every citizen has achieved personal efficiency, and physical fitness is one of the fundamental conditions precedent to personal efficiency. Here we have the blue print for the guidance of society and the school. If we are ever to achieve national efficiency, we must see to it that every man and woman, every boy and girl, has a strong, healthy body that is fully able to execute the behests of mind and spirit. This may require a stricter censorship of marriage licenses, including physical examinations; it may require more stringent laws on our statute books; it may require radical changes in our methods of physical training; and it may require the state to assume some of the functions of the home when the home reveals its inability or unwillingness to cope with the situation. Heroic treatment may be necessary; but until we as a people have the courage to apply the remedies that the diagnosis shows to be necessary, we shall look in vain for improvement.
Physical training.—Seeing that it is so difficult to find a man or a woman among our people who has attained physical perfection, it behooves society and the schools to take a critical inventory of their methods of physical training and their meager accomplishments as a preliminary survey looking to a change in our procedure. We seem to have delegated scientific physical training to athletics and pugilism, with but scant concern for our people as a whole. If pink-tea calisthenics as practiced mildly in our schools has failed to produce robust bodies, then it is incumbent upon us to adopt a régime of beefsteak. What the traditional school has failed to do the vitalized school must attempt to do or suffer the humiliation of striking its colors. There is no middle course; it must either win a victory or admit defeat in common with the traditional school. The standard is high, of course, but every standard of the vitalized school is and ought to be high.
Cigarettes.—If the use of cigarettes is devitalizing our boys, and this can be determined, then the manufacture and sale must be prohibited unless our legislative bodies would plead guilty to the charge of impotence. But we are told that public sentiment conditions the enactment of laws. If such be the case, then the school and its auxiliaries should feel it a duty to generate public sentiment. If cigarettes are harmful, then they should be banished, and the task is not an impossible one by any means. As to the injurious effects of cigarettes, as distinguished an authority as Thomas A. Edison says the following:
“The injurious agent in cigarettes comes principally from the burning paper wrapper. The substance thereby formed is called ‘acrolein.’ It has a violent action on the nerve centers, producing degeneration of the cells of the brain, which is quite rapid among boys. Unlike most narcotics, this degeneration is permanent and uncontrollable. I employ no person who smokes cigarettes.”
We have eliminated dangerous explosives from our Fourth of July celebrations, and the ban can as easily be placed upon any other dangerous product. Just here we inevitably meet the cry of paternalism, but we shall always be confronted by the question to what extent the government should stand aside and see its citizens follow the bent of their appetites and passions over the brink of destruction. It is the inherent right of government to maintain its own integrity, and this it can do only through the conservation of the powers of its citizens. If paternalism is necessary to this end, then paternalism is a governmental virtue. Better, by far, some paternalism than a race of weaklings.
Military training.—We may shrink away from military training in the schools, just as we shrink from the régime of pugilism; but we may profit by observing both these types of training in our efforts to develop some method of training that will render our young people physically fit. We need some type of training that will eliminate round and drooping shoulders, weak chests, shambling gait, sluggish circulation, and shallow breathing. The boys and girls need to be, first of all, healthy animals with large powers of endurance, elastic, buoyant, graceful, and in general well set up. These conditions constitute the foundation for the superstructure of education. The placid, anæmic, fiberless child is ill prepared in physique to attain to that mastery of the mental and spiritual world that makes for an approximation to complete living.
Examples cited.—If one will but make a mental appraisement of the first one hundred people he meets, he will see among the number quite a few who reveal a lack of physical vigor. They droop and slouch along and seem to be dragging their bodies instead of being propelled through space by their bodies. They can neither stand nor walk as a human being ought to stand and walk, and their entire ensemble is altogether unbeautiful. We feel instinctively that, being fashioned in the image of their Maker, they have sadly declined from their high estate. Their bodily attitude seems a sort of apology for life, and we long to invoke the aid of some teacher of physical training to rescue them from themselves and restore them to their rightful heritage. They are weak, apparently ill-nourished, scrawny, ill-groomed; and we know, without the aid of words, that neither a vigorous mind nor a great spirit would choose that type of body as its habitation.
The body subject to the mind.—A healthy, vigorous, symmetrical body that performs all its functions like a well-articulated, well-adjusted mechanism is the beginning, but only a beginning. Next comes a mind that is so well trained that it knows what orders to give to the body and how to give them. Many a strong body enters the door of a saloon because the mind is not sufficiently trained to issue wise orders. The mind was befuddled before the body became so, and the body becomes so only because the mind commands. Intoxication, primarily, is a mental apostasy, and the body cannot do otherwise than obey. If the mind were intent upon securing a book at the library, the body would not have seen the door of the saloon, but would have been urgent to reach the library. There is neither fiction nor facetiousness in the adage, “An idle brain is the devil’s workshop.” On the contrary, the saying is crammed full of psychology for the thoughtful observer. Hence, when we are training the mind we are wreaking destruction upon this workshop.
Freedom a condition precedent.—Complete living is impossible outside the domain of freedom. The prisons show forth no examples of complete living. But mental thralldom is quite as inimical to complete living as thralldom of the body. The mind must know in order to move among the things of life in freedom. Ignorance is slavery. The mind that is unable to read the inscription on a monument stands baffled and helpless, and no form of slavery can be more abject. The man who cannot read the bill of fare of life is in no position to revel in the good things that life offers. The man who cannot read the signboards of life gropes and flounders about in the byways and so misses the charms. If he knows the way, he has freedom; otherwise he is in thralldom. The man who cannot interpret life as it shows itself in hill, in valley, in stream and rock and tree, goes through life with bandaged eyes, and that condition affords no freedom.
Street signs.—A man who had been traveling through Europe for several weeks, and had finally reached London, wrote enthusiastically of his pleasure at being able to read the street signs. All summer he had felt restricted and hampered, but when he reached a country where the street signs were intelligible, he gained his freedom. Had he been as familiar with Italian, German, and French as he is with English, life would have been for him far more nearly complete during that summer and therefore much more agreeable and fertile. There is no more exhilarating experience than to be able to read the street signs along the highway of life, and this ability is one of the great objectives of every vitalized school.
Trained minds.—Nature reveals her inmost secrets only to the trained mind. No power can force her, no wealth can bribe her, to disclose these secrets to others. Only the mind that is trained can gain admission to her treasure house to revel in its glories. John Burroughs lives in a world that the ignorant man cannot know. The trained mind alone has the key that will unlock libraries, art galleries, the treasure houses of science, language, history, and art. The untrained minds must stand outside and win what comfort they can from their wealth, their social status, or whatever else they would fain substitute for the training that would admit them. All these things are parts of life, and those who cannot gain admission to these conservatories of knowledge cannot know life in its completeness.
Achievements of trained minds.—In order to know life in the large, the mind must be able to leap from the multiplication table to the stars; must become intimate with the movements of the tides, the glacier, and the planets; must translate the bubbling fountain and the eruption of Vesuvius; must be able to interpret the whisper of the zephyr and the diapason of the forest; must be able to hear music in the chirp of the cricket as well as in the oratorios; must be able to delve into the recesses of the mine and scale the mountain tops; must know the heart throbs of Little Nell as well as of Cicero and Demosthenes; must be able to see the processions of history from the cradle of the race to the latest proclamation; and must sit in the councils of the poets, the statesmen, the orators, the artists, the scientists, and the historians of all time. A mind thus trained can enter into the very heart of life and know it by experience.
Things of the spirit.—But education is a spiritual process, as we have been told; and, therefore, education is without value unless it touches the spirit. Indeed, it is only by the spirit that we may test the quality of education. It is spirit that sets metes and bounds and points the way to the fine things of life. A man may live in the back alley of life or on the boulevard, according to the dictates of the spirit. If his spirit cannot react to the finer things, his way will lie among the coarse and bizarre. If he cannot appreciate the glory that is revealed upon the mountain, he will gravitate to the lower levels. If his spirit is not attuned to majestic harmonies, he will drift down to association with his own kind. If he cannot thrill with pleasure at the beauty and fragrance of the lily of the valley, he will seek out the gaudy sunflower. If his spirit cannot rise to the plane of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, he will roam into fields that are less fruitful. The spirit that is rightly attuned lifts him away from the sordid into the realms of the chaste and the glorified; away from the coarse and ugly into the realm of things that are fine and beautiful; and away from the things that are mean and petty into the zone of the big, the true, the noble, and the good. And so with body, mind, and spirit thus doing their perfect work, he can, at least, look over into the promised land of complete living.
Altruism.—We are commanded to let our light shine, and this command is a noble and an inspiring one. A man who by such training as has been depicted approximates complete living is prepared to let his light shine primarily because he has light, and in the next place because his training has made him generous in spirit and altruistic; and his greatest joy comes from letting his light so shine that others may catch his spirit and move up to higher planes of living.