Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene

by G. Stanley Hall

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.

We have space but for two reports believed to be typical. Enebuske reports on the effects of seven months' training on young women averaging 22.3 years. The figures are based on the 50 percentile column.

————————+————+—————————————————+———— | | Strength of | |Lung | | | |right |left |Total |capacity| legs |back |chest|forearm|forearm|Strength ————————+————+———+——-+——-+———-+———-+———— Before training | 2.65 | 93 |65.5 | 27 | 26 | 23 | 230 After six months| 2.87 | 120 |81.5 | 32 | 28 | 25 | 293 ————————+————+———+——-+——-+———-+———-+————

By comparing records of what he deems standard normal growth with that of 188 naval cadets from sixteen to twenty-one, who had special and systematic training, just after the period of most rapid growth in height, Beyer concluded that the effect of four years of this added a little over an inch of stature, and that this gain as greatest at the beginning. This increase was greatest for the youngest cadets. He found also a marked increase in weight, nearly the same for each year from seventeen to twenty one. This he thought more easily influenced by exercise than height. A high vital index ratio of lung capacity to weight is a very important attribute of good training. Beyer[1] found, however, that the addition of lung area gained by exercise did not keep up with the increase thus caused in muscular substance, and that the vital index always became smaller in those who had gained weight and strength by special physical training. How much gain in weight is desirable beyond the point where the lung capacity increases at an equal rate is unknown. If such measurements were applied to the different gymnastic systems, we might be able to compare their efficiency, which would be a great desideratum in view of the unfortunate rivalry between them. Total strength, too, can be greatly increased. Beyer thinks that from sixteen to twenty-one it may exceed the average or normal increment fivefold, and he adds, "I firmly believe that the now so wonderful performances of most of our strong men are well within the reach of the majority of healthy men, if such performances were a serious enough part of their ambition to make them do the exercises necessary to develop them." Power of the organs to respond to good training by increased strength probably reaches well into middle life.