How pervasive this femininity is, which is slowly transforming our schools, is strikingly seen in the church. Gulick holds that the reason why only some seven per cent of the young men of the country are in the churches, while most members and workers are women, is that the qualities demanded are the feminine ones of love, rest, prayer, trust, desire for fortitude to endure, a sense of atonement—traits not involving ideals that most stir young men. The church has not yet learned to appeal to the more virile qualities. Fielding Hall[14] asks why Christ and Buddha alone of great religious teachers were rejected by their own race and accepted elsewhere. He answers that these mild beliefs of peace, nonresistance, and submission, rejected by virile warrior races, Jews and ancient Hindus, were adopted where women were free and led in these matters. Confucianism, Mohammedanism, etc., are virile, and so indigenous, and in such forms of faith and worship women have small place. This again suggests how the sex that rules the heart controls men.
Too much can hardly be said in favor of cold baths and swimming at this age. Marro[15] quotes Father Kneipp, and almost rivals his hydrotherapeutic enthusiasm. Cold bathing sends the blood inward partly by the cold which contracts the capillaries of the skin and tissue immediately underlying it, and partly by the pressure of the water over all the dermal surface, quickens the activity of kidneys, lungs, and digestive apparatus, and the reactive glow is the best possible tonic for dermal circulation. It is the best of all gymnastics for the nonstriated or involuntary muscles and for the heart and blood vessels. This and the removal of the products of excretion preserve all the important dermal functions which are so easily and so often impaired in modern life, lessen the liability to skin diseases, promote freshness of complexion; and the moral effects of plunging into cold and supporting the body in deep water is not inconsiderable in strengthening a spirit of hardihood and reducing overtenderness to sensory discomforts. The exercise of swimming is unique in that nearly all the movements and combinations are such as are rarely used otherwise, and are perhaps in a sense ancestral and liberal rather than directly preparatory for future avocations. Its stimulus for heart and lungs is, by general consent of all writers upon the subject, most wholesome and beneficial. Nothing so directly or quickly reduces to the lowest point the plethora of the sex organs. The very absence of clothes and running on the beach is exhilarating and gives a sense of freedom. Where practicable it is well to dispense with bathing suits, even the scantiest. The warm bath tub is enfeebling and degenerative, despite the cold spray later, while the free swim in cold water is most invigorating.
Happily, city officials, teachers, and sanitarians are now slowly realizing the great improvement in health and temper that comes from bathing and are establishing beach and surf, spray, floating and plunge summer baths and swimming pools; often providing instruction even in swimming in clothes, undressing in the water, treading water, and rescue work, free as well as fee days, bathing suits, and, in London, places for nude bathing after dark; establishing time and distance standards with certificates and even prizes; annexing toboggan slides, swings, etc., realizing that in both the preference of youth and in healthful and moral effects, probably nothing outranks this form of exercise. Such is its strange fascination that, according to one comprehensive census, the passion to get to the water outranks all other causes of truancy, and plays an important part in the motivation of runaways. In the immense public establishment near San Francisco, provided by private munificence, there are accommodations for all kinds of bathing in hot and cold and in various degrees of fresh and salt water, in closed spaces and in the open sea, for small children and adults, with many appliances and instructors, all in one great covered arena with seats in an amphitheater for two thousand spectators, and many adjuncts and accessories. So elsewhere the presence of visitors is now often invited and provided for. Sometimes wash-houses and public laundries are annexed. Open hours and longer evenings and seasons are being prolonged.
Prominent among the favorite games of early puberty and the years just before are those that involve passive motion and falling, like swinging in its many forms, including the May-pole and single rope varieties. Mr. Lee reports that children wait late in the evening and in cold weather for a turn at a park swing. Psychologically allied to these are wheeling and skating. Places for the latter are now often provided by the fire department, which in many cities floods hundreds of empty lots. Ponds are cleared of snow and horse-plowed, perhaps by the park commission, which often provides lights and perhaps ices the walks and streets for coasting, erects shelters, and devises space economy for as many diamonds, bleachers, etc., as possible. Games of hitting, striking, and throwing balls and other objects, hockey, tennis, all the courts of which are usually crowded, golf and croquet, and sometimes fives, cricket, bowling, quoits, curling, etc., have great "thumogenic" or emotional power.
Leg exercise has perhaps a higher value than that of any other part. Man is by definition an upright being, but only after a long apprenticeship.[16] Thus the hand was freed from the necessity of locomotion and made the servant of the mind. Locomotion overcomes the tendency to sedentary habits in modern schools and life, and helps the mind to helpful action, so that a peripatetic philosophy is more normal than that of the easy chair and the study lamp. Hill-climbing is unexcelled as a stimulus at once of heart, lungs, and blood. If Hippocrates is right, inspiration is possible only on a mountain-top. Walking, running, dancing, skating, coasting are also alterative and regulative of sex, and there is a deep and close though not yet fully explained reciprocity between the two. Arm work is relatively too prominent a feature in gymnasia. Those who lead excessively sedentary lives are prone to be turbulent and extreme in both passion and opinion, as witness the oft-adduced revolutionary disposition of cobblers.
The play problem is now fairly open and is vast in its relation to many other things. Roof playgrounds, recreation piers, schoolyards and even school-buildings, open before and after school hours; excursions and outings of many kinds and with many purposes, which seem to distinctly augment growth; occupation during the long vacation when, beginning with spring, most juvenile crime is committed; theatricals, which according to some police testimony lessen the number of juvenile delinquents; boys' clubs with more or less self-government of the George Junior Republic and other types, treated in another chapter; nature-study; the distinctly different needs and propensities of both good and evil in different nationalities; the advantages of playground fences and exclusion, their disciplinary worth, and their value as resting places; the liability that "the boy without a playground will become the father without a job"; the relation of play and its slow transition to manual and industrial education at the savage age when a boy abhors all regular occupation; the necessity of exciting interest, not by what is done for boys, but by what they do; the adjustment of play to sex; the determination of the proper average age of maximal zest in and good from sandbox, ring-toss, bean-bag, shuffle-board, peg top, charity, funeral play, prisoner's base, hill-dill; the value and right use of apparatus, and of rabbits, pigeons, bees, and a small menagerie in the playground; tan-bark, clay, the proper alternation of excessive freedom, that often turns boys stale through the summer, with regulated activities; the disciplined "work of play" and sedentary games; the value of the washboard rubbing and of the hand and knee exercise of scrubbing, which a late writer would restore for all girls with clever and Greek-named play apparatus; as well as digging, shoveling, tamping, pick-chopping, and hod-carrying exercises in the form of games for boys; the relations of women's clubs, parents' clubs, citizens' leagues and unions, etc., to all this work—such are the practical problems.
The playground movement encounters its chief obstacles in the most crowded and slum districts, where its greatest value and success was expected for boys in the early teens, who without supervision are prone to commit abuses upon property and upon younger children,[17] and are so disorderly as to make the place a nuisance, and who resent the "fathering" of the police, without, at least, the minimum control of a system of permits and exclusions. If hoodlums play at all, they become infatuated with baseball and football, especially punting; they do not take kindly to the soft large ball of the Hall House or the Civic League, and prefer at first scrub games with individual self-exhibition to organized teams. Lee sees the "arboreal instincts of our progenitors" in the very strong propensity of boys from ten to fourteen to climb in any form; to use traveling rings, generally occupied constantly to their fullest extent; to jump from steps and catch a swinging trapeze; to go up a ladder and slide down poles; to use horizontal and parallel bars. The city boy has plenty of daring at this age, but does not know what he can do and needs more supervision than the country youth. The young tough is commonly present, and though admired and copied by younger boys, it is, perhaps, as often for his heroic as for his bad traits.
Dr. Sargent and others have well pointed out that athletics afford a wealth of new and profitable topics for discussion and enthusiasm which helps against the triviality and mental vacuity into which the intercourse of students is prone to lapse. It prompts to discussion of diet and regimen. It gives a new standard of honor. For a member of a team to break training would bring reprobation and ostracism, for he is set apart to win fame for his class or college. It supplies a splendid motive against all errors and vices that weaken or corrupt the body. It is a wholesome vent for the reckless courage that would otherwise go to disorder or riotous excess. It supplies new and advantageous topics for compositions and for terse, vigorous, and idiomatic theme-writing, is a great aid to discipline, teaches respect for deeds rather than words or promises, lays instructors under the necessity of being more interesting, that their work be not jejune or dull by contrast; again the business side of managing great contests has been an admirable school for training young men to conduct great and difficult financial operations, sometimes involving $100,000 or more, and has thus prepared some for successful careers. It furnishes now the closest of all links between high school and college, reduces the number of those physically unfit for college, and should give education generally a more real and vigorous ideal. Its obvious dangers are distraction from study and overestimation of the value of victory, especially in the artificial glamours which the press and the popular furor give to great games; unsportsmanlike secret tricks and methods, over-emphasis of combative and too stalwart impulses, and a disposition to carry things by storm, by rush-line tactics; friction with faculties, and censure or neglect of instructors who take unpopular sides on hot questions; action toward license after games, spasmodic excitement culminating in excessive strain for body and mind, with alternations of reaction; "beefiness"; overdevelopment of the physical side of life, and, in some cases, premature features of senility in later life, undergrowth of the accessory motor parts and powers, and erethic diathesis that makes steady and continued mental toil seem monotonous, dull, and boresome.
The propensity to codify sports, to standardize the weight and size of their implements, and to reduce them to what Spencer calls regimentation, is a outcrop of uniformitarianism that works against that individuation which is one of the chief advantages of free play. This, to be sure, has developed old-fashioned rounders to modern baseball, and this is well, but it is seen in the elaborate Draconian laws, diplomacy, judicial and legislative procedures, concerning "eligibility, transfer, and even sale of players." In some games international conformity is gravely discussed. Even where there is no tyranny and oppression, good form is steadily hampering nature and the free play of personality. Togs and targets, balls and bats, rackets and oars are graded or numbered, weighed, and measured, and every emergency is legislated on and judged by an autocratic martinet, jealous of every prerogative and conscious of his dignity. All this separates games from the majority and makes for specialism and professionalism. Not only this, but men are coming to be sized up for hereditary fitness in each point and for each sport. Runners, sprinters, and jumpers,[18] we are told, on the basis of many careful measurements, must be tall, with slender bodies, narrow but deep chests, longer legs than the average for their height, the lower leg being especially long, with small calf, ankle, and feet, small arms, narrow hips, with great power of thoracic inflation, and thighs of small girth. Every player must be studied by trainers for ever finer individual adjustments. His dosage of work must be kept well within the limits of his vitality, and be carefully adjusted to his recuperative power. His personal nascent periods must be noted, and initial embarrassment carefully weeded out.
The field of play is as wide as life and its varieties far outnumber those of industries and occupations in the census. Plays and games differ in seasons, sex, and age. McGhee[19] has shown on the basis of some 8,000 children, that running plays are pretty constant for boys from six to seventeen, but that girls are always far behind boys and run steadily less from eight to eighteen. In games of choice, boys showed a slight rise at sixteen and seventeen, and girls a rapid increase at eleven and a still more rapid one after sixteen. In games of imitation girls excel and show a marked, as boys do a slight, pubescent fall. In those games involving rivalry boys at first greatly excel girls, but are overtaken by the latter in the eighteenth year, both showing marked pubescent increment. Girls have the largest number of plays and specialise on a few less than boys, and most of these plays are of the unorganized kinds. Johnson[20] selected from a far larger number 440 plays and games and arranged the best of them in a course by school grades, from the first to the eighth, inclusive, and also according to their educational value as teaching observation, reading and spelling, language, arithmetic, geography, history, and biography, physical training, and specifically as training legs, hand, arm, back, waist, abdominal muscles, chest, etc. Most of our best games are very old and, Johnson thinks, have deteriorated. But children are imitative and not inventive in their games, and easily learn new ones. Since the Berlin Play Congress in 1894 the sentiment has grown that these are of national importance and are preferable to gymnastics both for soul and body. Hence we have play-schools, teachers, yards, and courses, both for their own value and also to turn on the play impulse to aid in the drudgery of school work. Several have thought that a well-rounded, liberal education could be given by plays and games alone on the principle that there is no profit where there is no pleasure or true euphoria.