An analysis of these several authoritative and more or less official documents indicates very clearly a unanimity as to scope and aims of physical education, for they all seek to promote and conserve, in the broadest sense of the term, the health of the nation.
Poor type of physical education in secondary schools intensifies problem in the college
The problem of physical education in the college is intensified by the fact that freshmen come to their chosen institutions with a variety of experience in physical training, but unfortunately this experience is, too often, either inadequate or ineffective. The natural physical training of the earlier age periods produces whatever neuro-muscular development, whatever neuro-muscular coördination, whatever neuro-muscular control, and whatever other organic growth, development, or functional perfection is achieved by the young human concerned. A program of physical training wisely planned with reference to infancy, childhood, and early youth would include types of exercises, play, games, and sports, that would perfect the neuro-muscular and other functions far more completely than is commonly accomplished through the natural unsupervised and undirected physical training of those early age periods either in city or in rural communities. The force of modern habits of life has led to the destruction of those natural habits of work, play, and recreation that gave a proportion of our forebears a fairly complete natural program of physical exercise during the plastic or formative periods of life. As a result, many students reach college nowadays with stunted growths and with poorly developed, poorly trained, or poorly controlled neuro-muscular equipment. Some of these matriculates are physically weak. They lack alertness; their response is slow. Others are awkward and muscularly inefficient, though their physical growth is objectively—height and weight—normal or even above normal.
The College Department faces these problems through special provisions made for the purpose of supplying a belated neuro-muscular training to such cases. It often happens that successful training along these lines is possible only through individual instruction of a most elementary sort, taking the student through simple exercises that ought to have been a part of his experience in early childhood.
Individual needs of students augment problem of department of physical education
For the same reasons that are stated above, the College Department of Physical Training finds it necessary to concern itself with individual students who need special attention directed to specified organs or groups of organs whose training or care could have been accomplished ordinarily far better at an earlier period. These students present problems of posture, lung capacity, and regional weakness.
Supervision of athletics and recreation adds further to its problem
The College Department of Physical Training finds also a significant opportunity and an urgent duty in the fact that various types of physical exercise are intimately associated with social, ethical, and moral consequences. No other human activity gives the same opportunity for the development of a social spirit and personal ethical standards as do play, games, and sports of children and adolescents. Unsupervised, these activities degenerate and bring unmoral practices and an anti-social spirit in their wake.
Because of these opportunities and obligations, College Departments of Physical Training are including within their programs and jurisdictions more and more supervision of college athletics, and assume an ever increasing rôle in the direction of recreational activities of college students. It remains true, however, that these influences of supervised play and athletics should operate long before the individual reaches college age.
The intense interest of college students in athletic competitions, united with the opportunity which athletics offer for social and character training, has decided a number of colleges to turn athletic training over to the Department of Physical Training. This preparation for the supreme physical and physiological test must be built upon a foundation of safe and sound health. There is no more fitting place in the collegiate organization for these athletic and recreational activities.