Some years ago a London weekly paper, which speaks for the conservative class of England, in discussing certain suggested innovations in English higher education, said that the great merit of education at Oxford and Cambridge was that it was "absolutely useless." By this it was probably meant that the education was for a chosen few, was not intended to prepare men for the practical work of life and was essentially and only an intellectual and cultural training.
The change of attitude that is seen in our day is due chiefly to two great discoveries: the re-discovery of the human body and its relation to our mentality and the discovery of the mind of the child and youth. We have found that man is an animal who graduated from caves and dugouts and to whom even barbarism was a lade and great achievement. That the human body was made by the experiences of that rude life, and that since then we have made no change in it except to stand on two feet. Neither have we added one nerve cell or fiber to our brains since the day when the cave was home and uncooked food the daily diet.
The conception of man as an animal has led to a study of him as such. Educators as a class now concede that the physical man must be considered as an essential part of their scheme, that the brain is an organ of the body among other organs, and is subject to the same laws and influenced by similar conditions.
The influence of the mind upon the body is a commonplace of psychology, but the influence of the body upon the mind is of equal importance, though less frequently emphasized.
Whatever one's theory of the nature of mind, it must be considered in relation to the brain as the organ of its expression. The mind has, too, a broader base than the brain, for every organ of the body has some share in the mental functions. Every physician knows that physical disease lowers the quality of the thinking and, with the exception of a few geniuses like Darwin and Leopardi, it makes impossible intellectual work of a high order. Disorders of the internal organs rob the brain of nourishment and weaken it, and by obtruding their morbidness upon it they batter down its resistances and lower the thinking power.
Though we can never know the history of man's origin, the lives of the child and of the wild man help us to understand something of the order of racial development. All the higher mental faculties grow in the child as they grew in the race—out of impulse, instinct, feeling; and from infancy to maturity we recapitulate mentally and physically the early human-making stages, short circuiting in twenty years the race-process.
The life of physical activity that the child leads develops and coordinates the brain and the muscular system. In this way the great motor functions are organized in the brain and become part of the physical basis of mind.
The older education that trained the intellect exclusively, without reference to the practical demands of life or the needs of the body, was inadequate in that it ignored the law of thinking and doing. It is true that there is much to its credit, as many fine spirits have testified. They at least survived it.
Stanley Hall says "we think in terms of muscular movement," and this expresses the most important single fact in the mature mentality. That the mind is largely constituted of memories of muscular movements is basic in development.
The muscles are the special organs of volition, the one part of the body that the mind can directly command and act on. The muscles are preeminently the mind's instruments, the visible and moving part of its machinery. They are thought carriers, and during the growth period their functional activities are organized into the mental life. This is why "we think in terms of muscular movement," and why muscular training supplies a natural need of the developing mind.