It has been objected that gymnastics and field sports make girls coarse and mannish. The exact opposite has been found to be the case. It has been observed in colleges that when young women are properly led, their sports, in place of making them mannish, have a marked refining influence. They care more for correct posture because this is made one of their tests in athletic sports. They develop better manners and a new sense of pride in their appearance. They soon learn to avoid slang, loud talking and boisterous behavior. In the University of Chicago where they have excellent training, many of the girls have said that they came to have a new sense of dignity and to care more for their personal appearance.
They also develop the finer elements of character, a cooperative spirit, obedience to commands, patience, self-confidence, a spirit of comradeship, a democratic attitude and an appreciation of good qualities in others wherever found. All of these esthetic, social and moral qualities, woven into the texture of the growing character, and with the vigorous health that the physical training brings, are the best contribution to the making of the most effective type of the womanly woman. All games and sports and athletics for the young should therefore make for refinement and esthetic development.
The state needs now, and will always need, men and women who have sound bodies and abounding energy.
The harsher phases of the human struggle may pass and wars may cease, but the old contests of races, nations and individuals will continue under other forms.
As the race grows older life will become more largely mental. The increasing complexity of human relations and the more delicate adjustments that these relations require will bring a new and finer social order that will make higher demands upon reason.
While there is no evidence that experience or time or training will ever change the structure of the brain, it is probable that we have as yet but imperfectly utilized our mental possibilities. Stratton says:
Out of the depths of the mind new powers are always emerging.[2]
[2] "Experimental Psychology and Culture," George M. Stratton.
Back of the mental life, and making it possible, are the energies of the body, the functioning of the animal in man, which in the brain are changed to the higher uses of the mind. The ability to execute, to act effectively, to do and keep doing, to do the work of the professional man, the banker, or the scientist, all this is primarily physical, and from top to bottom of man's activities the physical test is applied. With the mental and emotional strain of civilized life goes the physical strain which is the other half of the struggle, and which now and always is both mental and physical. The Greeks recognized this unity of mind and body twenty-five hundred years ago and their results remain unmatched by any race.
They saw that the thought-out movements of physical training resulted in mental training and this law of mental development through physical training was a fundamental principle in their educational plan.