HEALTH VALUE OF "UNBOSSED" PLAY AND PHYSICAL TRAINING
_A boy without play means a father without a job. A boy without
physical training means a father who drinks. When people have
wholesome, well-disciplined bodies there will be less demand for
narcotics as well as for medicines._ On these three propositions
enthusiasm has built arguments for city parks and playgrounds, for
school gymnastics, and for temperance instruction. We have tried the
remedies and now realize that too much was expected of them. Neither
movement appreciated the mental and physical education of spontaneous
games and play.
Like hygiene instruction, physical training was made compulsory by law
in many states, and, like hygiene instruction, physical training had to
yield to the pressure of subjects in which children are examined. At
the outset both were based upon distorted psychology and physiology. Of
late physical training has been revived "to correct defects of the
school desk and to relieve the strain of too prolonged study periods."
In New York grammar schools ten minutes a day for the lower grades, and
thirty minutes a week for the higher grades, are set aside for physical
training. With the exception of eighteen schools where apparatus is
used, the exercise has been in the class rooms. It consists of what are
known as "setting-up exercises,"--deep breathing and arm movements for
two minutes between each study period, often forgotten until it is time
to go home, when the children are tired and need it least. Many
teachers so conduct these exercises that children keenly enjoy them.
[Illustration: SERVICEABLE RELIEF FROM SCHOOL STRAIN, BUT A POOR
SUBSTITUTE FOR OUTDOOR PLAY]
Like hygiene instruction, physical training preceded physical
examination. Generally speaking, it has not yet, either in schools or
in colleges, been related to physical needs of the individual pupil. In
fact, there is no guarantee that it is not in many schools working a
positive injury on defective children or imposing a defective
environment on healthy children. Formal exercises in cramped space, in
ill-ventilated rooms, with tight belts and heavy shoes, are conceded to
be pernicious. Formal exercises should never be given to any child
without examination and prescription by a physician. Children with
heart weakness, enlarged tonsils, adenoid growths, spinal curvature,
uneven shoulders, are frequently seen doing exercises for which they
are physically unfit, and which but serve to deplete further their
already low vitality. Attention might be called to many a class engaged
in breathing exercises when by actual count over half the boys were
holding their mouths open. Special exercises are needed by children who
show some marked defect like flat foot, flat chest, weak abdominal
muscles, habitual constipation, uneven shoulders, spinal trouble, etc.
That no physical training should be provided for normal children is the
belief of many leading trainers. This special training is useful to
develop athletes or to correct defects. Like massage, osteopathy, or
medicine, it should follow careful diagnosis. The time is coming when
formal indoor gymnasium exercises for normal pupils or normal students
will be considered an anomaly. There is all the difference in the world
between physical development and what is called physical training. The
test of physical development is not the hours spent upon a prescribed
course of training, but the physical condition determined by
examination. To be refused permission to substitute an hour's walk for
an hour's indoor apparatus work is often an outrage upon health laws.
Given a normal healthy body, plenty of space, and plenty of playtime,
the spontaneous exercise which a child naturally chooses is what is
really health sustaining and health giving.
Mere muscular development artificially obtained through the devices of
a gymnasium is inferior to the mental and moral development produced by
games and play in the open air. Eustace Miles, M.D., amateur tennis
player of England, says:
I do not consider a mere athlete to be a really healthy man. He
has no more right to be called a really healthy man than the
foundations or scaffolding of a house have a right to be called a
house. They become a good house, and, indeed, they are
indispensable to a good house, but at present the good house
exists only in potentiality.
The "healthy-mindedness" and "physical morality" which play and games
foster rarely result from physical training as a business, at stated
times, indoors, under class direction. It is too much like taking
medicine. A certain breakfast food is said to have lost much of its
popularity since advertised as a health food. When the National
Playground Association was organized President Roosevelt cautioned its
officers against too frequent use of the word "supervision" on the
ground that supervision and direction were apt to defeat the very
purpose of games and to stultify the play spirit. Is the little girl on
the street who springs into a hornpipe or a jig to the tune of a
hurdy-gurdy, or even the boy who runs before automobiles or trolley
cars or under horses' noses, getting less physical education than those
who play a round game in silence under the supervision of a teacher in
the school basement, or who stretch their arms up and down to the tune
of one, two, three, four, five, six? Who can doubt that the much-pitied
child of the tenement playing with the contents of the ash can in the
clothes yard or with baby brother on the fire escape is developing more
originality, more lung power, and better arteries than the child of
fortune who is led by the hand of a governess up and down Fifth Avenue.
Children have not forgotten how to play, but adults have forgotten to
leave space in cities, and time out of school, home work, and factory
work in which children may play. Again, the child--whether a city child
or a country child--rarely needs to be taught how to play. Teaching him
games will not produce vitality. Games are the spontaneous product of a
healthy body, active mind, and a joy in living. Give the children parks
and piers, roof gardens and playgrounds in which they may play, and
leave the rest to them. Give them time away from school and housework,
and leave the rest to them. Instead of lamenting the necessity for
playing in the streets, let us reserve more streets for children's
play. There are too many students of child welfare whose reasoning
about play and games is like that of a lady of Cincinnati, who, upon
reading the notice of a child-labor meeting, said: "Well, I am glad to
see there is going to be a meeting here for child labor. It is high
time some measure was taken to keep the children off the streets."
Physical examinations would prove that streets are safer and better
than indoor gymnasiums for growing children. Intelligent physical
training will train children to go out of doors during recess; will
train pupils and teachers not to use recess for study, discipline, or
eating lunch.
[Illustration: SPONTANEOUS PLAY ON ONE OF NEW YORK CITY'S SCHOOL
ROOF PLAYGROUNDS]
"After-school" conditions are quite as important as physical training
and gymnastics at school. Not long ago a nurse was visiting a sick
tenement mother with a young baby. She found a little girl of twelve
standing on a stool over a washtub. This child did all the housework,
took care of the mother and two younger children, got all the meals
except supper, which her father got on his return from work. As the
nurse removed the infant's clothes to give it a bath, the little girl
seized them and dashed them into the tub. "Yes, I am pretty tired when
night comes," she confessed. This child has prototypes in the country
as well as the city, and she did not need physical training. She did
not lack initiative or originality. She did need playmates, open air, a
run in the park, and "fun."
The educational value of games and outdoor play should be weighed
against the advantages of lowering the compulsory school age, and of
bridging over the period from four to seven with indoor kindergarten
training. Neither physical training nor education is synonymous with
confinement in school. The whole tendency of Nature's processes in
children is nutritional; it is not until adolescence that she makes
much effort to develop the brain. Overuse of the young mind results,
therefore, in diverting natural energy from nutritive processes to
hurried growth of the overstimulated brain. The result is a type of
child with a puny body and an excitable brain,--the neurotic. The young
eye, for example, is too flat (hypermetropic)--made to focus only on
objects at a distance. Close application to print, or even to weaving
mats or folding bits of paper accurately, causes an overstrain on the
eye, which not only results in the chronic condition known as
myopia,--short-sightedness,--so common to school children, but which
acts unfavorably on the constitution and on the whole development of
the child. At the recent International Congress of School Hygiene in
London, Dr. Arthur Newsholme, medical officer of health of Brighton,
made a plea for the exclusion of children under five years of age from
schools. "During the time the child is in the infant department it has
chiefly to grow. Nutrition and sleep are its chief functions. Paints,
pencils, paper, pins, and needles should not be handled in school by
children below six." Luther Burbank, in an article on "The Training of
the Human Plant," says:
The curse of modern child life in America is overeducation,
overconfinement, overrestraint. The injury wrought to the race by
keeping too young children in school is beyond the power of any
one to estimate. The work of breaking down the nervous systems of
the children of the United States is now well under way. Every
child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, and tad-poles, wild
strawberries, acorns, and pine cones, trees to climb and brooks
to wade in, sand, snakes, huckleberries, and hornets, and any
child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best
part of his education.
Not every child can have these blessings of the country, but every
child can be protected from the stifling of the nature instinct of play
by formal indoor "bossed" exercises, whether called games, physical
training, gymnastics, or Delsarte.
[Illustration: NEW YORK CITY'S SCHOOL FARM DOES NOT STIFLE
NATURE INSTINCT]
The answer to the protest against too early and too constant
confinement in school has always been: "Where will the child be if out
of school? Will its environment at home not work a worse injury to its
health? Will not the street injure its morals?" Because we have not yet
worked out a method of supervising the health of those children who are
not in school, it does not follow that such supervision is impossible.
Perhaps the time will come when there will be state supervision over
the health of children from birth, parents being expected to present
them once a year at school for examination by the school physician. In
this way defects can be corrected and health measures devised to build
up a physique that should not break down under the strain of school
life. For children whose mothers work during the day, and for those
whose home environment is worse than school, it might be cheaper in the
long run to assign teachers to protect them from injury while they play
in a park, roof garden, or out-of-door gymnasium. If parks and
playgrounds come too slowly, why not adopt the plan advocated by Alida
S. Williams, a New York principal, of reserving certain streets for
children between the hours of three and five, and of diverting traffic
to other streets less suitable for children's play? So great is the
value--mentally, morally, and physically--of out-of-door play that it
has even been suggested that the substitution of such play for school
for all children up to the age of ten would insure better minds and
sounder physiques at fifteen. It is generally admitted that the child
who enters school at eight rather than at six will be the gainer at
twelve. What a travesty upon education to insist upon schooling for
children because they are apt to be run over on the street, or to be
neglected at home, to shoot craps, or belong to a gang and develop bad
morals.
Educators will some day be ashamed to have made the schools the
catch-all or the court-plaster for the evils of modern industry.
Instead of pupils and mothers going to the school, enough hygiene
teachers, and play teachers, and district physicians could be employed
with the money now spent on indoor instruction to do the house-to-house
visiting urged in many chapters of this book. Such a course of action
would have an incalculable effect on the reduction of tuberculosis, not
only in making healthier physiques but by inculcating habits of outdoor
life and love of fresh air. The danger of those contagious diseases
which ravish childhood would be greatly reduced. An ambition for
physical integrity would make unnatural living unpopular. Competition
in games with children _of the same physical class_ develops accuracy,
concentration, dispatch, resourcefulness, as much as does instruction
in arithmetic. Smoking can easily be discredited among boys trying to
hit the bull's-eye. A boy would sooner give up a glass of beer than the
championship in rifle shooting or a "home run."
The influence of the "spirit of the game" on practical life has been
described thus by New York's director of physical training, Dr. Luther
H. Gulick:
Play is the spontaneous enlistment of the entire personality in
the pursuit of some coveted end. We do not have to pursue the
goal; we wish to--it is our main desire. This is the way in which
greatest discoveries, fortunes, and poems are made. It is the way
in which we take the responsibilities and problems of life that
makes it either a deadly bore--a mere dull round of routine and
drudgery--or the most interesting and absorbing game, capable of
enlisting all the energy and enthusiasm we have to put into it.
The people who accomplish things are the people who play the game.
They let themselves go; they are not afraid. Under the stimulus
and enthusiasm of play muscles contract more powerfully and longer
than under other conditions. Blood pressure is higher in play. It
is far more interesting to play the game than to work at it. When
you work you are being driven, when you play you are doing the
driving yourself. We play not by jumping the traces of life's
responsibilities, but by going so far beyond life's compulsions as
to lose sight of the compulsion element. Play up, play up, and
play the game.