COMPLETE LIVING
=The question raised.=--That education is a preparation for complete
living has been quoted by every teacher who lays any sort of claim to
the standard definitions. Indeed, so often and so glibly has the
quotation been made that it is well-nigh axiomatic and altogether trite.
But we still await any clear explanation of what is meant by complete
living. On this point we are still groping, with no prophetic voice to
tell us the way. By implication we have had hints, and much has been
said on the negative side, but the positive side still lies fallow. When
asked for an explanation, those who give the quotation resort to
circumlocution and, at length, give another definition of education,
apparently conscious of the mathematical dictum that things that are
equal to the same thing are equal to each other. So we continue to
travel in a circle, with but feeble attempts to deviate from the course.
=The vitalized school an exemplification.=--Nor will this chapter
attempt to resolve the difficult situation in which we are placed. It is
not easy to define living, much less complete living. All that is hoped
for here is to bring the matter to the attention of all teachers and to
cause them to realize that the quest for a definition of complete living
will be for them and for their pupils an exhilarating experience. The
vitalized school will belie its name if it does not strive toward a
solution of the difficulty, and any school that approximates a
satisfactory definition will be proclaimed a public benefactor. In fact,
the school cannot lay claim to the distinction of being vitalized if it
fails to exemplify complete living, in some appreciable degree, and if
it fails to groove this sort of living into a habit that will persist
throughout the years. This is the big task that the school must essay if
it would emancipate itself from the trammels of tradition and become a
leader in the larger, better way. Complete living must become the ideal
of the school if it would realize the conception of education of which
it is a professed exponent.
=Incomplete living.=--The man who walks with a crutch; the man who is
afflicted with a felon; the man who lacks a hand or even a
finger,--cannot experience complete living. Through the power of
adaptation the man with a crutch may compass more difficult situations
than the man with sound legs will attempt, but he cannot realize all the
possibilities of life that a sound body would vouchsafe to him. The man
without hands may learn to write with his toes, but he is not employed
as a teacher of penmanship. His life is a restricted one and, therefore,
less than complete. We marvel at the exhibitions of skill displayed by
the maimed, but we feel no envy. We may not be able to duplicate their
achievements, but we feel that we have ample compensation in the normal
use of our members. We know instinctively that, in the solitude of their
meditations, they must experience poignant regrets that they are not as
other people, and that they must pass through life under a handicap.
=The sound body.=--It is evident, therefore, that soundness of body is a
condition precedent to complete living. The body is the organism by
means of which the mind and the spirit function in terms of life; and,
if this organism is imperfect, the functioning will prove less than
complete. Hence, it is the province of the school to so organize all its
activities that the physical powers of the pupils shall be fully
conserved. The president of a large university says that during his
incumbency of seventeen years they have found only one young woman of
physical perfection and not a single young man, although the tests have
been applied to thousands. College students, it will be readily
conceded, are a selected group; and yet even in such a group not a
physically perfect young man was found in tests extending over seventeen
years. If a like condition should be discovered in the scoring of live
stock at our fairs, there would ensue a careful investigation of causes
in the hope of finding a remedy.
=Personal efficiency.=--We shall not achieve national efficiency until
every citizen has achieved personal efficiency, and physical fitness is
one of the fundamental conditions precedent to personal efficiency. Here
we have the blue print for the guidance of society and the school. If we
are ever to achieve national efficiency, we must see to it that every
man and woman, every boy and girl, has a strong, healthy body that is
fully able to execute the behests of mind and spirit. This may require a
stricter censorship of marriage licenses, including physical
examinations; it may require more stringent laws on our statute books;
it may require radical changes in our methods of physical training; and
it may require the state to assume some of the functions of the home
when the home reveals its inability or unwillingness to cope with the
situation. Heroic treatment may be necessary; but until we as a people
have the courage to apply the remedies that the diagnosis shows to be
necessary, we shall look in vain for improvement.
=Physical training.=--Seeing that it is so difficult to find a man or a
woman among our people who has attained physical perfection, it behooves
society and the schools to take a critical inventory of their methods of
physical training and their meager accomplishments as a preliminary
survey looking to a change in our procedure. We seem to have delegated
scientific physical training to athletics and pugilism, with but scant
concern for our people as a whole. If pink-tea calisthenics as practiced
mildly in our schools has failed to produce robust bodies, then it is
incumbent upon us to adopt a régime of beefsteak. What the traditional
school has failed to do the vitalized school must attempt to do or
suffer the humiliation of striking its colors. There is no middle
course; it must either win a victory or admit defeat in common with the
traditional school. The standard is high, of course, but every standard
of the vitalized school is and ought to be high.
=Cigarettes.=--If the use of cigarettes is devitalizing our boys, and
this can be determined, then the manufacture and sale must be prohibited
unless our legislative bodies would plead guilty to the charge of
impotence. But we are told that public sentiment conditions the
enactment of laws. If such be the case, then the school and its
auxiliaries should feel it a duty to generate public sentiment. If
cigarettes are harmful, then they should be banished, and the task is
not an impossible one by any means. As to the injurious effects of
cigarettes, as distinguished an authority as Thomas A. Edison says the
following:
"The injurious agent in cigarettes comes principally from the
burning paper wrapper. The substance thereby formed is called
'acrolein.' It has a violent action on the nerve centers,
producing degeneration of the cells of the brain, which is quite
rapid among boys. Unlike most narcotics, this degeneration is
permanent and uncontrollable. I employ no person who smokes
cigarettes."
We have eliminated dangerous explosives from our Fourth of July
celebrations, and the ban can as easily be placed upon any other
dangerous product. Just here we inevitably meet the cry of paternalism,
but we shall always be confronted by the question to what extent the
government should stand aside and see its citizens follow the bent of
their appetites and passions over the brink of destruction. It is the
inherent right of government to maintain its own integrity, and this it
can do only through the conservation of the powers of its citizens. If
paternalism is necessary to this end, then paternalism is a governmental
virtue. Better, by far, some paternalism than a race of weaklings.
=Military training.=--We may shrink away from military training in the
schools, just as we shrink from the régime of pugilism; but we may
profit by observing both these types of training in our efforts to
develop some method of training that will render our young people
physically fit. We need some type of training that will eliminate round
and drooping shoulders, weak chests, shambling gait, sluggish
circulation, and shallow breathing. The boys and girls need to be, first
of all, healthy animals with large powers of endurance, elastic,
buoyant, graceful, and in general well set up. These conditions
constitute the foundation for the superstructure of education. The
placid, anæmic, fiberless child is ill prepared in physique to attain to
that mastery of the mental and spiritual world that makes for an
approximation to complete living.
=Examples cited.=--If one will but make a mental appraisement of the
first one hundred people he meets, he will see among the number quite a
few who reveal a lack of physical vigor. They droop and slouch along and
seem to be dragging their bodies instead of being propelled through
space by their bodies. They can neither stand nor walk as a human being
ought to stand and walk, and their entire ensemble is altogether
unbeautiful. We feel instinctively that, being fashioned in the image of
their Maker, they have sadly declined from their high estate. Their
bodily attitude seems a sort of apology for life, and we long to invoke
the aid of some teacher of physical training to rescue them from
themselves and restore them to their rightful heritage. They are weak,
apparently ill-nourished, scrawny, ill-groomed; and we know, without the
aid of words, that neither a vigorous mind nor a great spirit would
choose that type of body as its habitation.
=The body subject to the mind.=--A healthy, vigorous, symmetrical body
that performs all its functions like a well-articulated, well-adjusted
mechanism is the beginning, but only a beginning. Next comes a mind that
is so well trained that it knows what orders to give to the body and how
to give them. Many a strong body enters the door of a saloon because the
mind is not sufficiently trained to issue wise orders. The mind was
befuddled before the body became so, and the body becomes so only
because the mind commands. Intoxication, primarily, is a mental
apostasy, and the body cannot do otherwise than obey. If the mind were
intent upon securing a book at the library, the body would not have seen
the door of the saloon, but would have been urgent to reach the library.
There is neither fiction nor facetiousness in the adage, "An idle brain
is the devil's workshop." On the contrary, the saying is crammed full of
psychology for the thoughtful observer. Hence, when we are training the
mind we are wreaking destruction upon this workshop.
=Freedom a condition precedent.=--Complete living is impossible outside
the domain of freedom. The prisons show forth no examples of complete
living. But mental thralldom is quite as inimical to complete living as
thralldom of the body. The mind must know in order to move among the
things of life in freedom. Ignorance is slavery. The mind that is unable
to read the inscription on a monument stands baffled and helpless, and
no form of slavery can be more abject. The man who cannot read the bill
of fare of life is in no position to revel in the good things that life
offers. The man who cannot read the signboards of life gropes and
flounders about in the byways and so misses the charms. If he knows the
way, he has freedom; otherwise he is in thralldom. The man who cannot
interpret life as it shows itself in hill, in valley, in stream and rock
and tree, goes through life with bandaged eyes, and that condition
affords no freedom.
=Street signs.=--A man who had been traveling through Europe for several
weeks, and had finally reached London, wrote enthusiastically of his
pleasure at being able to read the street signs. All summer he had felt
restricted and hampered, but when he reached a country where the street
signs were intelligible, he gained his freedom. Had he been as familiar
with Italian, German, and French as he is with English, life would have
been for him far more nearly complete during that summer and therefore
much more agreeable and fertile. There is no more exhilarating
experience than to be able to read the street signs along the highway of
life, and this ability is one of the great objectives of every vitalized
school.
=Trained minds.=--Nature reveals her inmost secrets only to the trained
mind. No power can force her, no wealth can bribe her, to disclose these
secrets to others. Only the mind that is trained can gain admission to
her treasure house to revel in its glories. John Burroughs lives in a
world that the ignorant man cannot know. The trained mind alone has the
key that will unlock libraries, art galleries, the treasure houses of
science, language, history, and art. The untrained minds must stand
outside and win what comfort they can from their wealth, their social
status, or whatever else they would fain substitute for the training
that would admit them. All these things are parts of life, and those who
cannot gain admission to these conservatories of knowledge cannot know
life in its completeness.
=Achievements of trained minds.=--In order to know life in the large,
the mind must be able to leap from the multiplication table to the
stars; must become intimate with the movements of the tides, the
glacier, and the planets; must translate the bubbling fountain and the
eruption of Vesuvius; must be able to interpret the whisper of the
zephyr and the diapason of the forest; must be able to hear music in the
chirp of the cricket as well as in the oratorios; must be able to delve
into the recesses of the mine and scale the mountain tops; must know the
heart throbs of Little Nell as well as of Cicero and Demosthenes; must
be able to see the processions of history from the cradle of the race to
the latest proclamation; and must sit in the councils of the poets, the
statesmen, the orators, the artists, the scientists, and the historians
of all time. A mind thus trained can enter into the very heart of life
and know it by experience.
=Things of the spirit.=--But education is a spiritual process, as we
have been told; and, therefore, education is without value unless it
touches the spirit. Indeed, it is only by the spirit that we may test
the quality of education. It is spirit that sets metes and bounds and
points the way to the fine things of life. A man may live in the back
alley of life or on the boulevard, according to the dictates of the
spirit. If his spirit cannot react to the finer things, his way will lie
among the coarse and bizarre. If he cannot appreciate the glory that is
revealed upon the mountain, he will gravitate to the lower levels. If
his spirit is not attuned to majestic harmonies, he will drift down to
association with his own kind. If he cannot thrill with pleasure at the
beauty and fragrance of the lily of the valley, he will seek out the
gaudy sunflower. If his spirit cannot rise to the plane of Shakespeare
and Victor Hugo, he will roam into fields that are less fruitful. The
spirit that is rightly attuned lifts him away from the sordid into the
realms of the chaste and the glorified; away from the coarse and ugly
into the realm of things that are fine and beautiful; and away from the
things that are mean and petty into the zone of the big, the true, the
noble, and the good. And so with body, mind, and spirit thus doing their
perfect work, he can, at least, look over into the promised land of
complete living.
=Altruism.=--We are commanded to let our light shine, and this command
is a noble and an inspiring one. A man who by such training as has been
depicted approximates complete living is prepared to let his light shine
primarily because he has light, and in the next place because his
training has made him generous in spirit and altruistic; and his
greatest joy comes from letting his light so shine that others may catch
his spirit and move up to higher planes of living.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
1. Why is education not satisfactorily defined by saying that it is a
preparation for complete living? Who first stated this definition?
2. What is the relation of the school to complete living?
3. What further training should the school give in better living than to
teach the pupils what it is?
4. Give an idea of what is meant by incomplete living so far as the body
is concerned.
5. Show that soundness of body is necessary to realize one's best.
6. What are some reasons for the scarcity of physically perfect men and
women?
7. Have we been able to eliminate physical defects and develop physical
merits in people to the same extent that we have in domestic animals?
8. What are some of the things that have been done to improve physical
man? Which of these have to do primarily with heredity and which with
rearing or training?
9. Why is the possession of healthy bodies a matter of national concern?
10. Wherein does physical training seem to have failed to attain its
ends?
11. What are the arguments, from the standpoint of the physically
efficient life, for the regulation or prohibition by the government of
the sale of injurious products?
12. What are the benefits of such a type of training as military
training?
13. Show how the lack of proper training of the mind may result in a
less efficient body.
14. In our present civilization what conditions may give rise to mental
thralldom? Upon what is mental freedom conditioned?
15. How can the trained mind get the most out of life and contribute the
most to it?
16. Explain how the spirit is the dominant element in complete living.
17. Why is one who is living the complete life sure to be altruistic?