[Illustration: EDWARD MUSSEY HARTWELL (1850-1922)]
=THE PHYSICAL EDUCATION SERIES=
EDITED BY R. TAIT MCKENZIE, B.A., M.D., M.P.E.
MAJOR, ROYAL ARMY MEDICAL CORPS
PROFESSOR OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND PHYSICAL THERAPY,
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
PHILADELPHIA
A GUIDE
TO THE
HISTORY OF
PHYSICAL EDUCATION
BY
FRED EUGENE LEONARD, A.M., M.D.
PROFESSOR OF HYGIENE AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION IN OBERLIN COLLEGE
OBERLIN, OHIO
ILLUSTRATED WITH 99 ENGRAVINGS
[Illustration]
LEA & FEBIGER
PHILADELPHIA AND NEW YORK
1923
COPYRIGHT
LEA & FEBIGER
1923
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
TO THE MEMORY OF
DR. EDWARD MUSSEY HARTWELL
WHO FIRST IN AMERICA BLAZED THE TRAIL WHICH I HAVE TRIED TO FOLLOW
PREFACE.
Thirty years ago, when the writer of these lines was called to a
professorship in physical education, there existed no comprehensive
survey of the field he was entering. The reports of Dr. Hartwell
contained excellent summaries which suggested our debt to the past
and to foreign lands, and fuller treatment of certain earlier periods
in the United States; but the English language offered little else of
value. Suitable preparation of courses in the principles and methods
of physical education required more ample knowledge of what others had
done and were doing, and the task of finding out and gathering together
the best of the European literature bearing on the subject was at once
begun and has been continued ever since. A summer trip to Germany in
1896 whetted an appetite which later found satisfaction in an entire
year (1900-1901) on the Continent, where the large special collections
at the Stockholm Central Institute of Gymnastics and the Berlin
_Turnlehrerbildungsanstalt_ supplied for the first time an opportunity
to become familiar with the older books and periodicals. The year also
contributed to the linguistic knowledge and experience needed for the
handling of such material. The direct contact with historic spots and
significant aspects of physical education in Europe which it brought
was afterwards renewed and broadened by five months (February to June,
1913) spent at important centers in Switzerland, Germany, the three
Scandinavian countries, and Great Britain.
Meanwhile the collection of material had progressed at a rapid rate, and
from time to time as circumstances permitted chapters of a book-to-be
were prepared and published, in irregular order, and biographical
sketches which might later be incorporated in such a work as the present
one. Thus it happens that only five of the twenty-eight chapters
in this volume are altogether new, though all have been carefully
revised and many of them largely rewritten within the last year and
a half. The selection of topics, order of arrangement, and manner of
presentation have been determined experimentally in courses given to
students in Oberlin College since the spring of 1894, and for thirteen
years (1899, 1902, and 1908-1919) at the Harvard University Summer
School. The illustrations are chosen from nearly six hundred which have
been employed in the form of lantern slides in these courses. With
few exceptions the references in the text and footnotes are based on
first-hand examination of the originals.
If we except Viktor Heikel’s _Gymnastikens Historia_ (issued at
Helsingfors in four parts, 1905-1909), comprehensive in plan but quite
erratic in its treatment of the United States, no work undertaking to
trace the history of physical education in Europe and America and to
describe the chief present-day movements has appeared hitherto in any
language. Euler’s standard _Geschichte des Turnunterrichts_ and the
lesser German manuals, while they are in general excellent guides so far
as ancient and medieval Europe are concerned, and for the recent history
in that particular country, have little or nothing to say of the rest
of modern Europe, except as it has influenced Germany herself. This is
less true of Euler’s monumental _Encyklopädisches Handbuch des gesamten
Turnwesens_ and the more recent _Handbuch des gesamten Turnwesens_ of
Dr. Rudolf Gasch, but in these, too, the space allotted to non-German
subjects is altogether insufficient. Similarly Illeris and Trap’s brief
_Grundtræk af Gymnastikkens Historie_ covers chiefly Danish experience.
For each country one must consult its own literature, and particularly
the periodical publications, and he needs also to supplement his reading
by personal observation and investigation on the ground in order to avoid
distorted views and arrive at sound conclusions.
If this attempt to set forth clearly the characteristics of the different
stages and phases through which physical education has passed, to
introduce the persons who have contributed to its advancement, and to
guide the reader to the best that has been written on the subject, shall
lead to deeper and more general appreciation of the place which physical
education should win and hold in general education, and to the adoption
of wiser measures where it is introduced, the labor expended upon the
volume will be well rewarded. Much has been omitted which might have been
included. If inaccuracies are discovered the author will be glad to have
his attention called to them.
F. E. L.
OBERLIN, OHIO, 1923.
EDITOR’S PREFACE.
The shore of physical education is strewn with the wrecks of systems
and movements, many of them good in themselves, but left to drift when
the personal support and enthusiasm of the founder was removed from the
helm. It has only been when some great national crisis had to be faced
and the minds of patriots and scholars were engaged in the effort to meet
it, that systems have been evolved great enough to survive the death of
their founder, the test of time and change in their national conditions.
This is notably true of the gymnastics of Denmark, Sweden and Germany.
Incomplete as systems of physical education without the addition of
games, but logical and accurate in their application to the conditions
they have had to meet, whenever similar conditions have arisen it is to
them we have turned for inspiration and instruction, and nowhere was
this better shown than in the great war of 1914, where crude masses of
untrained and underdeveloped men had to be made quick and accurate in
response to command and given that control of their bodies that is the
true function of physical education in its highest sense.
To the sincere student of physical education nothing has a more sobering
effect than the study of those advances made by the great men who have
given their lives to their cause. He finds that most of the theories that
come to him as new and startling have been thought before and have been
either rejected or put into practice as well or better than he is likely
to do, and so if he is a philosopher, he can avoid the inevitable failure
of schemes that have been discarded and adapt from material of proved
worth the material that suits his special conditions.
Such a study will save him from the outstanding characteristic of many
exploiters of this subject, the unfounded claims for originality and
novelty in their work. Small collections of free exercises are dignified
as systems and published as such with apparent seriousness, slight
variation of method is hailed as a great discovery, has its little day
of notoriety and takes its place on the library shelves as a literary
curiosity of interest only to the antiquarian, and the busy teacher has
neither the time nor the inclination to separate the wheat from the
chaff. Up to the present there have been but incomplete and fragmentary
reports available for our guidance, often in translation, and frequently
garbled by personal bias, so that the need has become more and more
urgent for a complete and scholarly review of the growth and distribution
of systems that are associated with certain names and certain periods.
Dr. Leonard is peculiarly fitted for such a great task. An enthusiastic
scholar, with an intimate knowledge of the languages in which the
originals were written, he has devoted the leisure and the vacations
of thirty years to collecting, reading and making available rare and
inaccessible works on the subject, for students of education in general
and of physical education in particular. Repeated visits to Europe and
pilgrimages to the shrines of the pioneers have given him the proper
perspective, and this volume presents his conclusions as delivered in his
yearly lecture courses at Oberlin and Harvard.
It comes appropriately early in a series of books designed to place
physical education on an equality with other more strongly entrenched
parts of a general educational system. The soul is indeed dead that does
not react with a generous glow when reading the difficulties overcome and
the work accomplished by the heroes of any field of endeavor, and what
could be more inspiring at this time than to have set forth the conquests
and defeats of those patriotic spirits whose lives have been given to
upbuilding the health and fitness of the youth of the world, throughout
the ages, as a guide and inspiration to us who have these same problems
to meet at the present time.
R. TAIT MCKENZIE,
Editor.
CONTENTS.
PART I. EUROPE.
CHAPTER I.
THE GREEKS.
Two Types of Education, Spartan and Athenian 17
Physical Education at Sparta 18
Physical Education at Athens 20
The National Festivals 24