Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/337

Rh study dead things, and that modern languages furnish enough discipline, and are, besides, useful. To the scientist, science is god of all, even of education. To him no man is properly educated unless his mind is stored with scientific ideas and trained by the scientific methods of the nineteenth century. Languages, ancient and modern, mathematics, science, philosophy, all advance their claims to be the best educators of the coming man. Meanwhile the coming man is nothing but a child, and must submit himself to his elders to be experimented upon according to the theories of teachers or parents.

For men, women, and children alike, I wish to enter a plea for a part of them much neglected in most discussions on education, and too much left out of sight in most theories of education—the body. In fact, for centuries past, many educators have seemed to regard the body as a rival of the brain, if not an enemy of it. They have apparently been filled with the idea that strength and time given to the body are strength and time taken from the mind. Unfortunately for the cause of good education, this erroneous idea is not held by teachers alone, but is a very prevalent one generally, the current dictum being that, representing by unity a person's force, whatever part of this unit is taken for the body leaves necessarily just that much less for the mind.

To combat this idea, and to replace it by a much more reasonable idea, I had almost said by the very opposite idea, shall be the chief though not the only aim of these pages.

To all races which have shown power in any direction the main source of that power has been physical. This is acknowledged to be true with regard to the conquering races of the past. With regard to the present we are too apt to think that the progress of civilization has changed the conditions of power, so that races physically weak, if they are only wise, can successfully compete with and finally overcome the strong races.

Take the Greeks. For a long time they were a conquering race—masters of the world of their time. But their influence has extended far beyond their day and beyond the limits of their little world. "It is no disgrace to a nineteenth-century American to go to school to the Greeks. They are still, in their own lines, the leaders of mankind. They are the masters." "Attica was about as large as Rhode Island. Rhode Island is a noble little Commonwealth. Yet it has enjoyed political liberty longer than the democracy of Athens lasted, and in the midst of the blazing light of this much-lauded century. What now is or will be the influence of Rhode Island on the world's history compared with the unmeasured and imperishable influence of Athens? Whence the difference?" The causes of the difference were manifold. One cause was their physical education. Hand in hand with their mental discipline, which was simple but thorough, went gymnastic exercise." Until the time of Alexander, the main