Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/648

628 be too strongly insisted that proper grading of classes, careful selection and arrangement of teaching material, progression in each lesson and throughout the series of lessons, and skillful adaptation of methods to meet local conditions, are of fundamental importance in physical training, as they are in other phases of educational effort.

Some surprise may be excited by the statement that at the present time the most painstaking and satisfactory work is being done in the colleges for women, but it is probably true. The college officers are as a rule more alive to the importance of the department, the teachers are with few if any exceptions graduates of normal schools of gymnastics which require two years of study, and the disturbing element of athletics does not enter so largely into competition with efforts at systematic physical training. At the Woman's College of Baltimore the system employed is purely Swedish, and the instruction is given by two graduates of the Royal Normal School of Gymnastics in Stockholm. The same system is employed, though less inflexibly, at Smith College. Bryn Mawr and Vassar have a combination of individual work' and class instruction with light apparatus, making most of the former. The work at Mount Holyoke is somewhat the same, but more varied. At Wellesley athletics receive a relatively larger share of attention.

It will not be out of place to refer, in conclusion, to a source of instruction and suggestion almost unknown to the great majority of the directors of American college gymnasia. We in this country have been greatly benefited by the study of Swedish gymnastics; but any one who comprehends the wealth of the German literature of gymnastics, and the extent and variety of the experience of which it is the outcome, must regret the fact that it has been hitherto so generally overlooked. It offers an inexhaustible storehouse of material which will be found especially helpful in planning courses in physical training for advanced classes in our institutions for higher education.

, though best known as a literary man, did equally valuable work in education, with which he was closely connected for a long series of years as inspector; and Sir Joshua Fitch, in his biography of him, credits him with having exerted a real and telling influence on schools and done much indirectly to raise the aims and the tone of teachers; and, the biographer says, "if he saw little children looking good and happy, and under the care of a sympathetic teacher, he would give a favorable report, without inquiring too closely into the percentage of scholars who could pass the examination. He valued the elementary schools rather as centers of civilization and refining influence than as places for enabling the maximum of children to spell and write, and to do a given number of sums without a mistake."