LETTER.

DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR,

BUREAU OF EDUCATION, Washington, D. C., October 24, 1885.

SIR: In spite of the frequent reference among educators and in educational literature to the fact that all education should aim at producing a sound mind in a healthy body, it is well known that this important truth is too often forgotten by school officers, teachers, and parents. Generally in American rural schools, and too often in our city schools, the conditions requisite to health are ignored. Too frequently schoolhouses are unhealthy in their location, their surroundings, or internal arrangements.

Beyond the instruction in hygiene the main attempts to conserve health in the public schools have consisted in introducing German gymnastics, or in paying a more careful attention to the laws of heating and lighting and the supply of pure air and water. Sometimes the introduction of manual labor has been looked upon as the sure prevention of all disease; athletic sports have been tried; and recently more careful attention has been given to the whole subject, especially in connection with our colleges. The Ling system of gymnastics is received with increasing favor. More and more believe that the best physical training will not aim to make either acrobats or athletes, but to promote health of body and mind. The efforts of Prof. Edward Hitchcock at Amherst College and of Dr. D. A. Sargent at Harvard have been attended with most beneficial results, and serve to greatly increase the care of the health of college students.

The number of gymnasia of merit has greatly increased. Calls for a report upon this new development in physical training have been urgent and frequent. I have therefore employed E. M. Hartwell, M.D., Ph.D., to collect the information accessible and prepare a report upon the subject. His report is contained in the following pages, which are recommended for publication. If our colleges and universities can lead the way in devising and establishing the best hygienic training, their example will soon affect favorably all other grades of instruction.

I have the honor to be, very respectfully, your obedient servant,
JOHN EATON,
Commissioner.

The Hon. SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR.
Publication authorized.

H. L. MULDROW,

Acting Secretary.

PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICAN COLLEGES AND

UNIVERSITIES.

IDEALS OF MANLY EXCELLENCE.

Philosophical speculations regarding the nature and future of man's body and soul underlie and determine all our schemes and endeavors for the nurture and training of youth. There appear to be four principal ideals of manly excellence, which, singly or in combination, have dominated the minds of the promoters and governors of educational foundations, and in accordance with which physical training has been favored, tolerated, neglected, or contemned. We may characterize these ideals broadly as the Greek or aesthetic, the monkish or ascetic, the military or knightly, and the medical or scientific.

The first three have been influential in varying degrees from very early times. The fourth, although compounded of ancient elements, is so strongly tinged with utilitarian and psycho-physical ideas that it is best described as modern. All of these ideals are traceable to conceptions of human nature and destiny which may be roughly classed under the two heads of lugubrious and cheerful.

THE GREEK IDEAL.

The Greek ideal, it is needless to say, was not lugubrious. "Everything that is good," says Plato in the "Timæus," "is fair, and the fair is not without measure, and the animal who is fair may be supposed to have measure. Now we perceive lesser symmetries and comprehend them, but about the highest and greatest we have no understanding; for there is no symmetry greater than that of the soul to the body. This, however, we do not perceive, nor do we allow ourselves to reflect that when a weaker or lesser frame is the vehicle of a great and mighty soul, or, conversely, when a little soul is encased in a large body, then the whole animal is not fair, for it is defective in the most important of all symmetries; but the fair mind in the fair body will be the fairest and loveliest of all sights to him who has the seeing eye."

Well might Charles Kingsley say of the Greeks, "To produce health, that is, harmony and sympathy and grace, in every faculty of mind and body, was their notion of education."

The antithesis between the Greek and the ascetic ideals is clearly indicated in a remark of Apuleius concerning Egyptian and Greek modes of worship. "The Egyptian deities," he says, "were chiefly honored by lamentations, and the Greek divinities by dances."

THE MONKISH IDEAL.

The ideal of the monk, which, after the first few centuries of the Christian Church, exercised such a profound influence upon European thought and life, was of Asiatic and, to a considerable extent, of Egyptian origin. "The duty of a monk," said St. Jerome, "is not to teach, but to weep." Weeping and self-torture might well absorb the energies of men who conceived that all flesh was the creation of Satan, and championed the belief that soul and body are independent and mutually antagonistic entities.

When it was held that "the greatest of all evils was pleasure, because by it the soul is nailed or riveted to the body," and that mental and spiritual health were best subserved by bodily weakness, we cannot wonder that "a hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac," to borrow the words of Lecky, "without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, became the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero and the lives of Socrates and Cato."

Such views as these, although they were treated as heretical by the earlier Fathers of the Christian Church, became accepted dogmas of the Church of Rome in the Middle Ages; and one may hear similar doctrines far from faintly echoed, if he will attend to the sermons of many of the Scotch, English, and American divines who have within the last three centuries striven to establish or perpetuate religious terrorism.

THE MILITARY IDEAL.

The military ideal of manliness, now existing side by side with the monkish ideal, now confronting and challenging it, has played a most important and conspicuous part in the education of the sons of noblemen and of gentlefolk. Herodotus tells us that the sons of the Persians, from their fifth year to their twentieth, were carefully taught three things only, to ride, to draw the bow, and to speak the truth. Physical training was predominant in the education of free-born youth among the Spartans, Romans, and ancient Germans: it consisted chiefly of martial exercises and the chase, and its aim was the formation of an agile and enduring soldiery. "Plaienge att weapons" formed a necessary part of every gentleman's education in Britain as well as on the Continent, even later than the sixteenth century.

"I swear I'd rather that my son should hang than learn letters. For it becomes the sons of gentlemen to blow a horn nicely, to hunt skill