A guide to the history of physical education

The best of the Renaissance writers on education had begun to break away from authority and tradition, and with reason as a guide were groping their way toward a training better suited to the nature and present needs of man than any the past could supply. That their ideas gained currency throughout all Europe and the way was thus prepared for practical reforms is very largely due to the powerful influence exerted by two philosophers, John Locke (1632-1704) and Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the former of whom published “Some Thoughts on Education” in 1693, and the latter his “Émile, a Treatise on Education” in 1762.

Locke was an Oxford graduate and lecturer, had studied medicine and been physician in the household of Lord Ashley, afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury, and his chief work, the “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” had already appeared (1690). His views, therefore, commanded attention at once, and whatever relates to the physical side of education came with the added weight of special knowledge. The author begins by dwelling at some length upon the hygiene of childhood. “Keep the body in strength and vigor,” he says, “so that it may be able to obey and execute the orders of the mind.... A sound mind in a sound body, is a short but full description of a happy state in this world: he that has these two has little more to wish for; and he that wants either of them will be but little the better for anything else.... He whose mind directs not wisely will never take the right way; and he whose body is crazy and feeble will never be able to advance in it....

“Most children’s constitutions are either spoiled, or at least harmed, by cockering and tenderness.” They should not be too warmly clad or covered, winter or summer, and to prevent colds the boy’s feet are to be washed every day in cold water, and his shoes made “so thin that they might leak and let in water whenever he comes near it.” For safety and for health’s sake he must learn to swim. He is to be “much in the open air, and very little, as may be, by the fire, even in winter.” Clothing should never be made tight, especially about the breast, and the diet ought to be very plain and simple, with only small beer for drink, and that after eating. Serving his meals at irregular intervals will train him to endure hunger, if necessary. As regards fruit, “our first parents ventured paradise for it, and it is no wonder our children cannot stand the temptation, though it cost them their health.” Some kinds are wholesome and may be taken freely before or between meals, but others are forbidden. Allow no sweetmeats—“one of the most inconvenient ways of expense that vanity hath yet found out; and so I leave them to the ladies.” Nothing is more to be indulged children than sleep, but insist upon early rising, and let the bed be hard and rather quilts than feathers. All may be summed up in these rules: “Plenty of open air, exercise, and sleep; plain diet, no wine or strong drink, and very little or no physic; not too warm and strait clothing; especially the head and feet kept cold, and the feet often used to cold water and exposed to wet.”

Further on, in the body of his work, Locke comes to what we should now call physical training proper. He recognizes that “besides what is to be had from study and books, there are other accomplishments necessary for a gentleman, to be got by exercise, and to which time is to be allowed, and for which masters must be had. Dancing being that which gives graceful motions all the life, and above all things, manliness and a becoming confidence to young children, I think it cannot be learned too early.... As for the jigging part, and the figures of dances, I count that little or nothing, farther than as it tends to perfect graceful carriage. Music ... wastes so much of a young man’s time to gain but a moderate skill in it ... that amongst all accomplishments I think I may give it the last place.... Fencing, and riding the great horse, are looked upon as so necessary parts of breeding that it would be thought a great omission to neglect them: the latter of the two, being for the most part to be learned only in great towns, is one of the best exercises for health which is to be had in those places of ease and luxury ... and ... is of use to a gentleman, both in peace and war.... As for fencing, it seems to me a good exercise for health, but dangerous to the life, the confidence of their skill being apt to engage in quarrels those that think they have learned to use their swords.... If ... a man be to prepare his son for duels, I had much rather mine should be a good wrestler than an ordinary fencer; which is the most a gentleman can attain to in it, unless he will be constantly in the fencing school, and every day exercising....

“I would (also) have him learn a trade, a manual trade; nay, two or three, but one more particularly.... Manual arts, which are both got and exercised by labor, do many of them by that exercise not only increase our dexterity and skill, but contribute to our health too; especially such as employ us in the open air....” He “is not for painting;” but proposes “one, or rather both these, viz., gardening or husbandry in general, and working in wood, as a carpenter, joiner, or turner; these being fit and healthy recreations for a man of study or business.”

The effects produced by Rousseau’s educational romance, “Émile,” upon the modern pedagogic world it would be difficult to exaggerate. The times were ripe for a revolt, and close upon the radical criticism of existing methods to which this theorist gave such convincing expression followed the actual reforms inaugurated by Basedow, Pestalozzi, and other innovators. It will be sufficient here to mention only a single phase of the education which this disciple of Locke would give to his imaginary hero. “The body,” says Rousseau⁠[11] in Book I, “must needs be vigorous in order to obey the soul: a good servant ought to be robust.... The weaker the body, the more it commands; the stronger it is, the better it obeys.” Upon the subject of sleep, cold bathing, and the clothing suitable for young children his views are those of Locke.

In Book II we read: “If ... you would cultivate the intelligence of your pupil, cultivate the power which it is to govern. Give his body continual exercise; make him robust and sound in order to make him wise and reasonable; let him work, and move about, and run, and shout, and be continually in motion; let him be a man in vigor, and soon he will be such by force of reason.... It is a very deplorable error to imagine that the exercise of the body is injurious to the operations of the mind; as if these two activities were not to proceed in concert, and the second were not always to direct the first!... These continual exercises, thus left wholly to the direction of Nature, not only do not brutalize the mind while fortifying the body, but on the contrary they form within us the only species of reason of which childhood is susceptible, and the most necessary at any and all periods of life. They teach us thoroughly to understand the use of our powers, the relations between our own bodies and surrounding bodies, and the use of the natural instruments which are within our reach and which are adapted to our organs.... In order to learn to think, we must ... exercise our limbs, our senses, and our organs, which are the instruments of our intelligence; and in order to derive all the advantage possible from these instruments, it is necessary that the body which furnishes them should be robust and sound. Thus, so far is it from being true that the reason of man is formed independently of the body, it is the happy constitution of the body which renders the operations of the mind facile and sure....

“... Let him learn to make jumps, now long, now high; to climb a tree, to leap a wall. Let him always find his equilibrium; and let all his movements and gestures be regulated according to the laws of gravity, long before the science of statics intervenes to explain them to him.... When a child plays at shuttlecock he trains his eye and arm in accuracy; when he whips a top he increases his strength by using it, but without learning anything. I have sometimes asked why we do not offer children the same games of skill which men have, such as tennis, fives, billiards, bow and arrow, football, and musical instruments. I have been told, in reply, that some of these sports are beyond the strength of children, and that their limbs and organs are not sufficiently developed for the others. I find these reasons bad.... I do not mean that he shall knock the balls in our tennis courts, nor that his little hands shall be made to hold the racket of an expert; but that he shall play in a hall whose windows are protected; that at first he use only soft balls; that his first rackets shall be of wood, then of parchment, and finally of catgut stretched to accord with his progress.... To spring from one end of the hall to another, to estimate the bound of a ball still in the air, and to send it back with a strong and steady hand, such sports do not befit a man but they serve to train a youth....

“... I insist absolutely that Émile shall learn a trade,” Rousseau continues, in Book III. This is not so much for the trade itself, as for overcoming the prejudices that despise it. “His apprenticeship is already more than half done, through the tasks with which we have occupied our time up to the present moment.... He already knows how to handle the spade and the hoe; he can use the lathe, the hammer, the plane, and the file; the tools of all the trades are already familiar to him. All he has to do in addition is to acquire of some of these tools such a prompt and facile use as to make him equal in speed to good workmen using the same tools, and in this point he has a great advantage over all others; he has an agile body and flexible limbs, which can assume all sorts of attitudes without difficulty and prolong all sorts of movement without effort.... All things considered, the trade which I would rather have be to the taste of my pupil is that of cabinetmaker. It is cleanly, it is useful, and it may be practised at home; it keeps the body sufficiently exercised; it requires of the workman skill and ingenuity, and in the form of the products which utility determines, elegance and taste are not excluded....”

As he approaches maturity (Book IV) Émile requires “a new occupation which interests him by its novelty, which keeps him in good humor, gives him pleasure, occupies his attention, and keeps him in training—an occupation of which he is passionately fond and in which he is wholly absorbed. Now the only one which seems to me to fulfil all these conditions is hunting.... Émile has everything necessary for success in it: he is robust, dexterous, patient, indefatigable. Without fail he will contract a taste for this exercise; he will throw into it all the ardor of his age; for a time, at least, he will lose in it all the dangerous inclinations which spring from idleness. Hunting toughens the heart as well as the body....”

Book V is concerned with the education of Sophie, Émile’s future wife. “... Plato, in his Republic, enjoins the same exercises on women as upon men, and in this I think he was right.... Since the body is born, so to speak, before the soul, the first culture ought to be that of the body; and this order is common to both sexes. But the object of this culture is different; in one this object is the development of strength, while in the other it is the development of personal charms. Not that these qualities ought to be exclusive in each sex, but the order is simply reversed: women need sufficient strength to do with grace whatever they have to do; and men need sufficient cleverness to do with facility whatever they have to do. The extreme lack of vigor in women gives rise to the same quality in men. Women ought not to be robust like them, but for them, in order that the men who shall be born of them may be robust also. In this respect the convents, where the boarders have coarse fare, but many frolics, races, and sports in the open air and in gardens, are to be preferred to the home where a girl, delicately reared, always flattered or scolded, always seated under the eyes of her mother in a very close room, dares neither to rise, to walk, to speak, nor to breathe, and has not a moment’s liberty for playing, jumping, running, shouting, and indulging in the petulance natural to her age; always dangerous relaxation or badly conceived severity, but never anything according to reason. This is the way the young are ruined both in body and in heart.... Delicacy is not languor, and one need not be sickly in order to please.”

While Locke and Rousseau were urging the necessity of some sort of physical training in the scheme of education, and philologists and students of ancient art kept alive the knowledge of Greek gymnastics, a number of medical writers had been directing attention to the importance of bodily exercise in the restoration and preservation of health. In London, in 1705, Francis Fuller (1670-1706), a graduate of St. John’s College, Cambridge, published “Medicina Gymnastica: or a Treatise Concerning the Power of Exercise with Respect to the Animal Œconomy, and the Great Necessity of it in the Cure of Several Distempers.”⁠[12] A German translation appeared in 1750,⁠[13] after the book had already passed through seven or eight editions in England. Friedrich Hoffmann (1660-1742), a distinguished German physician referred to several times by GutsMuths in his “Gymnastics for the Young,” and the first professor of medicine at Halle University, published in Latin an essay “On Motion, the Best Medicine for the Body”⁠[14] in 1701; and eighteen years later several of his articles on the hygienic influence of exercise appeared at Halle under the title “The Incomparable Advantages of motion and of Bodily Exercises, and How They are to be Employed for the Preservation of Health.”⁠[15] Joh. Friedrich Zückert (1737-1778), a Berlin physician quoted by Basedow, in discussing the hygiene of infancy and childhood (1764-1765),⁠[16] mentions various bodily exercises, such as wrestling, dancing, riding, vaulting, bowling, skating and swimming. Upon his appointment to the chair of medicine at Lausanne, in 1766, Simon André Tissot (1728-1797) delivered a Latin discourse on the health of the literary class (De valetudine litteratorum), in which he recommends games and gymnastics for the youth of both sexes. A French translation of the address was published in 1767,⁠[17] a German one in the following year,⁠[18] besides later editions in both languages, several in English,⁠[19] and at least one in Swedish,⁠[20] “Italian, and six other languages.” A well-known French physician, Clement Joseph Tissot (1750-1826), published in Paris in 1780 his “Medical and Surgical Gymnastics: an Essay on the Use of Motion and of Different Exercises of the Body in the Cure of Disease.”⁠[21] Translations of the work were printed in Leipsic⁠[22] and Stockholm.⁠[23]