A guide to the history of physical education

The earliest attempt in America to prepare teachers of physical education was made by Dio Lewis in the years 1861-1868, at his Normal Institute for Physical Education in Boston (see pp. 256-259). Its first course opened at 20 Essex Street July 5, 1861, and at the commencement exercises held nine weeks later, on September 5, 7 men and 7 women were graduated. The second course, which extended from January 2 to March 13, 1862 (ten weeks), was completed by a class of 18, the third (July 5 to September 15, 1862) by one of 12, and the fourth class, graduated March 13, 1863, numbered 22. Details of later courses are lacking. In a volume published in 1868 Lewis says that more than 250 persons had taken the diploma of the Normal Institute in the nine sessions which had been held, but his biographer states that “421 ladies and gentlemen, in almost equal numbers,” were graduated in the seven years following its establishment.

The second normal school, that of the North American Turnerbund, was projected as far back as 1856, but not actually opened until November 22, 1866. After two courses in New York City (1866-1867, 1869), one in Chicago (1871), and a third in New York (1872-1873), it became firmly established in Milwaukee under Brosius (1875-1888). Then followed two years in Indianapolis (1889-1891), a return to more ample quarters in Milwaukee, under Brosius and Wittich (1891-1907), and finally a permanent transfer to Indianapolis (in 1907). Its present name, Normal College of the American Gymnastic Union, was received in 1919. Four summer courses were given at Milwaukee, 1895-1898 inclusive. The history of the school is given at some length on pp. 297-300 and 307.

We have already mentioned Dr. Sargent’s contribution to the training of teachers (p. 284). During his forty years at Hemenway Gymnasium (1879-1919) his influence in this direction was more widely felt than that of any other man in America. The beginning was modest enough, at Witneys Block, corner of Palmer and Brattle Streets in Cambridge (1881-1883), where a single pupil, Mrs. Mary E. W. Jones, completed the one-year course in 1882. A second year was now added, and 4 women were graduated in 1884. Meanwhile quarters had been secured and equipped at 20 Church Street, and here in the years 1883-1904 a total of 261 women finished the prescribed work in theory and practice. About 70 others remained for a single year only. In 1902 the course became a three-year one, with attendance at a summer camp in New Hampshire added in 1912. When the new “Sargent Gymnasium,” on Everett Street, was occupied, in the school year 1904-1905, men as well as women were received as students, and in the next five years 130 more women and 6 men were graduated. In the year 1918-1919 the total enrollment had reached 406, with 22 names on the list of “officers of instruction,” not counting student assistants and special camp instructors and assistants.

In connection with the Harvard University Summer School five-week courses in physical education, under the direction of Dr. Sargent, were first given in 1887, attended that year by 18 men and 37 women. The total registration in the years 1887-1898 was 982 (329 men and 653 women), or an average attendance of 82. For the next three years the course was lengthened to two summers, and the enrollment was 98 men and 204 women, or a total of 302 and an average of 101. Thereafter the graded course covered four successive summers of theory and practice. The figures reached in the period 1902-1919 were 971 men and 2211 women, or a total of 3182 and an average per season of 177. For the entire period of thirty-three years, from 1887 through 1919, the enrollment was 4466 (1398 men and 3068 women), with an average attendance of 135.

The Brooklyn-Anderson-New Haven Normal School of Gymnastics and the Chautauqua (summer) School of Physical Education stood in much the same relation, in the years 1886-1904, as the Sargent Normal School and the Harvard University summer courses. William Gilbert Anderson, the prime mover in each, was the son of Edward Anderson, a Congregational clergyman, and grandson of Rufus Anderson, assistant secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions 1824-1832 and secretary 1832-1866. He was born at St. Joseph, Michigan, September 9, 1860. From 1874 to 1880 his father was pastor in Quincy, Illinois, and early in this period the boy became “an ardent champion of advanced work in gymnastics, possessed of considerable skill as a performer on the horizontal bars, a tumbler and a battoule-board and springboard leaper.... Attainment as an acrobat had come, in part, from association with the circus men who wintered” in Quincy, and his enthusiasm was further stimulated by William Blaikie’s “How to Get Strong” (New York, 1879) and Archibald Maclaren’s “Physical Education” (Oxford, 1869). In the year 1877-1878, while a student in the Roxbury Latin School, Boston, Anderson was a pupil of Robert J. Roberts in the Young Men’s Christian Association at 68 Eliot Street. Then came two years (1878-1880) as freshman and sophomore in the classical course at the University of Wisconsin, where military drill was the only required form of exercise, though there was a crude outdoor gymnasium which the catalogue described as “well-furnished,” and “open to students at fixed hours.” After teaching school for a year in Clayton, Illinois, he became superintendent of the Cleveland, Ohio, Young Men’s Christian Association gymnasium (1881-1882), and received the degree of doctor of medicine from the Cleveland Medical College in 1883. The next two years were spent in Columbus and Toledo, Ohio. He had now decided to follow physical training as a profession, and in the fall of 1885 accepted an appointment as director of the gymnasium at Adelphi Academy (now Adelphi College), Brooklyn, New York.

Here, early the next year, he organized the “Brooklyn Normal School for Physical Education.” Its first announcement, which lists a faculty of ten, calls attention to the fact that “no school in the country pays more attention to the physical education of its scholars than the Adelphi Academy. The number of scholars enrolled is within a few of one thousand, the majority of whom take daily exercise (obligatory). Members of the Normal Class will have opportunity to observe and assist in the instruction of these classes.... The gymnasium of Adelphi Academy, corner of St. James Place and Lafayette Avenue, has been secured for the use of Normal classes.... The first course in reading and study will extend from February 1 to October 1, 1886. The course in practical training in the gymnasium will begin February 1 and end June 1, 1886. The second term will begin October 4, 1886, and end June, 1887.” A class of 10 students was graduated in 1887, and 87 altogether in the period 1886-1892. At the end of that time Dr. Anderson removed to New Haven, Connecticut, to become associate director of the Yale University gymnasium, and the school, rechristened the “Anderson Normal School of Gymnastics,” was opened in the new location in September of 1892. In the next eleven years its graduates numbered 140. Meanwhile Dr. Ernst Hermann Arnold⁠[290] had been associated with Dr. Anderson in the management of the school, and in 1903 the latter’s active connection with it ceased altogether.⁠[291] The name had again been changed in January of 1901, this time to “New Haven Normal School of Gymnastics.”

In 1886 Dr. Anderson went to Chautauqua, New York, to take charge of physical education in the summer school established there by the Chautauqua Institution seven years before, and gave some free instruction to a normal class of three pupils. The next season there was a charge for such tuition, and certificates were given to the few who finished the work; but the normal course was not formally established until the following summer (1888). An old skating rink at the corner of Palestine and Scott avenues served as headquarters until a new gymnasium, started in 1890 and completed in the winter of 1890-1891, was ready for use. Meanwhile a company had been organized to erect the building and conduct the normal course, and the summer school of physical education was managed by this company in the years 1890-1912. Dr. Anderson held the position of principal from 1890 to 1894, and dean 1895-1904. By the addition of an advanced year in 1891 the course was extended to cover two summers, and in 1903 a third term was offered for the first time. In 1902 a second gymnasium, for classes in Swedish and corrective gymnastics, was available. Upon Dr. Anderson’s retirement Jacob Bolin, a member of the faculty since 1891, succeeded him as dean (1905-1909). In 1913 the school passed into the hands of the Chautauqua Institution. Dr. Jay W. Seaver⁠[292] had been an instructor at the summer school since 1889 and president of the company 1895-1912, and now became director of the courses in physical education. After his death Dr. Joseph E. Raycroft was acting director for two years (1916 and 1917), and in 1918 the position was given to Professor Charles Winfred Savage of Oberlin College, who had already served for two seasons as a member of the faculty.

The history of the physical training departments of the International Young Men’s Christian Association College at Springfield, Massachusetts (since 1887) and the Young Men’s Christian Association College in Chicago (since 1890) has been given in a previous chapter (pp. 309-319). In the absence of other opportunities for the professional training of men, these schools have enrolled among their students some who were not looking forward to Association service, and on the other hand many of their graduates have withdrawn from Association positions to accept others in public schools, in secondary and state normal schools, in colleges and universities, in church or settlement or playground work, or with athletic clubs or Boy Scouts.

We have already noted (p. 325) the beginning of the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, in 1889, the teaching done there by Posse, Enebuske, and Collin, and that in September of 1909 this school became the department of hygiene and physical education of Wellesley College. Mrs. Hemenway, at her death in 1894, had endowed it for a period of fifteen years, and Miss Amy Morris Homans was its director from the start until her retirement from the Wellesley faculty in the summer of 1918. After occupying temporary quarters at Boyleston Place and on Park Street, in Boston, the school was housed in Paine Memorial Building, 9 Appleton Street, between Tremont and Berkeley, and then from September of 1897 until the transfer in 1909 in the building of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association at 97 Huntington Avenue, near Exeter Street. At Wellesley the new Mary Hemenway Hall, constructed with a view to the needs of the Normal School and also to provide for the physical training of all Wellesley College students, was ready for its use. Twelve women had graduated from the first class, in 1891, and 433 women and 9 men in the years 1891-1909 inclusive.

Upon severing his connection with the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics Baron Posse at once opened a small gymnasium of his own in the Harcourt Building, 23 Irvington Street, on February 1, 1890. Afterwards more spacious quarters in the same building were occupied. From the normal classes, during the next six years (1890-1895), a total of 96 women and 6 men were graduated, 3 of them receiving the diploma from the medico-gymnastic course only. A still larger number had come under his instruction in the brief summer courses conducted in the Boston gymnasium, at the Martha’s Vineyard Summer Institute, and at Harvey, Illinois (see p. 326). Following Baron Posse’s death, on December 18, 1895, Baroness Rose Posse became director of the school. In the fall of 1900 it was transferred to the Fensmere Building, 206 Massachusetts Avenue, and in June of 1911 incorporated under the name “Posse Normal School of Gymnastics,” with Baroness Posse as president. That same summer (1911) the building at the corner of Garrison and St. Botolph streets, originally constructed (1886) for the (Mary E.) Allen Gymnasium and later used by the Women’s Athletic Club of Boston, was secured. This was completely destroyed by fire in the spring of 1913. A plot of land at 773-781 Beacon Street, near its intersection with Commonwealth Avenue, was now purchased, and the formal opening of the new building erected here took place on November 17 of that year. Baroness Posse retired from active connection with the school in May, 1915, and was succeeded as president by Mr. Hartvig Nissen (see p. 332).

No attempt is made here to trace the growth of the numerous other privately owned gymnasia, most of them of later origin, which have offered training courses for teachers. Nor have the data been collected which would make possible a history of physical training at the various state normal schools. One recalls, however, in the case of the latter, the long service of Dr. and Mrs. C. E. Ehinger at West Chester, Pa., Dr. H. B. Boice at Trenton, N. J., and Professor Wilbur P. Bowen at Michigan Normal College, Ypsilanti (since 1894). Much more significant, as pointing the way to the final solution of the problem of adequate professional preparation for leadership in physical education, are the beginning of teachers’ courses at our colleges and universities. But here again the facts are not at hand for a complete story. Such courses, counting toward a bachelor’s degree, have been offered at the University of California since 1898, the University of Nebraska since 1899, Oberlin College since 1900, University of Missouri at about the same time, Teachers College of Columbia University since 1903, Wellesley College since 1909, and University of Wisconsin since the fall of 1911. Doubtless there are other institutions which should be added to this list for the period it covers, and within the last ten years the number has grown considerably. Summer courses, with university credit allowed, have been conducted at Columbia University since 1899. Carefully coördinated courses leading to advanced degrees will mark the next step in advance, and in this direction, also, there are some encouraging signs of progress.