The events of the four years between the summer of 1914 and the winter of 1918 have brought us to a full realization of the real significance of physical education in the training of youth. America and her allies have had very dramatic reasons for regretting their careless indifference to the welfare of childhood and youth in former years. Only yesterday, we were told that the great war would be won by the country that could furnish the last man or fight for the last quarter of an hour. America and her allies looked with a new and fearful concern upon the army of young men who were found physically unfit for military service.

With the danger of war past, there is no lack of evidence that we and our allies will make practical application of this particular lesson. It will be fortunate indeed if the enlightened people of the earth are really permanently awake to the importance of the physical education of their citizens-in-the-making.

Governmental agencies have already started the movement to guarantee to the coming generation more extensive and more scientific physical education. Public and private institutions are joining forces so that the advantages of this extended program of physical education will be enjoyed by the young men and young women in industry and commerce as well as by those in schools and colleges.

It is to be hoped that the American college will do its full share and neglect no reasonable measure whereby the college graduate may be developed into the vigorous and healthy human being that the mentally trained ought to be. It must be admitted that our findings by the military draft boards, as well as other evidences secured through physical examinations, are not such as to make the American college proud of the quality or the extent of physical education which it has given in the past. We must express our keen disappointment at the prevalence of under-development, remediable defects, and unachieved physical and functional possibilities in our college graduates.

Physical training is concerned with the achievement and the conservation of human health. It has to do with conditioning the human being for the exigencies of life in peace or in war. Its standards are not set by a degree of health which merely enables the individual to keep out of bed, eat three meals a day, and run no abnormal temperature. Physical training is concerned with developing vigorous, enduring health that is based upon the perfect function, coördination, and integration of every organ of the human body; health that is not found wanting at the military draft; health that meets all its community obligations; health that is not affected by diseases of decay; and health that resists infection and postpones preventable death.

Official statements and information from reliable sources indicate that physical education and hygiene and physical training are regarded by authorities as covering about the same general field. The general plan and syllabus for physical training adopted by the Regents of the University of the State of New York in 1916 interprets physical training as covering "(1) Individual health examinations and personal health instruction (medical inspection); (2) instruction concerning the care of the body and the important facts of hygiene (recitations in hygiene); (3) physical examinations as a health habit, including gymnastics, elementary marching, and organized, supervised play, recreation, and athletics."

In March of 1918 a National Committee on Physical Education, formed of representatives from twenty or more national organizations, adopted the following resolutions:

I. That a comprehensive, thoroughgoing program of health education and physical education is absolutely needed for all boys and girls of elementary and secondary school age, both rural and urban, in every state in the Union.

II. That legislation, similar in purpose and scope to the provisions and requirements in the laws recently enacted in California, New York State, and New Jersey, is desirable in every state, to provide authorization and support for state-wide programs in the health and physical education field.

III. That the United States Bureau of Education should be empowered by law, and provided with sufficient appropriations, to exert adequate influence and supervision in relation to a nationwide program of instruction in health and physical education.

IV. That it seems most desirable that Congress should give recognition to this vital and neglected phase of education, with a bill and appropriation similar in purpose and scope to the Smith-Hughes Law, to give sanction, leadership, and support to a national program of health and physical education; and to encourage, standardize, and, in part, finance the practical program of constructive work that should be undertaken in every state.

V. That federal recognition, supervision, and support are urgently needed, as the effective means, under the Constitution, to secure that universal training of boys and girls in health and physical fitness which are equally essential to efficiency of all citizens both in peace and in war.

In December, 1918, five national organizations, assembled in regular annual meeting, adopted resolutions which read in part as follows:

In January, 1919, the United States Interdepartmental Social Hygiene Board suggested the following organization of a department of hygiene for the purpose of establishing such a department in at least one normal school, college, or university training school for teachers in each state of the Union.

SUGGESTED ORGANIZATION OF A DEPARTMENT OF HYGIENE

In February, 1919, the field service of the National Committee on Physical Education issued a tentative outline for a state law for physical education, suggested for use in planning future legislation. The purposes of physical education as stated in the preamble of this law read as follows:

In February, 1919, the legislative committee of the National Committee on Physical Education prepared a bill for federal legislation for the purpose of assisting the states in establishing physical education in their schools. This proposed federal law stated the purpose and aim of physical education as follows:

An analysis of these several authoritative and more or less official documents indicates very clearly a unanimity as to scope and aims of physical education, for they all seek to promote and conserve, in the broadest sense of the term, the health of the nation.

The problem of physical education in the college is intensified by the fact that freshmen come to their chosen institutions with a variety of experience in physical training, but unfortunately this experience is, too often, either inadequate or ineffective. The natural physical training of the earlier age periods produces whatever neuro-muscular development, whatever neuro-muscular coördination, whatever neuro-muscular control, and whatever other organic growth, development, or functional perfection is achieved by the young human concerned. A program of physical training wisely planned with reference to infancy, childhood, and early youth would include types of exercises, play, games, and sports, that would perfect the neuro-muscular and other functions far more completely than is commonly accomplished through the natural unsupervised and undirected physical training of those early age periods either in city or in rural communities. The force of modern habits of life has led to the destruction of those natural habits of work, play, and recreation that gave a proportion of our forebears a fairly complete natural program of physical exercise during the plastic or formative periods of life. As a result, many students reach college nowadays with stunted growths and with poorly developed, poorly trained, or poorly controlled neuro-muscular equipment. Some of these matriculates are physically weak. They lack alertness; their response is slow. Others are awkward and muscularly inefficient, though their physical growth is objectively—height and weight—normal or even above normal.

The College Department faces these problems through special provisions made for the purpose of supplying a belated neuro-muscular training to such cases. It often happens that successful training along these lines is possible only through individual instruction of a most elementary sort, taking the student through simple exercises that ought to have been a part of his experience in early childhood.

For the same reasons that are stated above, the College Department of Physical Training finds it necessary to concern itself with individual students who need special attention directed to specified organs or groups of organs whose training or care could have been accomplished ordinarily far better at an earlier period. These students present problems of posture, lung capacity, and regional weakness.

The College Department of Physical Training finds also a significant opportunity and an urgent duty in the fact that various types of physical exercise are intimately associated with social, ethical, and moral consequences. No other human activity gives the same opportunity for the development of a social spirit and personal ethical standards as do play, games, and sports of children and adolescents. Unsupervised, these activities degenerate and bring unmoral practices and an anti-social spirit in their wake.

Because of these opportunities and obligations, College Departments of Physical Training are including within their programs and jurisdictions more and more supervision of college athletics, and assume an ever increasing rôle in the direction of recreational activities of college students. It remains true, however, that these influences of supervised play and athletics should operate long before the individual reaches college age.

The intense interest of college students in athletic competitions, united with the opportunity which athletics offer for social and character training, has decided a number of colleges to turn athletic training over to the Department of Physical Training. This preparation for the supreme physical and physiological test must be built upon a foundation of safe and sound health. There is no more fitting place in the collegiate organization for these athletic and recreational activities.

The college departments that cover this field in whole or in part are known by various names. We have departments of Physical Training; of Physical Education; of Physical Culture; of Hygiene; of Physiology and Physical Education; of Hygiene and Physical Education; of Physical Training and Athletics, and so on.

An analysis of these college departments shows that they all concern themselves with much the same important objects, although they differ in their lines of greater emphasis. We find, too, that in some colleges the department includes activities that form separate, though related departments in other institutions.

The activities of such departments fall into three large divisions, each one of which has its logical subdivisions. One of these large divisions may be called the division of health examination. It has to do with the health examination of the individual student and with the health advice that is based on and consequent to such examination. The second division has to do with health instruction covering the subject matter of physical training. The third division covers directed experiences in right living and the formation of health habits, and includes the special activities noted above.

We often refer to the first division noted above as the division of medical inspection, physical examination, or health examination; to the second as hygiene, physiology, biology, or bacteriology; and to the third as gymnastics, physical exercise, organized play, recreation, athletics, or narrowly as physical training.

The prime purpose of collegiate physical training, then, is to furnish the student such information and such habit-forming experiences as will lead him to formulate and practice an intelligent policy of personal health control and an intelligent policy of community health control. The collateral and special objects of physical training vary with the individual student under the influence of his previous training and his present and future life plans.

The Collegiate Department of Physical Training is primarily concerned, therefore, with the acquisition and conservation of human health—mental, moral, and physical health. Because of his physical training, the college man should live longer; he should meet his environments obligations more successfully; he should be better able to protect himself from, and better able to avoid, injury; he should lose less time on account of injury, poor health, and sickness; he should get well more rapidly when he is sick; he should be better able to recover his health and strength after injury or illness; and he should therefore give to society a fuller, happier, and more useful life.

Such a department is concerned secondarily with (a) those special defects of earlier physical training that bring to college, students in need of neuro-muscular training and organic development, (b) with social, ethical, and character training, and (c) with the conditioning and special training of students for athletic competition or for other extraordinary physical and physiological demands.

In the light of the above statements, the objects of physical training may be summarized as follows:

THE MEDICAL EXAMINATION

In the American college of today, the student's first contact with the Department of Physical Training is very likely to be in the examining room. In the College of the City of New York[12] it has become the established custom to require a satisfactory health examination before admitting the applicant to registration as a student in the college. Entering classes are enrolled in this institution at the beginning of each term, and in each list of applicants there are always a few to whom admission is denied because of unsatisfactory health conditions.

In each case in which admission is denied because of unsatisfactory health, the individual is given careful advice relative to his present and probable future condition, and every effort is made to help the applicant plan his life so that he may be able at a later time to enter the college. Of course, it occasionally happens that applicants are found with serious and incurable health defects which make it very improbable that they will ever be in condition to attempt a college education.

The health examination of the student should cover those facts in his family and personal health history that are likely to have a bearing upon his present or future health, and the examination should include a very careful investigation of the important organs of his body. This examination calls for expert medical and dental service.

The most useful examiner is he who is at the same time a teacher. Nowhere else is a better or even an equally good opportunity given to drive home impressively, and sometimes dramatically, important lessons in individual hygiene. Through a pair of experimental lenses placed by his examiner before his hitherto undiscovered visual brain cells, the young student who has had poor vision and has never known it, may obtain, for the first time, a glimpse of the beauty in his surroundings.

The dental examiner who finds bad teeth and explains bad teeth to the student whose health is being, or may be, destroyed by such teeth, has before him all the elements necessary for very effective health instruction.

The health examination should be a personal and private affair. It is often best not to have even a recorder present. The student should understand that whatever passes between him and his examiner is entirely confidential.

All advice given a student at these examinations should be followed up if it is the kind of advice that can be followed up. If the advice involves the attention of a dentist or treatment by a physician, time should be allowed for making arrangements and for securing the treatment necessary. After that time has elapsed the student should be called upon to report with information from his parent or guardian, or from his family health adviser, indicating what has been done or will be done for the betterment of the conditions for which the advice was originally given. In the hands of a tactful examiner—one who is a teacher as well as an examiner—the student and parent, particularly the parent, will coöperate effectively in this plan for the development of health habits of the student. Less than three tenths of one per cent of the parents of City College students refuse to secure special health attention for their boys when we do so advise.

These examinations should be repeated at reasonable intervals throughout the entire college course. We have found in the College of the City of New York that a repetition every term is none too frequent. Visual defects, dental defects, evidences of heart trouble and signs of pulmonary tuberculosis, and other defects, not infrequently arise in cases of individuals who have been seen several times before without showing any evidence of poor health. It is hoped that these repeated examinations may lead to the continuation of such habits of bodily care in postgraduate years.

A careful and concise record must be made covering the main facts of each examination and of each conference with the student subsequent to his examination. These memoranda enable the examiner at each later examination to talk to the student with a knowledge of what has been found and what has been said and what has been done on preceding examinations, and on preceding follow-up conferences. As a result, the examiner-teacher is in position to be very much more useful not only because of significant facts before him concerning the student with whom he is talking, but also because of the greater confidence which the student will necessarily have in an examiner who is obviously interested in him and who possesses such an accurate record of his health history.

These examinations should apply to every student in a college or a university, regardless of the division to which he belongs. The need for health instruction or for the establishment of health habits, in order that one may be physically trained for the exigencies of life, is not peculiar to any student age period or to any academic or technicological group, or to a college for men or a college for women.

One of the dangers present in these college examinations is the tendency of the examiner to become more interested in the number of students examined and the number of diagnoses made than in the good influence he may have upon the health future of the student.

Every "case" should be treated by the health examiner as if it were the first and only case on hand for the day. The student certainly classifies the examiner as the first and only one he has had that day. The examiner should plan to make every contact he has with a student a help to the student.

HEALTH INSTRUCTION

A second large division of physical training deals with health instruction. As has been pointed out above, the division of health examination produces a very important and very useful opportunity for individual health instruction.

Hygiene, however, is presented commonly to groups of students in class organization rather than individually. Anatomy, physiology, psychology, bacteriology, pathology, general hygiene, individual hygiene, group hygiene, and intergroup hygiene are sciences, or combinations of sciences, from which physical training draws its facts. These sciences and those phases of economics and sociology that have to do with the economic and social influences of health and disease, of physical efficiency and physical degeneracy, supply physical training with its general subject matter.

Health instruction, then, as a part of physical training, draws its content from these sources. A logical plan of class instruction would, therefore, include the elements of anatomy, physiology, psychology, bacteriology (and general parasitology), pathology, economics, and sociology, as a basis for a more complete presentation of the facts of general hygiene, individual hygiene, group hygiene, and intergroup hygiene.

The most satisfactory presentation of these subjects involves the grouping of students into small classes, the employment of laboratory methods, the use of reference libraries, and the assignment of problems for investigation and study, with a general group discussion of these problems.

Unfortunately, college classes are large and the number of teachers employed in the department of physical training, or in those departments from which physical training draws its science and its philosophy, is small, so that it is impractical to plan to give this instruction to small groups of students covering this range of subject matter.

As a result, the lecture method with its obvious defects and shortcomings is the common medium for the health instruction of college students organized into classes. The more intimate and detailed instruction in these subjects is secured in special courses and in professional schools.

In the College of the City of New York, we expect that students who come to us from high schools and preparatory schools have had the elements of anatomy and physiology either in courses on those subjects or in courses in biology.[13] Our health instruction, therefore, has been developed along the lines of lectures on general hygiene, individual hygiene, group hygiene, and intergroup hygiene running through the four terms of the freshman and sophomore years.

These lectures are given in periods of from ten to fifteen minutes each, preceding class work in various forms of physical exercise. They are often called "floor talks." The shortness of the presentation favors vigor of address; necessitates a concise organization of material and a clarity and brevity of statement; and is more likely to command student attention and concentration. It has, however, its obvious defects. In these lectures persistent effort is made to influence the daily habits of the student. The lecture content is selected with reference to the practical problems of the daily life of the individual and of the community of which he is a part. It is obvious that the amount of time devoted to the presentation of the subject matter is utterly inadequate.

Short written tests are given once each month, and a longer written test is given at the end of each term. These examinations stimulate the student to organize his information and make it more completely his own property. The classes are too large[14] and the instructional force relatively too small to permit the assignment of references, presentation of reports, and the conduct of investigations.

Further instruction in physiology and bacteriology is secured in this institution through elective courses open to students in their junior and senior years. These elective courses, however, are not planned primarily for the health education of the student, but rather for his partial preparation as a teacher of physical training, a student of medicine, a scientific specialist, or for public health work.

HEALTH-FORMING ACTIVITIES OF THE DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION

The third division of activities contains the health-habit-forming influences covered by the Department of Physical Training. These influences are formed partly in connection with the follow-up activities associated with the health examinations and advice noted above; partly through impressions made by way of individual and class instruction concerning the laws of health (also noted above); and partly through systematic class work, group work, and individual work in gymnastics, organized recreation, games, play, and athletics.

The student who has been given a health examination each term throughout his college career will be very likely to continue the practice as a habit after graduation. This habit will follow more surely if the examiner has been a real health teacher and not a perfunctory recorder of observations made upon the student. A lack of sympathy and tact may easily prejudice the student against the examination.

The student who has been led regularly to care for defects of one sort or another; whose contact with his examiner-teacher in conferences following up the advice that has been given at the time of examination has been accompanied by the right sort of explanation and mutual understanding, will be more likely to continue to exercise that sort of care for the welfare of his body after he is no longer under the influence of the college.

The student who has seen the application of class health talks to his everyday problems is likely to be influenced to the practice of consequent health habits, particularly if those short lectures serve to correlate his various habit-forming experiences while in college.

And finally, the student who is brought into contact with regular systematic exercise may, if the exercise is attractive and interesting, achieve a health habit that will be carried out into his postgraduate life.

The existence of the Department of Physical Training would be amply justified if its influence upon the health and vigor of the student were limited to the period of his stay in college. The full success of this department, however, like that of all other college departments, must be measured by its influence upon the life of the student after he has left college. The formation of lasting health habits is, therefore, the most important object of this department.

Regular appropriate physical exercise is one of our most important health habits. It is perhaps safe to say that for the average individual it is the most important health habit. This is true because of its intimate and impressive influence upon all the fundamental organic functions of the body. Physical exercise in the American college is provided either as organized class work in the gymnasium, or by means of voluntary recreational opportunities, or through athletics.

Class work may include: marching, mass drills with or without light apparatus, work on heavy apparatus, games, dancing, swimming, and track and field work. This class work may be indoors or outdoors, depending on the season or climate.

Voluntary recreational opportunities are offered through free mass drills open to all students who may desire to take them regularly or irregularly; through open periods for apparatus work; and through facilities and space for games, swimming, mass athletics, and so on.

Competitive athletics are typical of the American college. Theoretically, athletics are open to all students. Practically, in many of our colleges athletics are made available only to the student with leisure time and exceptional physique. Consistent effort is being made today by college authorities to provide opportunities for intramural (interclass, intergroup, and mass) athletics for the whole student body; at the same time preserving the desirable features of the more specialized intercollegiate competitions.