Bill's School and Mine Part 2

PLAY AS A TRAINING IN APPLICATION.

Never yet was a boy who dreamed of ice-cream sundaes while playing ball.

Every one knows that play means health and happiness to children, and nearly every one thinks of the playgrounds movement as based solely on ideals of health and ideals of happiness in a rather narrow sense; but the movement means much more than health and happiness as these terms are generally understood.

The Indian boy's play, which included practice with the bow and arrow, foot racing, ball playing and horse-back riding, was perfectly adapted to the needs of his adult life, but how about base ball and prisoner's base for the boy who is to become a salesman or a mechanic, a physician or an engineer? Good fun and a good appet.i.te certainly come from these games, and one may also place to their credit a tempered reasonableness and a high regard for what is fair and square; _but as a training in application nothing can take their place._

Play as a training in application! That certainly is a paradox; and yet everyone knows that play is the first thing in life to give rise to that peculiar overwhelming eagerness which alone can bring every atom of one's strength into action. Ability to focus one's whole mind upon an undertaking and to apply one's whole body in concentrated effort is what our boys and girls are most in need of, and vigorous compet.i.tive play serves better than anything else, if, indeed there is anything else to create it.

Intense and eager application! That means not only an escape from laziness and apathy, but eagerness is the only thing in the world that defies fatigue. A healthy boy can put forth an amazing amount of physical effort and be fresh at the end of a day of play. And a man whose habit of application is so highly developed that it a.s.sumes a quality of eagerness and never fails in absolute singleness of purpose, is there any limit to what such a man can do?

Every one knows that play means health and happiness to children, and nearly every one thinks of the playgrounds movement as based solely on ideals of health and ideals of happiness in a rather narrow sense; but the movement means much more than health and happiness as these terms are generally understood.{3}

The Indian boy's play, which included practice with the bow and arrow, foot racing, ball playing and horse-back riding, was perfectly adapted to the needs of his adult life, but how about base ball and prisoner's base for the boy who is to become a salesman or a mechanic, a physician or an engineer? Good fun and a good appet.i.te certainly come from these games, and one may also place to their credit a tempered reasonableness and a high regard for what is fair and square; _but as a training in application nothing can take their place._

Play as a training in application! That certainly is a paradox; and yet everyone knows that play is the first thing in life to give rise to that peculiar overwhelming eagerness which alone can bring every atom of one's strength into action. Ability to focus one's whole mind upon an undertaking and to apply one's whole body in concentrated effort is what our boys and girls are most in need of, and vigorous compet.i.tive play serves better than anything else, if, indeed there is anything else to create it.

Intense and eager application! That means not only an escape from laziness and apathy, but eagerness is the only thing in the world that defies fatigue. A healthy boy can put forth an amazing amount of physical effort and be fresh at the end of a day of play. And a man whose habit of application is so highly developed that it a.s.sumes a quality of eagerness and never fails in absolute singleness of purpose, is there any limit to what such a man can do?

THE ENERGIZING OF PLAY.

Strenuous play leads to strenuous work.

To face page 28

THE ENERGIZING OF PLAY.

Strenuous play leads to strenuous work.

Play Ball.

Scarcely more than a generation ago every American boy came under the spell of hunting and fishing; and there is no more powerful incentive to laborious days, nor any anodyne so potent for bodily discomfort and hardship! A hunting and fishing boyhood! Such has been the chief source of human energy in this lazy world of ours, the chief basis of life-long habit of persistent and strenuous effort; and the problem of educational play is to a great extent the problem of finding an effective subst.i.tute for the lure of the wild for stimulating young people to intense activity.

The lure of the wild! Alas it is but a poet's fancy in this tame world of ours. But our boys remain as a perennial race of Wild Indians however tame the world may come to be; and fortunately they are not dependent upon completely truthful externals. The genuine Wild Indian becomes a sorry spectacle, even if he does not sicken and die, when he is deprived of his millions of square miles of wild buffalo country; but our boy Bill cannot have such an out-of-doors, never again as long as the earth shall last. Indeed he has no need of such a thing, for if his fancy is stirred by ardent playmates he will chase an imaginary stag around a vacant lot all day if only there is a mixture of earth and sky and greenery to set off his make believe--and eat mush and milk when the day is done!

Indeed youngsters must hunt in packs, as Whitcomb Riley tells in his Hunting Song of the American Bander-Log, and the gang idea contains the ultimate solution of what would otherwise be an impossible problem, namely, to find an effective subst.i.tute for the lure of the wild for the energizing of the intensely active kind of play, the kind of play that trains for application, the kind that approaches hunting and fishing or tribal warfare or the settling of a blood-feud in its persistent, single-minded and strenuous activity.

Many grown-ups seem to think that mere permission is now a sufficient basis for play, as it was in pioneer and rural days. Indeed this is largely true for very small children who can sit in the sunshine and make mud pies or dig holes in a bed of sand; but with older boys it is different. They may indeed fight or steal, or engage in the worst varieties of gang activity, or sit by a fire in a back alley talking s.e.x like grown-up sordidly imaginative Hottentots in Darkest Africa; but strenuous play requires suggestive example and organization, as with our Boy Scouts; and it depends to a very great extent upon compet.i.tive athletics. A dozen large ball fields and two or three good-sized swimming pools are, next to his food, the most important thing for our boy Bill; and they would do more to make him into an energetic and industrious man than all the rest of his school work put together.

Scarcely more than a generation ago every American boy came under the spell of hunting and fishing; and there is no more powerful incentive to laborious days, nor any anodyne so potent for bodily discomfort and hardship! A hunting and fishing boyhood! Such has been the chief source of human energy in this lazy world of ours, the chief basis of life-long habit of persistent and strenuous effort; and the problem of educational play is to a great extent the problem of finding an effective subst.i.tute for the lure of the wild for stimulating young people to intense activity.{4}

The lure of the wild! Alas it is but a poet's fancy in this tame world of ours. But our boys remain as a perennial race of Wild Indians however tame the world may come to be; and fortunately they are not dependent upon completely truthful externals. The genuine Wild Indian becomes a sorry spectacle, even if he does not sicken and die, when he is deprived of his millions of square miles of wild buffalo country; but our boy Bill cannot have such an out-of-doors, never again as long as the earth shall last. Indeed he has no need of such a thing, for if his fancy is stirred by ardent playmates he will chase an imaginary stag around a vacant lot all day if only there is a mixture of earth and sky and greenery to set off his make believe--and eat mush and milk when the day is done!

Indeed youngsters must hunt in packs, as Whitcomb Riley tells in his Hunting Song of the American Bander-Log, and the gang idea contains the ultimate solution of what would otherwise be an impossible problem, namely, to find an effective subst.i.tute for the lure of the wild for the energizing of the intensely active kind of play, the kind of play that trains for application, the kind that approaches hunting and fishing or tribal warfare or the settling of a blood-feud in its persistent, single-minded and strenuous activity.

Many grown-ups seem to think that mere permission is now a sufficient basis for play, as it was in pioneer and rural days. Indeed this is largely true for very small children who can sit in the sunshine and make mud pies or dig holes in a bed of sand; but with older boys it is different. They may indeed fight or steal, or engage in the worst varieties of gang activity, or sit by a fire in a back alley talking s.e.x like grown-up sordidly imaginative Hottentots in Darkest Africa; but strenuous play requires suggestive example and organization, as with our Boy Scouts; and it depends to a very great extent upon compet.i.tive athletics. A dozen large ball fields and two or three good-sized swimming pools are, next to his food, the most important thing for our boy Bill; and they would do more to make him into an energetic and industrious man than all the rest of his school work put together.

THE STUDY OF SCIENCE.

Grau theurer Freund ist alle Theorie Und grun des Lebens goldener Baum.

GOETHE

Everyone realizes the constraint that is placed upon the lives of men by the physical necessities of the world in which we live, and although in one way this constraint is more and more relieved with the progress of the applied sciences, in another way it becomes more and more exacting. It is indeed easier to cross the Atlantic Ocean now than it was in Leif Ericsson's time, but consider the discipline of the shop, and above all consider the rules of machine design! Could even the hardy Nors.e.m.e.n have known anything as uncompromisingly exacting as these? To do things becomes easier and easier, but to learn how to do things becomes more and more difficult.

Every person I have ever talked with, old or young, theorist or practician, student-in-general or specialist in whatever line, has exhibited more or less distinctly a certain att.i.tude of impatience towards the exactions of this or that phase of the precise modes of thought of the physical sciences.

"Da wird der Geist Euch wohl dressiert In spanische Stiefeln eingeschnuert."

In a recent article[D] on the distinction between the liberal and technical in education, my friend and colleague, Professor Percy Hughes, says that in speaking of an education as liberal we thereby a.s.sociate it with liberalism in politics, in philosophy and theology, and in men's personal relations with each other. In each case liberalism seems fundamentally, to denote freedom, and liberalism in education is the freedom of development in each individual of that character and personality which is his true nature. All this I accept in the spirit of an optimist, a.s.suming men's true natures to be good, but I do not, and I am sure that Professor Hughes does not, consider that technical education, unless it be inexcusably harsh and narrow, is illiberal; nor that liberal education, unless it be inexcusably soft and vague, is wholly non-technical. The liberal and the technical are not two kinds of education, each complete in itself. Indeed, Professor Hughes speaks of liberal education, not as a category, but as a condition which makes for freedom of development of personality and character.

It seems to me, however, that there are phases of education which have but little to do with personality, and I call to your attention this definition of liberalism in education, in order that I may turn sharply away from it as a partial definition which, to a great extent, excludes the physical sciences. Indeed, I wish to speak of a condition in education which is the ant.i.thesis of freedom. I wish to explain the teaching of elementary physical science as a mode of constraint, as an impressed constructive discipline without which no freedom is possible in our dealings with physical things. I wish to characterize the study of elementary physical science as a reorganization of the workaday mind of a young man as complete as the pupation of an insect; and I wish to emphasize the necessity of exacting constraint as the essential condition of this reorganization.

There is a kind of salamander, the axolotl, which lives a tadpole-like youth and never changes to the adult form unless a stress of dry weather annihilates his watery world; but he lives always and reproduces his kind as a tadpole, and a very funny-looking tadpole he is, with his lungs hanging like feathery ta.s.sels from the sides of his head. When the aquatic home of the axolotl dries up, he quickly develops a pair of internal lungs, lops off his ta.s.sels and embarks on a new mode of life on land. So it is with our young men who are to develop beyond the tadpole stage, they must meet with quick and responsive inward growth that new and increasing "stress of dryness," as many are wont to call our modern age of science and organized industry.

Stress of dryness! Indeed no flow of humor is to be found in the detached impersonalities of the sciences, and if we are to understand the characteristics of physical science we must turn our attention to things which lead inevitably to an exacting and rigid mathematical philosophy. It certainly is presumptive to tell a reader that he must turn his attention to such a thing, but there is no other way; the best we can do is to choose the simplest path. Let us therefore consider the familiar phenomena of motion.

The most prominent aspect of all phenomena is motion. In that realm of nature which is not of man's devising[E] motion is universal. In the other realm of nature, the realm of things devised, motion is no less prominent. Every purpose of our practical life is accomplished by movements of the body and by directed movements of tools and mechanisms, such as the swing of scythe and flail, and the studied movements of planer and lathe from which are evolved the strong-armed steam shovel and the deft-fingered loom.

The laws of motion. Every one has a sense of the absurdity of the idea of reducing the more complicated phenomena of nature to an orderly system of mechanical law. To speak of motion is to call to mind first of all the phenomena that are a.s.sociated with the excessively complicated, incessantly changing, turbulent and tumbling motion of wind and water. These phenomena have always had the most insistent appeal to us, they have confronted us everywhere and always, and life is an unending contest with their fortuitous diversity, which rises only too often to irresistible sweeps of destruction in fire and flood, and in irresistible crash of collision and collapse where all things mingle in one dread fluid confusion! The laws of motion!

Consider the awful complexity of a disastrous tornado or the dreadful confusion of a railway wreck, and understand that what we call the laws of motion, although they have a great deal to do with the ways in which we think, have very little to do with the phenomena of nature. The laws of motion! There is indeed a touch of arrogance in such a phrase with its unwarranted suggestion of completeness and universality, and yet the ideas which const.i.tute the laws of motion have an almost unlimited extent of legitimate range, _and these ideas must be possessed with a perfect precision if one is to acquire any solid knowledge whatever of the phenomena of motion._ The necessity of precise ideas. Herein lies the impossibility of compromise and the necessity of coercion and constraint; one must think so and so, there is no other way. And yet there is always a conflict in the mind of even the most willing student because of the constraint which precise ideas place upon our vivid and primitively adequate sense of physical things; and this conflict is perennial but it is by no means a one-sided conflict between mere crudity and refinement, for refinement ignores many things. Indeed, precise ideas not only help to form[F] our sense of the world in which we live but they inhibit sense as well, and their rigid and unchallenged rule would be indeed a stress of dryness.