Youth_ Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene - G. Stanley Hall

Swedish, Turner, Sargent, and American systems are each, most unfortunately,
still too blind to the others' merits and too conscious of the others' shortcomings.
To some extent they are prevented from getting together by narrow devotion to a
single cult, aided sometimes by a pecuniary interest in the sale of their own
apparatus and books or in the training of teachers according to one set of rubrics.
The real elephant is neither a fan, a rope, a tree nor a log, as the blind men in the
fable contended, each thinking the part he had touched to be the whole. This
inability of leaders to combine causes uncertainty and lack of confidence in, and
of enthusiastic support for, any system on the part of the public. Even the
radically different needs of the sexes have failed of recognition from the same
partisanship. All together represent only a fraction of the nature and needs of
youth. The world now demands what this country has never had, a man who,
knowing the human body, gymnastic history, and the various great athletic
traditions of the past, shall study anew the whole motor field, as a few great
leaders early in the last century tried to do; who shall gather and correlate the
literature and experiences of the past and present with a deep sense of
responsibility to the future; who shall examine martial training with all the
inspirations, warnings, and new demands; and who shall know how to revive the
inspiration of the past animated by the same spirit as the Turners, who were
almost inflamed by referring back to the hardy life of the early Teutons and
trying to reproduce its best features; who shall catch the spirit of, and make due
connections with, popular sports past and present, study both industry and
education to compensate their debilitating effects, and be himself animated by a
great ethical and humanistic hope and faith in a better future. Such a man, if he
ever walks the earth, will be the idol of youth, will know their physical secrets,
will come almost as a savior to the bodies of men, and will, like Jahn, feel his
calling and work sacred, and his institution a temple in which every physical act
will be for the sake of the soul. The world of adolescence, especially that part
which sits in closed spaces conning books, groans and travails all the more
grievously and yearningly, because unconsciously, waiting for a redeemer for its
body. Till he appears, our culture must remain for most a little hollow, falsetto,
and handicapped by school-bred diseases. The modern gymnasium performs its
chief service during adolescence and is one of the most beneficent agencies of
which not a few, but every youth, should make large use. Its spirit should be
instinct with euphoria, where the joy of being alive reaches a point of high,
although not quite its highest, intensity. While the stimulus of rivalry and even
of records is not excluded, and social feelings may be appealed to by unison
exercises and by the club spirit, and while competitions, tournaments, and the
artificial motives of prizes and exhibitions may be invoked, the culture is in fact