5,600 143 III 57 Total number not enrolled Total number of university graduates in all institutions reported 120 158 446 Briefly stated there are 446 specially trained and skilled teachers to every 11,503 children requiring special education in state institutions-not a large percentage. From the data collected from authentic sources and herewith presented it is obvious 1. That a higher standard for teachers employed in the state charitable and penal institutions must be exacted. This can be best brought about by a) Employing only teachers who have diplomas showing their scientific preparation for special work. b) By paying higher salaries to teachers in schools of special education. c) By state boards of control allowing teachers in the state charitable and penal institutions to have every third year for a year of vacation (with salary), this year to be spent in study or research. d) By the state universities being given supervision and control of all the educational and scientific work of such institutions. e) By the state boards of control in the various states being made up, not of politicians, but of educators, scientists, physicians, lawyers, and philanthropists, whose duty it shall be to see that the wards of the state receive that for which the public pays high taxes, and whose duty it shall be also to advance the scientific interests of the state charitable and penal institutions that have educational features. 2. That there must soon be, in connection with the public day-school system in the large cities, special institutions-residential schools-which shall provide both hospital and educational features, such institutions to be used as a sort of clearing-house for children who require for one, two, or even three years special physical and mental care. In such hospital schools or educational sanitaria may parents place their children, where they may be carefully studied until it is definitely determined whether such children are candidates for state school for feeble-minded, or whether they are only temporarily subnormal, and can by a few years of medical care and special education be brought up to the norm. That these residential schools must provide for very young deaf, blind, or subnormal children, for the state institutions do not admit children until the eighth or ninth year, thus losing to the child much valuable time for overcoming his deficiencies. The purpose of the residential schools to be prophylactic as well as therapuetical. 3. That the universities and state normal schools must include in their curricula branches of study that will specially fit teachers to know very definitely that which they should know to handle skillfully all cases and types of defective children that may be met in the public school, and who, because of neural defects, speech defects, mutism, etc., or because of physical and mental infirmities, or because of illness, must be re-educated, and have special care and treatment. As was indicated in the statement submitted to the Department of Special Education in 1902, one of the greatest needs in the educational field today is graduate courses in our universities, colleges, and state normal schools, such courses to provide or include a special course of study of "special" education, including particularly instruction in the physical care of children; the overcoming of neural defects; correction of speech defects; special method for the training of the deaf; special method employed in the education of the blind; the methods to be used in re-educating young invalid children; and methods of handling incorrigibles. The state reformatories are putting in educational features, and the time is not far distant when the re-education of the insane will be a part of the system of state public instruction and under the joint supervision of educators and physicians. ALL CRIME IS DISEASE ARTHUR B. LINSLEY, REGISTRAR OF PHILLIPS BROOKS SCHOOL, The dying words of the greatest of all the kings of biblical history to his son, the wisest of all men, express in their literal meaning a caution and a command which may well be the motto and inspiration of every ambitious youth of today: "Be strong and show thyself a man!" It may safely be said that no accomplishment in this world, however praiseworthy in itself, deserves consideration unless it have virtue as its basis. In no system of government, in no university, in no school, ought rewards of merit or any form of appreciation to be given, unless, coupled with the enumeration of other deserving qualities, there be also these words: "and for exemplary conduct." "What doth it matter if one gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Of what real advantage is it for a man to be a leader in politics, society, art, or literature, if his private life be so corrupt that he may never receive the approval of that most unsparing of critics-his own conscience? The most interesting and the most unsolvable of all the investigations presented to the student of social ethics and of theology is the wonderful duality of the human soul—that which I call "myself." You may never have realized it, but if you will turn the lamp upon your inner consciousness, and scan the process which goes on whenever you are called to decide upon a matter of moment in your conduct, you will hear always two voices speaking; not, I feel sure, those of "the good angel" and "the bad angel"-external monitors—as some contend; but the two distinct and powerful elements of your own duality. You are never called upon to meet and oppose a single temptation, to which there is danger of yielding (and, surely, that is not "temptation" which involves no danger), that you are not conscious of the better part within you presenting the claims of duty with unsparing bluntness and pertinacity, and fighting vigorously the advances of that other part which extols with enervating plausibility and eloquence the expediency and advantage of the evil course. These two monitors of your inner self actually talk with each other, each presenting its own arguments as tho you yourself were the judge; and how often, when you have yielded to the tempter, have you listened to the upbraidings of that same better self? This knowledge and conviction of the right is the very last human power to be lost when reason refuses its society; and there is no man so sunken in vice, no woman so depraved, no editor of any vile sheet so prone to cater to the worst elements in society, as not to be a competent, not to say unerring, judge of the line between right and wrong in any question of conduct or propriety which is ever brought up. If, then, I were to define character in the briefest and most epigrammatical way, I should call it "the preponderance in man of the better self over the worse." The one goal of all education, of all training, of all trial and tribulation, is character. When the refining of the last great assay has been made, when the metal has been melted in the crucible and the dross has been driven out, the only thing which the Great Judge will select is the pure gold of character. Of the influences which tend to improve the character and morals of men, I maintain that there is none of greater value than judicious physical training. You do not believe that even a Paderewski could give his noblest interpretations upon an instrument ill-made or out of tune. How can you expect the best accomplishment of the mind and heart, if that most marvelously intricate of all machines, the human body, be not kept in perfect order and at the point of highest efficiency? I am well aware that for many years athletics and athletes have not been of the highest repute. But there is nothing attractive and entertaining in this world that the devil and his minions do not seize upon and monopolize, if you permit them to do so. The time was when a young man would almost lose his reputation to be seen playing a game of billiards. The lowest elements of society had seized upon this finest of all games of skill, and surrounded it with such associations as made it disreputable, not only to enter a billiard room, but even to take part in a game in a private house; but today the billiard table is as reputable an adjunct of the city home as a grand piano. Thus I might enumerate many kinds of sport and many forms of exercise (which are not only absolutely harmless in themselves, but, on the other hand, extremely beneficial) which have been brought under the ban of the critic and the church, because of the evil associations which have been made to surround them. But it is true still that, outside of our colleges and schools, the athlete is apt to be regarded as a man of inferior standing, and so long as the brute instinct remains in the human nature, just so long will the crowd, at every opportunity, flock to see dogs and game-cocks and men fight and kill each other, and that sport will continue to be the most fascinating to the lowest elements of society which has in it the greatest amount of brutality. Much wrong has been done by injudicious opposition to many forms of harmless sport and exercise by people who ought to have known better. From the time of St. Jerome, who declared that the duty of a monk was not to teach, but to weep, and who describes himself as "weak of digestion, his skin squalid, and his bones as scarcely holding together," down to the beginning of the present decade, a vigorous constitution and exuberant health have always been considered inconsistent with "spiritual sanctity." Only three of the famous Greek and Latin Fathers-Ambrose, Augustine, and Athanasiuswere able-bodied men. "But the permanent influence of these three has been far greater, for good or for evil, than that of all the others put together." Students of divinity forty years ago were practically excluded by public opinion from participation in any form of athletic sports. They were forced to conform their lives, their dress, and their diet almost to the ascetic standard of the Middle Ages. I have a friend, a clergyman, now fourscore years of age, who in his youth barely escaped expulsion from the Baptist Divinity School at West Newton, Mass., for participating in the game of ball called "rounders." Another was driven from his pulpit for swimming the Connecticut and pitching quoits; and the idea is still rife in most communities that the minister of the gospel must be not as other men, but make his life eccentric by the practice of excessive self-abnegation. The most cursory glance at the history of the church will, however, establish the fact that almost all the great and permanent religious movements have been accomplished by vigorous and able-bodied "saints," who have been the exception to the general rule of health. I need scarcely allude to the typical scholar or professor in the colleges of the last half-century. His description, in a word, is that of great intellectuality, feeble constitution, chronic indigestion, and peevish regret that lack of health had prevented the accomplishment of the magnificent undertakings he had always proposed to make. Horace Mann has capitally said: "All thru the life of a pure-minded but feeble-bodied man, his path is lined with memory's gravestones, which mark the spots where noble enterprises perished for lack of physical vigor to embody them in deeds.” All this is changed; and today the preacher or the scholar may adorn the walls of his study with the trophies of the chase or the prizes won in the athletic contests of his college days, with no alarm lest his piety should be thought the less sincere because of his manly physique or his vigorous personality. Guhl and Koner, in their Life of the Greeks and Romans, mention first Thomas Wentworth, Higginson. among the public buildings of Greece the gymnasiums, because, as they say, they were the center points of Greek life. Here, as well as in the open air, were maintained all kinds of regulated exercise for the purpose of strengthening the body or single limbs. These they called "gymnastics." This training was supplemented by "agonistic" exercises, comprising those that tended to prepare the athletes for the wrestling bouts, which formed an important part of the national festivities, particularly the games of Olympia. Here assembled, invited by the peace messengers of Zeus, the delegates from empires and cities, with crowds of enthusiastic spectators from distant shores. The flower of Greek youth came up to test their skill in the noble competition for the crown of Zeus. Only he whose previous training of at least ten months in the Greek gymnasium, and whose untainted character and pure Hellenic descent had been certified, was allowed to approach the silver urn which contained the lots. Sterne says: "The body and the mind are like the jerkin and its lining; if you rumple the one, you rumple the other." In this bit of wisdom lies. the gist of the whole matter. The scholar, the preacher, and the business man, in our rushing metropolitan life, will speedily break down unless he recognize the fact that the constant drain upon his nerves and the trituration of the tissues of his brain must be balanced by regular and judicious exercise. Charles Kingsley said of the Greeks: "Their notion of education was to produce the highest type of health—that is, harmony and sympathy and grace in every faculty of mind and body;" and so closely upon a par did they place the action of mind and body that their commonplace definition of an "ignoramus" was "a man who could neither read nor swim;" and the Persians swung the balance far to the side of bodily care, for, says Herodotus, "from their fifth year to their twentieth the boys were carefully taught three things only to ride, to draw the bow, and to speak the truth." The fundamental maxim of the new physical training is this: "Aim not to produce a few great athletes, men who can lift vast weights, hurl a ponderous hammer, ride a wheel one hundred miles between sunrise and sundown, or win a six-days' foot race, while the multitudes go untaught and untrained; but rather to raise every individual to the highest symmetrical developmentto the maximum of health and physical beauty of which nature has made him personally capable." Not quantity, but quality-grace of form and efficiency of muscle-is the desideratum. Hercules must yield the palm to Apollo. One of the greatest eulogies, in a single sentence, which I have ever heard pronounced upon a human being, was that spoken of the late Dr. Marion Sims: "That by his discoveries in the methods of surgery and in the treatment of disease he had added twenty-seven days to the average life of civilized woman!" And if out of all the din and fanfare of the present era of athletics, attention to physical training and hygiene shall become universal in all our systems of education, thousands and thousands of years in the aggregate, of health and strength, of comfort and happiness, may be added to the human life of the civilized world. |