Physical Exercise in Education
Physical Exercise in Education.—It is generally conceded that the physical functions need exercise in connection with mental education. But leading educators are coming to realize that the excessive athletic sports so popular in college life are really detrimental to useful education. The Sacramento Record-Union quotes President David Starr Jordan as saying that “if instructors demanded the same standard of work from the athletic leaders in colleges as from other students, the requisition would operate to cause the disappearance of the athletic parasite.” How much better it is to have some useful manual exercise connected with every educational institution that will conserve the necessary physical recreation. In all the athletic “sports” there is the gambling, contestant excitement that stimulates over-exercise and detracts from the relish of profitable literary pursuits. But in rational, profitable exercise of the muscles there is not the incentive to overdoing, nor the diversion of the mind from useful study that comes from physical exercise merely as an exciting entertainment. The well-regulated industrial training-school affords the ideal well-balanced education.