College Teaching Part 18

The problem of physical education in the college is intensified by the fact that freshmen come to their chosen inst.i.tutions 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 coordination, 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.

=Individual needs of students augment problem of department of physical education=

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.

=Supervision of athletics and recreation adds further to its problem=

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 a.s.sociated 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 a.s.sume an ever increasing role 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 compet.i.tions, 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.

=Organization of Department of Physical Education=

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 a.n.a.lysis 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 inst.i.tutions.

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 compet.i.tion 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:

I. The fundamental and ever present object of physical training is the acquisition and conservation of vigorous, enduring health, the summated effect of perfect functions in each and every organ of the human body.

II. The special objects of physical training vary in their needs for emphasis at different age periods and under the changing stresses of life. Among the more important of these special objects are:

(1) General, normal growth. An object in the early age periods.

(2) Neuro-muscular development, coordination, and control.

Accomplished best in early age periods.

(3) Special organic (anatomical and functional) development.

Optimum period in childhood and youth.

(4) Social, ethical, and moral training. Character building.

Objects more easily secured in childhood and youth.

(5) Preparation for some supreme physical and physiological test; e.g., athletic compet.i.tion, police or fire service, military service. Most desirable training period in late youth and early maturity. Must depend, however, on the effects of earlier physical training.

(6) The formation of health habits. Best accomplished in early life but commonly an important function of the College Department of Physical Training.

(7) The conservation of health. Always an object, but more particularly so in the middle and later life.

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 cla.s.ses are enrolled in this inst.i.tution 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.

=Scope of health examination=

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.

=How to conduct health examination=

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. .h.i.therto 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 pa.s.ses 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 cooperate 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 repet.i.tion 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 cla.s.sifies 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.

=Content of hygiene instruction=

Hygiene, however, is presented commonly to groups of students in cla.s.s 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.