ments of which they are composed, that man rises farthest above the higher animals, and of these powers later adolescence is the golden age. The aimless and archaic movements of in- fancy, whether massive and complex or in the form of iso- lated automatic tweaks or twinges, and perhaps even the still more microkinetic gleanings of fibrillary formications, are thus, by slow processes of combined analysis and synthesis, involving changes as radical as any in all the world of growth, made over into habits and conduct that fit the world of present environment.
But, thirdly, this long process carried out with all degrees of completeness may be arrested at any unfinished stage. Some automatisms refuse to be controlled by the will, and both they and it are often overworked. Here we must distinguish con- stantly between ( i ) those growing rankly in order to be later organized under the will, and (2) those that have become feral after this domestication of them has lost power from disease or fatigue, and (3) those that have never been subjugated because the central power that should have used them to weave the texture of willed action — the proper language of complete 164 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE manhood — was itself arrested or degenerate. With regard to many of these movements these distinctions can be made with confidence, and in some children more certainly than in others. In childhood, before twelve, the efferent patterns should be de- veloped into many more or less indelible habits and their colors set fast. Motor specialties requiring exactness and grace like piano-playing, drawing, writing, pronunciation of a for- eign tongue, dancing, acting, singing, and a host of virtu- osities, must be well begun before the relative arrest of acces- sory growth at the dawn of the ephebic regeneration and before its great afflux of strength. The facts seem to show that children of this age, such as Hancock ^ described, who could not stand with feet close together and eyes closed without swaying much, could not walk backward, sit still half a minute, dress alone, tie two ends of a string together, interlace slats, wind thread, spin a top, stand on toes or heels, hop on each foot, drive a nail, roll a hoop, skate, hit fingers together rapidly in succession beginning at the little finger and then re- versing, etc., are the very ones in whom automatisms are most marked or else they are those constitutionally inert, dull, or uneducable.
In children these motor residua may persist as characteristic features of inflection, accent, or manners; automatisms may become morbid in stammering or stuttering, or they may be seen in gait, handwriting, tics or tweaks, etc. Instead of disappear- ing with age, as they should, they are seen in the blind, as facial grimaces uncorrected by the mirror or facial consciousness, in the deaf as inarticulate noises, and they may tend to grow mon- strous with age as if they were disintegrated fragments of our personality, split off and aborted, or motor parasites leaving our psycho-physic ego poorer in energy and plasticity of adapta- tion, till the distraction and anarchy of the individual nature be- comes conspicuous and pathetic.
At puberty, however, when muscle habits are so plastic, when there is a new relation between quantity or volume of motor energy and qualitative differentiation, and between voli- tional control and reflex activities, these kinetic remnants strongly tend to shoot together into wrong aggregates if right * A Preliminary Study of Some of the Motor Phenomena of Mental Effort, American Journal of Psychology, July, 1896, vol. vii, pp. 491-517.
GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION 165 ones are not formed. Good manners and correct motor form generally, as well as skill, are the most economic ways of doing things, but this is the age of wasteful ways, awkwardness, mannerisms, tensions that are a constant leakage of vital energy, perhaps semi-imperative acts, contortions, quaint move- ments, more elaborated than in childhood and often highly un- aesthetic and disagreeable, motor coordinations that will need laborious decomposition later. The avoidable factor in their causation is, with some modification, not unlike that of the simpler feral movements and faulty attitudes, carriage, and postures in children, viz., some form of overpressure or misfit between environment and nature. As from the years of four to eight there is great danger that overemphasis of the activities of the accessory muscles will sow the seeds of chorea, or aggra- vate predispositions to it, now again comes a greatly increased danger, hardly existing from eight to twelve, that overprecision, especially if fundamental activities are neglected, will bring nervous strain and stunting precocity. This is again the age of the basal, e. g., hill-climbing muscles, of leg and back and shoulder work, and of the yet more fundamental heart, lung, and chest muscles. Now again the study of a book, under the usual conditions of sitting in a closed space and using pen, tongue, and eye combined, has a tendency to overestimate the accessory muscles. This is especially harmful for city children who are too prone to the distraction of overmobility at an age especially exposed to maladjustment of motor income and ex- penditure, and it constitutes not a liberal or power-generating, but a highly and prematurely specialized, narrowing, and weak- ening education unless offset by safeguards better than any system of gymnastics, which is at best artificial and exag- gerated.
As Bryan well says, " the efficiency of a machine depends so far as we know upon the maximum force, rate, amplitude, and variety of direction of its movements and upon the exact- ness with which below these maxima the force, rate, amplitude, and direction of the movements can be controlled." The motor efficiency of a man depends upon his ability in all these respects. Moreover, the education of the small muscles and fine adjust- ments of larger ones is as near mental training as physical cul- ture can get, for these are the thought-muscles and movements.
1 66 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE and their perfected function is to reflect and express by slight modifications of tension and tone every psychic change. Only the brain itself is more closely and immediately an organ of thought than are these muscles and their activity, re- flex, spontaneous, or imitative in origin. Whether any of them are of value, as Lindley thinks, in arousing the brain to activity, or, as Miiller suggests, in drawing off sensations or venting efferent impulses that would otherwise distract, we need not here discuss. If so, this is of course a secondary and late function — nature's way of making the best of things and utili- zing remnants.
With these facts and their implications in mind we can next pass to consider the conditions under which the adolescent mus- cles best develop. Here we confront one of the greatest and most difficult problems of our age. Changes in modern motor life have been so vast and sudden as to present some of the most comprehensive and all-conditioning dangers that threaten civi- lized races. Not only have the forms of labor been radically changed within a generation or two, but the basal activi- ties that shaped the body of primitive man have been suddenly swept away by the new methods of modern industry. Even popular sports, games, and recreations, so abundant in the early life of all progressive peoples, have been reduced and trans- formed, and the play age, that once extended on to middle life and often old age, has been restricted. Sedentary life in schools and offices, as we have seen, is reducing the vigor and size of. our lower limbs. Our industry is no longer under hygienic conditions, and instead of being out of doors, in the country, or of highly diversified kinds, it is now specialized, monotonous, in closed spaces, bad air, and perhaps poor light, especially in cities. The diseases and arrest bred in the young by life in shops, offices, factories, and schools increase. Work is rigidly bound to fixed hours, uniform standards, stints and piece-prod- ucts, and instead of a finished article, each individual now achieves a part of a single process, and knows little of those that precede or follow. Machinery has relieved the large basal mus- cles and laid more stress upon fine and exact movements that in- volve nerve strain. The coarser forms of w^ork that involve hard lifting, carrying, digging, etc., are themselves specialized, and skilled labor requires more and more brain-work. It has GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION 1 67 been estimated that " the diminution of manual labor required to do a given quantity of work in 1884 as compared with 1870 is no less than 70 per cent." ^ Personal interest in and the old native sense of responsibility for results, ownership and use of the finished products, which have been the inspiration and soul of work in all the past, are in more and more fields gone. Those who realize how small a proportion of the young male population train or engage even in amateur sports with zest and regularity, how very few and picked men strive for records, and how immediate and amazing are the results of judicious training, can best understand how far below his possibilities as a motor being the average modern man goes through life, and how far short in this respect he falls from fulfilling nature's design for him.
For unnumbered generations primitive man in the nomad age wandered, made perhaps annual migrations, and bore heavy burdens, while we ride relatively unencumbered. He tilled the reluctant soil, digging with rude implements where we use machines of many man-power. In the stone, iron, and bronze age, he shaped stone and metals, and wrought with in- finite pains and effort, products that we buy without even knowledge of the processes by which they are made. As hunter he followed game, and when found, he chased, fought, and overcame it in a struggle perhaps desperate, while we shoot it at a distance with little risk or effort. In warfare he fought hand to hand and eye to eye, while we kill " with as much black powder as can be put in a woman's thimble." He caught and domesticated scores of species of wild animals and taught them to serve him; fished with patience and skill that compensated his crude tools, weapons, implements, and tackle; danced to exhaustion in the service of his gods or in memory of his forebears, imitating every animal, rehearsing all his own activi- ties in mimic form to the point of exhaustion, while we move through a few figures in closed spaces. He dressed hides, wove baskets which we can not reproduce, and fabrics which we only poorly imitate by machinery, made pottery which set our fashions, played games that invigorated body and soul. His courtship was with feats of prowess, and skill, and meant physical effort and endurance.
^ Encyclopaedia of Social Reform, 1898, p. 1095.
1 68 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Adolescent girls, especially in the middle classes, in upper grammar and high school grades, during the golden age for nascent muscular development, suffer perhaps most of all in this respect. Grave as are the evils of child labor, I believe far more pubescents in this country now suffer from too little than from too much physical exercise, while most who suffer from work do so because it is too uniform, one-sided, accessory, or under unwholesome conditions, and not because it is ex- cessive in amount. Modern industry has thus largely ceased to be a means of physical development and needs to be offset by compensating modes of activity. Many labor-saving de- vices increase neural strain, so that one of the problems of our time is how to preserve and restore nerve energy. Under present industrial systems this must grow worse and not better in the future. Healthy natural industries will be less and less open to the young. This is the new situation that now con- fronts those concerned for motor education, if they would only make good what is lost.
Some of the results of these conditions are seen in average measurements of dimensions, proportions, strength, skill, and control. Despite the excellence of the few, the testimony of those most familiar with the bodies of children and adults, and their physical powers, gives evidence of the ravages of modern modes of life that, without a wide-spread motor re- vival, can bode only degeneration for our nation and our race. The number of common things that can not be done at all; the large proportion of our youth who must be exempted from many kinds of activity or a great amount of any; the thin limbs, collapsed shoulders or chests, the bilateral asymmetry, weak hearts, lungs, eyes, puny and bad voices, muddy or pallid complexions, tired ways, automatism, dyspeptic stomachs, the effects of youthful error or of impoverished heredity, delicate and tender nurture, often, alas, only too necessary, show the lamentable and cumulative effects of long neglect of the motor abilities, the most educable of all man's powers, and perhaps the most important for his well-being. If the unfaithful stewards of these puny and shameful bodies had again, as in Sparta, to strip and stand before stern judges and render them account, and be smitten with a conviction of their weakness, guilty deformity, and arrest of growth, if they were brought to GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION 1^9 realize how they are fallen beings, as weak as stern theologians once deemed them depraved, and how great their need of phys- ical salvation, we might hope again for a physical renaissance. Such a rebirth the world has seen but twice or perhaps thrice, and each was followed by the two or three brightest culture periods of history, and formed an epoch in the advancement of the kingdom of man. A vast body of evidence could be col- lected from the writings of anthropologists showing how supe- rior unspoiled savages are to civilized man in correct or esthetic proportions of body, in many forms of endurance of fatigue, hardship, and power to bear exposure, in the development and preservation of teeth and hair, in keenness of senses, absence of deformities, as well as immunity to many of our diseases. Their women are stronger and bear hardship and exposure, monthly periods and childbirth, better. Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ diseases.
The progressive realization of these tendencies has prompted most of the best recent and great changes motor- ward in education and also in personal regimen. Health- and strength-giving agencies have put to school the large motor areas of the brain, so long neglected, and have vastly enlarged their scope. Thousands of youth are now inspired with new enthusiasm for physical development, and new institutions of many kinds and grades have arisen, with a voluminous literature, unnumbered specialists, specialties, new apparatus, tests, movements, methods, and theories, and the press, the public, and the church are awakened to a fresh interest in the body and its powers. All this is magnificent, but sadly inade- quate to cope with the new needs and dangers, which are vastly greater.
In the lower realms of culture, sects have arisen, each with its own creed and cult, and perhaps its own publications, schools, apparatus, etc., and each blind and perhaps hostile to the merits of others. Some make deep breathing central, others relaxa- tion and passivity, to get all the unconscious tensions out of the muscles and joints, group by group, with special exer- cises, postures, etc., to this end. Some years ago a laughing cult, with giggle classes and a so-called philosophy of happiness.
170 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE flourished in a number of our cities. Others aim chiefly at Delsartian grace, emotional expression, and gesture. One schemelet cultivates classic poses and recommends those of famous statues of antiquity, in the attitude of some of which the pupil must always be found. Yawning has a cult and a little literature all to itself, and so has artificial crying and laughing and stretching. There are several health-lift, chest-expanding systems and apparatus, and trainers with secret methods ex- plained only to pupils. I have a book-shelf full of graded class and personal exercises for both sexes, all with copious directions and reasons, collections of plays and games, new and old, edited and arranged according to principles superior to what has been known hitherto. Sometimes the diaphragm, or the regulation of the bowels, the liver, sex, and lungs are chiefly had in view; these apparently for the most part by adult authors, who have suffered, and found relief, and who benevolently offer their cures as preventives to the young. Here the rankest weeds show the richest soil of need and opportunity.
Higher up the scale of ameliorative efforts are far more sane and beneficent methods, and we must glance at a few of the best and most typical, following the order: ( i ) industrial, (2) manual training, (3) gymnastic, and (4) sports and play games.
L Industrial education is now imperative for every nation that would excel in agriculture, manufacture, and trade, not only because of the growing intensity of competition, but because of the decline of the apprentice system and the growing intricacy of processes, requiring only the skill needed for livelihood. Thousands of our youth of late have been diverted from secondary schools to the monotechnic or trade classes now established for horology, glass-work, brick-laying, carpentry, forging, dressmaking, cooking, typesetting, bookbinding, brewing, seamanship, work in leather, rubber, horticulture, gardening, photography, basketry, stock-raising, typewriting, stenography and bookkeeping, elementary commercial train- ing for practical preparation for clerkships, etc. In this work not only is Boston, our most advanced city, as President Pritchett ^ has shown in detail, far behind Berlin, but German ' The Place of Industrial and Technical Training in Public Education. Tech- nology Review, January, 1902.
GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION 17' workmen and shopmen are slowly taking the best places even in England, and but for a high tariff, which protects our in- feriority, the competitive pressure would be still greater. In Germany, especially, this training is far more diversified than here, always being colored if not determined by the prevalent industry of the region and more specialized and helped out by evening and even Sunday classes in the school buildings, and by the still strong apprentice system. Froebelian influence in manual training reaches through the eight school years, and is in some respects better than ours in lower grades, but is very rarely coeducational, girls' work of sewing, knitting, crocheting, weaving, etc., not being considered manual train- ing. There are now over 1,500 schools and workshops in Ger- many where manual training is taught; twenty-five of these are independent schools. The work really began in 1875 with v. Kaas, and is promoted by the great Society for Boys' Hand- work. Much stress is laid on paper and pasteboard work in lower grades, under the influence of Kurufa of Darmstadt. Many objects for illustrating science are made, and one course embraces the Seyner water-wheel.^ In France it is made more effective by the equal salaries of teachers everywhere, thus securing better instruction in the country. Adolescence is the golden period for acquiring the skill that comes by practise, so essential in the struggle for survival. In general this kind of motor education is least of all free, but subservient to the tool, machine, process, finished product, or end in view, and to these health and development are subordinated, so that they tend to be ever more narrow and special. The standard here is maximal efficiency of the capaci- ties that earn. It may favor bad habitual attitudes, muscular development of but one part, excessive large or small muscles, involve too much time or effort, unhealthful conditions, etc., but it has the great advantage of utility, which is the main- spring of all industry. In a very few departments and places this training has felt the influence of the arts and crafts movement and has been faintly touched with the inspiration of beauty. While such courses give those who follow them marked advantage over those who do not, they are chiefly * See an article by Dr. H. E Kolk, Education, Dec, 1902.
172 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Utilitarian and do little to mature or unfold the physical powers, and may involve arrest or degeneration.
Where not one but several or many processes are taught, the case is far better. Of all work-schools, a good farm is probably the best for motor development. This is due to its great variety of occupations, healthful conditions, and the incalculable phyletic reenforcement from immemorial times. I have computed some threescore industries ^ as the census now classifies them, that were more or less generally known and practised sixty years ago in a little township, which not only in this but in other respects has many features of an ideal educa- tional environment for adolescent boys, combining as it does not only physical and industrial, but civil and religious elements in wise proportions and with pedagogic objectivity, and repre- senting the ideal of such a state of intelligent citizen voters as was contemplated by the framers of our Constitution.
Contrast this life with that of a " hand " in a modern shoe factory, who does all day but one of the eighty-one stages or processes from a tanned hide to a finished shoe, or of a man in a shirt-shop who is one of thirty-nine, each of whom does as piece-work a single step requiring great exactness, speed, and skill, and who never knows how a whole shirt is made, and we shall see that the present beginning of a revival of interest in muscular development comes none too early. So liberal is muscular education of this kind that its work in somewhat primitive form has been restored and copied in many features by many educational institutions for adolescents, of the Abbots- holme type and grade, and several others, whose purpose is to train for primitive conditions of colonial life. Thousands of school gardens have also been lately developed for lower grades, which have given a new impetus to the study of nature. Farm training at its best instils love of country, ruralizes taste, borrows some of its ideals from Goethe's peda- gogic province, and perhaps even Oilman's pie-shaped commu- nities, with villages at the center irradiating to farms in all directions. In England, where by the law of primogeniture holdings are large and in few hands, this training has never flourished, as it has greatly in France, where nearly every * See my Boy Life in a New England Town. Proc. Am. Antiquarian Society, October, 1890.
GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION 173 adult male may own land and a large proportion will come to do so. So of processes. As a student in Germany I took a few lessons each of a bookbinder, a glassblower, a shoemaker, a plumber, and a blacksmith, and here I have learned in a crude way the technique of the gold-beater and old-fashioned broom- maker, etc., none of which come amiss in the laboratory, and I am proud that I can still mow and keep my scythe sharp, chop, plow, milk, churn, make cheese and soap, braid a palm-leaf hat complete, knit, spin and even " put in a piece '' in an old-fash- ioned hand loom, and weave frocking. But this pride bows low before the pupils of our best institutions for negroes, Indians, and juvenile delinquents, whose training is often in more than a score of industries and who to-day in my judgment receive the best training in the land, if judged by the annual growth in mind, morals, health, physique, ability, and knowledge, all tak- en together. Instead of seeking soft, ready-made places near home, such education impels to the frontier, to strike out new careers, to start at the bottom and rise by merit, beginning so low that every change must be a rise. Wherever youth thus trained are thrown, they land like a cat on all-fours and are armed cap-a-pie for the struggle of life. Agriculture, manufac- ture, and commerce are the bases of national prosperity, and on them all professions, institutions, and even culture, are more and more dependent, while the old ideals of mere study and brain-work are fast becoming obsolete. We really retain only the knowledge we apply. We should get up interest in new processes like that of a naturalist in new species. Those who leave school at any age or stage should be best fitted to take up their life work instead of leaving unfitted for it, aimless and dis- couraged. Instead of dropping out limp and disheartened, we should train " struggle- for-lifeurs," in Daudet's phrase, and that betimes, so that the young come back to it not too late for securing the best benefits, after having wasted the years best fit- ted for it in profitless studies or in the hard school of failure. By such methods many of our flabby, undeveloped, anemic, easy- living city youth would be regenerated in body and spirit.
Some of the now oldest, richest, and most famous schools of the world were at first established by charity for poor boys who worked their way, and such institutions have an un- dreamed-of future. No other so well fit for a life of respect- 174 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE able and successful muscle work, and perhaps this should be central for all at this stage. It develops the muscular activi- ties rendered necessary by man's early development, which were so largely concerned with food, shelter, clothing, making and selling commodities necessary for life, comfort and safety. The natural state of man is not war, but peace, and perhaps Dawson^ is right in thinking that three-fourths of man's physical activities in the past have gone into such vocations. Industry has determined the nature and trend of muscular de- velopment, and youth, who have pets, till the soil, build, manu- facture, use tools, and master elementary processes and skills, are most truly repeating the history of the race. This, too, lays the best foundation for intellectual careers. The study of pure science, as well as its higher technology, follows rather than precedes this. In the largest sense this is the order of nature, from fundamental and generalized to finer accessory and specialized organs and functions, and such a sequence best weeds out and subordinates automatisms. The age of stress in most of these kinds of training is that of most rapid increment of muscular power, as we have seen in the middle and later teens rather than childhood, as some recent methods have mistakenly