IDEAL HEALTH

Evening Star, Issue 22451, 23 September 1936, Page 12

IDEAL HEALTH

PROBLEM OF 11 PHYSICAL ILLITERACY ” “ A physical illiterate,” said Dr L. P. Jacks in a recent speech, “ may_ be in good health as judged by medical standards, ■ just as a man who has never learned to read and write may be quite an intelligent person. But just as your mental illiterate is shut out from a' world of culture by his inability to read and write, so your physical illiterate is shut out from a world of skilful activities which add enormously to' the joy and value «f----life. “ Perhaps an illustration will best convey what physical illiteracy means. It was once standing in a field with a companion when a procession of crosscountry runners, belonging to a harriers’ club, passed us. My companion was an Oriental philosopher, who was also a physical expert, trained in the discipline of Yoga. He watched the procession with a critical eye. “ Many of the runners were badly blown, and some were in evident distress. When they had all passed he turned) to me and said: * What a dread* ful sight I Not one of those men knows how to run.’ From his point of view, all those men were physical illiterates. With that I will couple the remark once made to me by the head master of a large elementary school of nearly 1,000 children: ‘ Not 5 per cent, of the children in this school know how to stand, to sit, to walk, to speak, or to breathe.’

“ On the other hand, officers in the Army, in contrast with university dons,, understand immediately what is meantby physical illiteracy. One of them wrote to me the other day: * Physical illiteracy is the normal condition of our recruits. They pass the tests for.health and measurements and may be • classed- as Al, but they don’t know; how to stand Or walk. They have no control over their ordinary and are quite incompetent to march in step or keep a united front; It,takes months of drill -to teach them their physical ABC.’ “ There are no statistics of physical illiteracy because wo are,only just beginning to realise that such a thing exists. But you have only to study an ordinary crowd, at a test match, on a racecourse, or even at a political meeting, to see that • physical illiteracy ia a frightfully common condition. Few. things _ would yield more valuable results in the intellectual, moral, and. social worlds than a great national' effort to get rid of physical illiteracy. The problem of leisure would begin to clear up. ... “ How is the attack on physical il4 literacy to, be conducted? The obvious answer is by instituting a right method of physical education, by integrating it with the national' system of education, by making it universally accessible in the same way as reading and writing* and, finally, by giving it a place among the tests by which educational efficiency is judged and rewarded; “A right system would differ con-i siderably from most of the systems op methods hitherto practised. It would not make the mistake of training the body on lines which have _ little or nothing to do with the training of tho mind. It would be no ‘ mix up ’of academics and athletics,- of book learning and games. It would be founded on sound knowledge of the relations between mind and body. “ It would never seek merely to take the devil out of the young people, but would aim rather at kindling the divine spark 'to a brighter flame. It would utilise their ‘ superfluous energies ’ instead of merely letting them off. It would be mental education as well as physical, but with this important difference from mental education as we commonly practise it, that instead of training the mind as a disembodied thing we should train the mind through its embodiment.

_ “An ideal system of physical education might be defined as one which trains the pupil to think with his whole body, the whole body being treated as the organ _of intelligence, through which his thinking finds expression, and not his thinking alone, but his moral ideals and his social aspirations, la ' all this a special care should be devoted to the education of the hand 1 , because the hand is the working end of the whole body.”