Education is to unfold all these latencies in the individual and the
race to their maximal maturity and strength. As a process considered
as internally taking place, it is nothing else than human evolution;
as a force or forces tending to growth, it is “almost as broad as what
biology calls environment”--a much wider conception than instruction
and discipline.
According to the genetic view of soul, consciousness is a late
product in the evolution of the soul kingdom, and thus constitutes
only a small and yet unstable upper story of our psychic structure.
Thus we must seek “the bearer of mental heredity” in the larger and
older basal structure of the soul, namely, in the motor habits,
feelings, instincts, impulses, and intuitions--which constitute the
unconscious part of our soul. It follows, then, that to secure a full
and unhindered unfolding of this unconscious basal part of our soul is
the first concern of education. Unless built on this foundation rock,
which is coextensive with the history of animal and human evolution,
the superstructure will not stand firm and secure. So Dr. Hall stands
as a vigorous protestant against the ultra-intellectualistic tendency
of prevailing education which neglects the culture of motor habits, of
instincts, and of emotions and pleads for the cultivation of the heart
as well as the head.
First, he is an ardent apostle of the education of and through
muscle, the growing recognition of which has been one of the most
conspicuous and hopeful tendencies of educational progress in recent
years. “Muscles are the vehicles of habituation, imitation, obedience,
character, and even of manners and customs.... Skill, endurance, and
perseverance may almost be called muscular virtues, and fatigue,
velleity, caprice, _ennui_, restlessness, lack of control,
and poise, muscular faults” (1: vol. i, p. 132). Thus the basis of
character building must be laid in motor training; will culture is
essentially muscle culture. Yet muscles are not only the organs of
will, but also of feeling and thought. Throughout animal and human
evolution, the development of intelligence went together with that
of the structure and function of muscles, and every change in our
emotional life is accompanied by change in internal or external muscles
of the body.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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