DIVORCE OF BODY AND MIND

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18653, 23 August 1930, Page 9

DIVORCE OF BODY AND MIND

VIEWS OF DISTINGUISHED EDUCATIONALIST. Dr. L. P. Jacks, Principal of Manchester College, in an address reported in the “Oxford Times,” said:— “I think some of the greatest mistakes we are making, both in industry and education, arise from our having a separate mind and body,” he said. “The idea of the human being as a patchwork creation, made up of a superior thing called the mind and an inferior thing called the body, seems to be entirely false anu most pernicious when used as a basis for dealing with the human being. “It is in the school of industry more than in any other that our people today are being made for good or evil. I think industry and education will be much more closely together for a common purpose in the future than they are in the present. I would define a good citizen as one who is engaged in teaching his fellow-citizens the great lesson of excellence by the way he goes about the business of life, by the way he does his work, and the way he spends his leisure time.

“lf you insist on taking them as separate things and educate the mind by one set of operations and the body by another, you will find t.ie result of your divided efforts is not in the best interests of a man’s mind or his body. I think it can be said truly that in this country no large attempt has been made to correlate the culture of the mind with the culture of the body. I have nothing to say against athletics, and I fully endorse all that is said at school prize-givings and such-like occasions about the value of a healthy mind and the development of the body. But I would point out at the same time that the cult of the body, as typified on the playing-fields, has very little to do with the cult of the mind as it goes on in our classrooms and lecture-rooms.” Dr. Jacks said that he once took a Japanese professor round the lecturerooms of Oxford and then took him to see a Rugger match in the Parks. The profesor’s observation was: “In your lecture-rooms you train the minds of the young men as if you mean them to become clergymen, and on your playing-fields you train their bodies as if you mean them to become policemen.” “That.” said Dr. Jacks, “states pretty r.ccura '!y the relation between the culture of the mind and the body carried on in our universities and schools and in the country generally. Both methods are good, but good for a different purpose. The tired body always craves for some kind of external excitement. Most of the industrial areas provide the external excitement. Alcohol, of course, is one. “The relation of man’s mind and body,” he added, “had never been thoroughly worked out by the educators of this country, but in some Continental countries the higher education of the body was being incorporated into the national system of education, and went hand-in-hand with the education of the mind. In this country we had been taught to think that the cult of the mind was celestial, something heavenly, and somehow it was a«’partner to the growth of that which was immeasurably inferior to itself, called the body. The body was often spoken of as the house which the mind inhabits, and he thought it had to be confessed that the idea was not altogether u.ii.ounded in fact. “I see in the physical condition of the crowd an opportunity for one of the greatest of educational reforms that civilisation has ever attempted.”