who see that this program is carried out. The Federation also makes a small contribution to the cost of this physical training throughout the republic. The Congress of the United States should immediately provide for some national aid to the states and municipalities in putting into force in all schools a course of physical training planned and watched by the national government. When a proper course of physical training has been in operation all over the United States for ten years, the productiveness of the national industries will show a great increase, the number of children in the average family will also increase, and there will not be so many stooping, crooked, stunted, slouching, awkward people in the streets and factories as there are now. The war has brought to light the fact that American schools and ordinary American life for more than a hundred years have failed to keep alive one sentiment of public duty which was natural to the early American communities on the shores of the Atlantic, because they lived under the constant pressure of public dangers and apprehensions. When the Pilgrim Fathers first planted their settlement at Plymouth they took it for granted that every able-bodied man was to bear arms in defense of the community. The Puritan Colony of Massachusetts Bay made the same assumption; and both these pioneering communities relied for many years on a militia to which every able-bodied man belonged as a matter of course. In the adventurous Puritan settlements on the border, the men carried their guns with them into the fields where they worked and to church on Sundays. Every able-bodied man felt that he might at any time encounter wounds and death in defense of his home and village. Military service from him was the country's due. In recent American generations this sense of personal individual duty to the country has been lost, and it has taken a great war in defense of human liberty to reëstablish it. Now, it is for the schools and colleges of the country to maintain this sense of obligation in all the generations to come by direct and positive teachings, and by coöperating with the family and church in training boys and girls and young men and women to render gladly free, unpaid service in their homes, to the neighbors and friends whom they can help, and to the stranger within their gates. Every secondary school should give concrete and well-illustrated instruction in all the coöperative enterprises in which young people can take part for the benefit of the community, and in all the protective and helpful services which young citizens can render. The altruistic sentiments and services should be set before the pupils, and should be exemplified in the lives of their teachers, parents, and natural leaders. The influence of all teachers and parents should be steadily exerted to diminish the selfishness and self-reference which often accompany thoughtless childhood, and to develop, as early as possible, good will and serviceableness towards others, and consideration for the needs of others. It should be made a special object in all schools to develop among the children and youth what is called in sports "team play"; to impress all the pupils with the high value of coöperative discipline, that is, of the discipline imposed with the consent of the subject of discipline in order to increase the efficiency of the group and therefore the satisfaction of every member in his own contribution. This content in a strict discipline which he has a share in planning and imposing is to-day the chief need of all workmen in industries which require punctuality, order, system, and a common purpose to be efficient on the part of all concerned. There should be many opportunities during school life to learn this enjoyable acquiescence in the strict, coöperative discipline necessary when many persons have to combine in the prompt and accurate production of a given effect or result. Some of the familiar means to this end are singing in parts, producing music in a band or orchestra, folkdancing, combining in groups to perform gymnastic feats, acting plays, and giving descriptions or narratives before a school audience in which many speakers combine to produce one harmonious and consecutive story. In modern warfare a soldier's work in an active army depends for its success chiefly upon the soldier's skill and satisfaction in action, guided and determined by strict, coöperative discipline. The same is true in almost all the large national industries. Success in them involves the general submission of all participants to a strict, cooperative discipline. This discipline does not much resemble the old-fashioned, automatic, unthinking obedience which was long the ideal in military and industrial organization. It requires the voluntary coöperation of intelligent, free individuals whose wills consent to the discipline for an object which seems good to them, in a method which they think reasonable and appropriate. All schools and colleges should systematically provide much practice in this kind of discipline. Because of the complete detachment of church from state in this country, and of the existence here of a great variety of churches based on different dogmas and creeds, or on different observances, rituals, rites, and symbols, or on different forms of ecclesiastical government, all of which are tolerated and protected by the national and state governments, it has been considered impossible to allow in the free schools which are supported by general taxation any of the teachings or practices ordinarily called religious. A bad result of this condition is that there has been in the public schools no systematic inculcation of duty towards parents, neighbors, teachers, friends, or country, or of reverence towards God; although some practical virtues essential to the conduct of a school have always been inculcated, such as punctuality, order, and respect for the neighbor's rights and for constituted authority. Accordingly, reverence for prophets, saints, and spiritual heroes has been taught only incidentally and with caution, lest the religious sentiments of one church or another be shocked. It is one of the best lessons of the war that millions of American youth, trained in schools of this negative character as regards things spiritual, many of whom were not connected with any church, have developed in the presence of the hardships, horrors, and risks of war sentiments which may be properly called religious, and might be expressly inculcated in American public schools. Most of the young men who have filled the National Army and Navy went to the war in a gregarious way, because their comrades did, or because they were drafted, or because their friends and relatives would be proud, though troubled, to have them go; but when they came to face imminent death or wounds, when they realized that at any moment they themselves might be called on to make the supreme sacrifice, many of them began to consider why they were in such a novel and horrible situation, and some of them found a satisfactory answer to that question. Innumerable soldiers from many races, dying, or realizing in hospitals that they were crippled for life, have said that they were dying, or were crippled, for the sake of their country-France, England, Scotland, America—or for their dear home, or for their children, or for the next generation-that they may have a better world to live in than the present generation found prepared for themselves. Multitudes of the American soldiers and sailors in this war have perceived, for the first time, that their own prime motive in life has been the desire to be of service to other people, though they had lived the ordinary life of daily labor and play, of family affection, and careless gaiety, without much reflection on the great issues of life and death, or on the deep things of love and duty. The tremendous emotions of battle and the sense of comradeship which the sharing of great dangers and hardship creates, develop in them feelings and states of mind which may properly be called religious. They learn what self-sacrifice means and practice it contentedly; they learn that a man may gladly risk his life or lay it down for his friends; they learn that service to others is immeasurably happier than thought for self; they hate war and everything about it, but fight on resolutely in the hope so beautifully expressed by Alan Seager, That other generations might possess, From shame and menace free in years to come, He marched to that heroic martyrdom. They learn that brotherhood is the very essence of practical religion. A letter written by a young man, who enlisted after having served his term as a convict in Sing Sing prison and then had trying experiences during several months in the French trenches, to the former warden of the prison, who had been a good friend to him, dealt mostly with the ordinary tediums, trials, and hardships of the private soldier's life; but this was one of its broken sentences: "Religion? This battalion is a band of brothers." Some line officer, who has been intimate with his men when in hospital or in their rest-places, or some chaplain who has shared with the privates their hardships and their dangers and written letters home for them as they lay wounded or dying, ought to prepare a manual of religion of the thinking soldier in this war for the freedom and security of mankind. It would contain no dogma, creed, or ritual, and no church history; but it would set forth the fundamental religious ideas which ought to be conveyed to every American child and adolescent in the schools of the future. Such teaching would counteract materialism, promote reverence for God and human nature, strengthen the foundations of a just and peace-loving democracy, and conform to Micah's definition of religion: "What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" The manuals of American history for use in the public schools will hereafter tell how, in 1917, the American people, with remarkable unanimity, went into a ferocious war of European origin in the hope and expectation of putting down divine-right government, secret diplomacy, and militarism, of making justice and kindness the governing principles in international relations, and of promoting among the masses of mankind the kind of liberty under law which they had themselves long enjoyed. In contributing to the vigorous and successful prosecution of this war they spent their money like water, upset their industries and their habits of life, laid on their posterity an immense burden of debt, and put at risk the lives of millions of their sons and daughters. At the same time they gave huge sums of money to relieve the miseries and woes which war now entails on combatants and non-combatants alike. No great church and no single religious organization incited the American people to this disinterested crusade. Nevertheless, the united action of the people for the nineteen months past testifies that they are guided and inspired by certain simple religious teachings of supreme efficacy. They evidently mean to do unto others as they wish others to do to them, to love their neighbors as themselves, to imitate the example of the Good Samaritan in binding up the wounds of mankind, and to love truth, freedom, and righteousness. That is the religion which ought to be taught hereafter in all American schools. |