Health and Skill
BY DR. L.
P. JACKS. HOW health and skill are related is a question awaiting investigation and urgently needing it, especially in the interests of educational reform. In spite of the general acceptance accorded to the saying "mens sans in corpore sano," it may be doubted whether the true significance of it, as applied to human. beings, has been rightly - apprehended either by educational experts, Whitehall administrators, schoolmasters in general, or by the audience of " parents and friends " who applaud it when quoted, as it so often is, by the Bishop or Mayor on " Foundation Day." Even physicians often appear to understand it superficially. They are too apt to treat the health of a human being, or of a community, as consisting in freedom from disease. It is certainly much more than that.
The health of a human being, though having something in common with the health of an ox, stands nevertheless on a different level and is altogether misconceived when we think of it in terms appropriate only to the ox. A human being has other functions to perform than that of wholesomely digesting fodder and converting it into edible tissue, and would be incompetent to perform them if endowed only with the ox's health. The only healthy mind that could exist in such a body would be the mind of an ox ; to the healthy mind of a human being it would be an utterly inadequate instrument, even though it were . raised upright on two feet and wore the human shape. It is no exaggeration to say that a healthy human mind might be more at home with a body crippled by disease and destined to a premature death (like Keats, for example) than with a body whose health. consisted only in qualities appropriate to the health of an ox. A doubt may even be permitted whether the type of physical health promoted on the playing fields of our schools and colleges is the type best suited to sustain the mental operations that go on inside the walls of those institutions. Competent witnesses inform one that it induces a whole- some tendency to go to sleep under the challenge of intellectual interests.
I suggest that whether our object be educational reform or social reform (the two, in my opinion, are hardly distinguishable in the final analysis) we need a much deeper conception of bodily health than that which underlies our current understanding of mens sana corpore sano. I have no quarrel either with the physiolo- gist or the biologist, and am willing to accept as true and immensely important all that the one tells me of the body's structure and the other of its history. But I would suggest that the true nature of the body is not exhausted by the accounts these sciences give of it either singly or in combination. Beyond all that, and, of course, including it, I see in the body (as who may not see ?) a marvellously fashioned instrument, to which all instruments of human invention are crude in comparison, exquisitely adapted and designed, in the correlation of its organs and faculties, for creative activity akin to that of its creator, whoever or whatever that creator may be.
Following upon that comes the suggestion, which I now make, that physical health demands, when all its other demands have been satisfied according to the prescriptions of physiology and biology, that opportunity shall be found, and training given, for the exercise of creative activity. Short of this the perfect health of the body is not attain- able. The " exercise " it demands is essentially skilful exercise and not mere exertion, of the kind, for example, recommended to Sidney Smith by his physician (with what retort will he remembered) " to take a walk on an empty stomach." An unskilled body is a thwarted body -1-thwarted, not in some minor detail, but in the very (sore and essence of its nature. And because thwarted, unhealthy. Even those elements of health which it shares with the body of an ox will suffer through the essential thwarting of its human nature—unless indeed the owner of it manages (as some do) to accommodate his human nature to an ox-like mode of existence. These thwarted human bodies exist in millions among the massed populations of our great cities (we class them as " C ") and every one of them represents a thwarted mind, a thwarted human being.
Voices have recently been heard among us—my own has been one of them—earnestly pleading for reformed methods of education, in which the acquisition of skill, and not the acquisition of knowledge alone, should be the object aimed at from the earliest stage and steadily pursued to the last. The plea has naturally aroused a good deal of criticism, especially among professional educators, which has sometimes gone the length of accusing us of contempt for " knowledge." This, of course, is absurd. Skill is nothing else than knowledge in action, or, better, wisdom completing itself by doing spontaneously what is accurately known. Our conviction is that until knowledge is thus transformed into skill it has no vital connexion with the personality of the knower ; it is superficial, precarious, unfixed, unassimilated, with the result that most of it is destined to be lost sight of, neglected, misapphed, forgotten or even despised in the stages of life which follow the stage known as " education."
This, we contend, is actually happening, on an enor- mous scale, to the " knowledge " imparted, at great cost of money and labour, under our present system of training the young. We observe that the vast majority of those to whom the knowledge is imparted are incapable, through defective training in other respects, especially in the matter of self-control, of putting what they are taught in school or college—often imperfectly it must be confessed—to any profitable or even enjoyable use. Instead, therefore, of being treated as enemies of know- ledge we deserve to be welcomed as its friends, roused to indignant protest by the appalling waste of it that is now going on under the half-done job which usurps the name of education. As friends and lovers of knowledge, we are pleading for a type of education which shall incorporate knowledge into the personality of the knower and convert it, thereby, into creative activity. This conversion of knowledge into creative activity, through incorporation with the " whole man " of the knower, is precisely what -we mean by skill. A little knowledge thus converted seems to us of higher value than much knowledge in the unfixed and half-formed condition so often represented by leaving certificates, matriculation tests and University degrees. Of this half-knowledge we are indeed the enemies.
Of the many definitions of " man "—and they are as numerous as definitions of God—there is one that seems to have more value than any other as a guiding principle in educational practice. This is the definition of man as " by nature a skill-hungry animal," a being, that is, far whom health and happiness arc alike unattainable so long as his skill-hunger remains unsatisfied. The concep- tion is as old as Aristotle, whose definition of man as a " political animal " is meaningless without it. For the • puTrtical life,..the life of the good citizen, is essentially an affair of co-operation, and co-operation is unquestionably the finest and most difficult of all human arts. Vain is the hope of those who would produce ea-Operation, whether on the large scale or the small, by preaching the necessity of it or by extolling the value of 'it. As well might we expect to produce a race of artists by extolling the arts, or to create an orchestra by expounding the principles-. of harmony. That man alone wilt.coroperate successfully with his fellows, in " politics " as in. every- thing else, who has learnt self-mastery " from- Mir youth up," and trained himself, mind and body together, to follow the rhythms of a rational universe, adjusting his every action spontaneously and joyfully to the patterns of reason, like an instrument in an orchestra; a singer in a chorus, a dancer treading with thousands of others the measure of a complicated dance. The good citizen is, of all men, the most skilled; skilled in the use of powers which add something to the value of the social inherit- ance ; skilled in the yet higher sense of adjusting, timing and tuning his contribution in harmony with the contri- butions of his fellows. No human qualities arc more difficult to acquire, and none more delightful to exercise when acquired, than those which go. to the make-up of man as " a political animal." How far our voting masses arc from having acquired them we know to our cost. How little our " system of education " is doing to promote them has become patent to some of us. Yet " man " is hungry to acquire them and fully capable of their acquisi- tion, though not all at once.
But we must begin further back, with the simpler pro- position at the beginning of this article, that, even for the individual, health and happiness are unattainable, at least in their higher forms, so long as his natural skill- hunger remains unsatisfied. Dull and drab at the best is the life of the unskilled ; dull and drab, and often vicious in the effort to escape from the dullness and the drabness —the origin of most of the vices that disfigure and poison our civilization. That man desires happiness and can never be diverted from the pursuit of it is true ; but the happiness he desires is not of the kind that " ready made pleasures " can supply, or money purchase, no matter how abundant and varied. It is the joy of skilful work, which at its highest level is indistinguishable from skilful play, as the highest levels of play are indistinguishable from it—the joy of creative activity. Short of this, man is doomed to be miserable, and because miserable, unhealthy.
Previous page
