This disregard of physical conditions is giving rise to national disturbance.  It has thoroughly worked itself into our educational system.  Though our schools profess to be purely secular, they still adhere to this old theological idea.  You can not get teachers to enter with zest into exercises for physical development, because they think that a man who trains the body must be inferior to the man who trains the mind.  They do not see that the two are closely allied.  They will tell you that the time is all apportioned, so many hours for each study, and that if you take half an hour out for exercise the boy must lose so much Latin or Greek, or something else.  The idea of the high-school is to get the boy into college.  They care nothing about the condition of the individual.  The individual must be sacrificed to the reputation of the school, or of the master; the standard must be kept up.  If the master can not get just such a percentage of scholars into college, his own reputation and the reputation of the school are injured.  If he can get this percentage into college, he does not care what becomes of the individual.  Our schools treat a boy as professional trainers treat a man on the field; the only idea is to make the boy win a certain prize.  They do not care any thing about his health; that is nothing to them.  Their reputation is made upon the success of the boy in his entrance to college.  Here I have to step in and say to the father:  “This boy must not go any farther.  His future prospects ought not to be sacrificed in this way.  Your son’s success in life does not depend upon his going through the Latin school.  Let him step out and take another year.  Do not attempt to crowd him.”  The result of this lack of attention to physical training, even looking at it from the intellectual stand-point, is fatal.  The boy gets a disgust for study, as one does for any special kind of food when kept exclusively upon it.  Many a fellow who stood high in school breaks away from books as soon as he enters college, and goes to the other extreme.  That is nature’s method of seeking relief.  He has mental dyspepsia, and every opportunity that offers for physical play he accepts.  He can not help it, and he ought not to be blamed for it, because it is the natural law.

The laws of assimilation govern the brain as well as the body.  You can only store up just about so much matter—­call it educational material if you will—­in a given time.  If you undertake to force the physical activity of the brain, you must supply it with more nourishment.  If a boy takes no exercise to increase his appetite, if he does not invigorate and nourish his blood, which supplies brain substance, of course there is deterioration.  If he has a good stock of reserve physical power he will get on very well for a while, but all at once he will come to a stop.  How many hundreds of those who stood well when they entered college get to a certain point and can get no farther, because they have not the physical basis.  They are like athletes who can run a certain speed, but can never get beyond that.  On the other hand, men who have had a more liberal physical training will go right by them, though not such good scholars, because they have more of a basis back in the physical.