Here is what Plato thought;
On Plato
We must begin by "sending out into the country all the inhabitants of
the city who are more than ten years old, and by taking possession of
the children, who will thus be protected from the habits of their
parents" (540). We cannot build Utopia with young people corrupted at
every turn by the example of their elders. We must start, so far as we
can, with a clean slate. It is quite possible that some enlightened
ruler will empower us to make such a beginning with some part or
colony of his realm. (One ruler did, as we shall see.) In any case we
must give to every child, and from the outset, full equality of
educational opportunity; there is no telling where the light of talent
or genius will break out; we must seek it impartially everywhere, in
every rank and race. The first turn on our road is universal
education.
For the first ten years of life, education shall be predominantly
physical; every school is to have a gymnasium and a playground; play
and sport are to be the entire curriculum; and in this first decade
such health will be stored up as will make all medicine unnecessary.
"To require the help of medicine because by lives of indolence and
luxury men have filled themselves like pools with waters and
winds, . . . flatulence and catarrh-is not this a disgrace? . . . Our
present system of medicine may be said to educate diseases," to draw
them out into a long existence, rather than to cure them. But this is
an absurdity of the idle rich. "When a carpenter is ill he asks the
physician for a rough and ready remedy-an emetic, or a purge, or
cautery, or the knife. And if anyone tells him that he must go through
a course of dietetics, and swathe and swaddle his head, and all that
sort of thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be ill, and
that he sees no good in a life that is spent in nursing his disease to
the neglect of his ordinary calling; and therefore, saying good-bye to
this sort of physicians, he resumes his customary diet, and either
gets well and lives and does his business, or, if his constitution
fails, he dies and has done with it" (405-6). We cannot afford to have
a nation of malingerers and invalids; Utopia must begin in the body of
man.
But mere athletics and gymnastics would make a man too one-sided. "How
shall we find a gentle nature which has also great courage?-for they
seem to be inconsistent with each other" (375). We do not want a
nation of prize-fighters and weight-lifters. Perhaps music will solve
our problem: through music the soul learns harmony and rhythm, and
even a disposition to justice; for "can he who is harmoniously
constituted ever be unjust? Is not this, Glaucon, why musical training
is so powerful, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the
secret places of the soul, bearing grace in their movements and making
the soul graceful?" (401; Protagoras, 326). Music moulds character,
and therefore shares in determining social and political issues.
"Damon tells me-and I can quite believe it-that when modes of music
change, the fundamental laws of the state change with them." [Of.
Daniel O'Connell: "Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not
who makes its laws."]
Music is valuable not only because it brings refinement of feeling and
character, but also because it preserves and restores health. There
are some diseases which can be treated only through the mind
(Charmides, 157) : so the Corybantic priest treated hysterical women
with wild pipe music, which excited them to dance and dance till they
fell to the ground exhausted, and went to sleep; when they awoke they
were cured. The unconscious sources of human thought are touched and
soothed by such methods; and it is in these substrata of behavior and
feeling that genius sinks its roots. "No man when conscious attains to
true or inspired intuition, but rather when the power of intellect is
fettered in sleep or by disease or dementia"; the prophet (manlike) or
genius is akin to the madman (manike) (Phcedrus, 244).
...With minds so freely growing, and bodies made strong by sport and
outdoor life of every kind, our ideal state would have a firm
psychological and physiological base broad enough for every
possibility and every development. But a moral basis must be provided
as well; the members of the community must make a unity; they must
learn that they are members of one another; that they owe to one
another certain amenities and obligations. Now since men are by nature
acquisitive, jealous, combative, and erotic, how shall we persuade
them to behave themselves? By the policeman's omnipresent club? It is
a brutal method, costly and irritating. There is a better way, and
that is by lending to the moral requirements of the community the
sanction of supernatural authority. We must have a religion.
The Story of Philosophy
The Lives and Opinions of the Great Philosophers of the Western World
by
WILL DURANT
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671739166/
-----------------------------------------
Play and Education in Plato's Republic
Arthur A. Krentz
Luther College, University of Regina
krentza@leroy.cc.uregina.ca
ABSTRACT: This paper focuses on the connection between play (paidia)
and education (paideia) in Plato's Republic. The dialogue presents two
opposing pedagogical approaches to the education of political
leadership: first, the approach of a Socratic-like lover of wisdom,
who seeks to "free" citizens through philosophical play for lives of
excellence (arete) and for the application of their leadership skills
to the construction of a just society for the public good; and second,
the approach of tyrannical sophists who educate and rule in the city
by coercive force for private advantage and the enslavement of
citizens for a ruler's own personal ends. Plato's Republic aims to
show that philosophical "play" is the best pedagogical means to
educate a just citizenry and to prepare philosophical leaders to
govern.
http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Educ/EducKren.htm
SPORTS
Running closely parallel to the rise of vaudeville out of saloon
entertainment was another branch of the entertainment industry which
has proven to have greater staying power: what we have come to call
sports. Modern games were not invented by Americans: most of the games
we spend so much time watching and much less time playing were
invented by the English in the late 18th and early 19th century. Other
contributions were made by the Germans in the early 19th century,
especially in the area of gymnastics and field sports, with some
contribution from the Swedes. The Canadians developed ice hockey;
lacrosse was an American Indian game; and basketball was invented in
Springfield, Massachusetts. But it was the English who developed, if
they did not invent, the ball games which have figured so largely in
the lives of people in the 20th century-tennis, golf, the bat games,
the kicking games.
It is significant that one of the most important figures in the
development of modern sports was Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby,
who was attempting early in the 19th century to reform the English
public schools, which had become to an extent debauched in the 18th
century. Modern sports, then, were initially a product of the
Victorian mentality. For these Victorians, just as the main function
of art was not to provide pleasure but to uplift, so the function of
sport would not be to amuse but to improve. As people must cultivate
their minds and elevate their souls, so they must improve their
bodies. People, so the Victorians came to believe, had a duty to keep
fit. One ought to play at sports: going out for the team or taking an
arduous daily swim came to be seen as a virtue.
This was equally true of the Germans, who were developing the idea of
physical training: they saw in gymnastics a spiritual element. From
the Victorian point of view it really did not matter who won or lost
for the point of the contest was to improve the players both
physically and morally; what counted therefore was fair play, honor,
and a good physical challenge. Even after sports began to be
professionalized in the second half of the nineteenth century, the
English insisted on maintaining the distinction between the gentleman
amateur, who played for the values in the game itself, and the
professional, who was in part an entertainer and whose rewards
depended upon winning. A residue of this Victorian attitude continues
today in the idea that sports are meant to "build character," which is
still given lip service in at least some American colleges and
universities. For the Victorians it was a real ideal: sports taught
fortitude, loyalty, team spirit, a willingness to endure the hard
moments uncomplainingly. It was a time when tennis players would
applaud each other's fine shots, and would no more think of throwing a
racquet or cursing an umpire than they would of belching at the tea
table.
The United States was somewhat behind in adopting the new Victorian
sports culture. Americans had, of course, followed the lead of the
Europeans, especially the English, in taking up horse racing and the
blood sports: not only the gentry, but ordinary farmers liked to bet
on horses at backwoods tracks attended by rough country crowds.
But the United States, especially New England, carried into the 19th
century a residue of Calvinism that told them that idleness was sin,
and play the devil's work. Equally sinful was wagering; and the
drunken blood-thirst of the spectators around the cockpit could hardly
have been attractive to the religious temper.
Gradually, however, the new Victorian view of sport as having moral
and character-building qualities drifted across the Atlantic, and the
old objections began to dissipate. The 19th century, says one writer,
"was a period of beginnings characterized by the gradual breakdown of
traditional prejudices against play and amusements."
The first game to benefit from the new acceptance of sport was what
came to be called baseball. It began to develop out of its English
predecessors in the 1830s. By 1845 there were written rules, and at
the same moment Americans did what they would characteristically do-
they professionalized the game. By the time of the Civil War there had
come into existence leagues, player organizations, newsletters,
committees to coordinate rule changes, and the like. The Civil War
itself gave the sport further impetus, as bored soldiers in army
encampments got up games to while away empty time, in the process
teaching the game to others who did not know it. The baseball game at
a Civil War army camp was a common sight. And very quickly after the
close of the war baseball became a modern spectator sport with a
nationwide following.
Richard D. Mandell, a sports historian, says, "The establishment of
'leagues' under profit-oriented managerial control in the 1870s
provided the models for other American sports that later
professionalized."
Thereafter it all came in a rush. In the 1870s American colleges began
holding track and field events in imitation of the English university
competitions. Parimutuel betting was developed in the 1860s and 1870s.
The National League in baseball was formed in 1876. Boat racing became
popular in the 1870s and 1880s. The first meeting of the League of
American Wheelmen came in 1880, the first national tournament of the
United States Lawn Tennis Association was held in 1881. Boxing,
especially after the arrival of John L. Sullivan as the sport's first
great champion, began to draw large audiences. "Western Union paid 50
operators to send out 208,000 words of description following John L.'s
fight with Jack Kilrain in New Orleans in 1889. When Jim Corbett beat
Sullivan in 1892, 300 saloons and billiard halls in New York alone
were supposed to have received the news." College football-developed
out of the rugby game invented at Thomas Arnold's school a half-
century earlier-began to attract a large following in the 1880s, and
by the 1890s people were referring to a sports craze on American
college campuses, with football the dominant game. Symptomatic of the
enormous interest in the game was the fact that in 1903 Harvard, with
a student body of some 5000, saw fit to provide a concrete stadium
which could hold 57,000 people.
And so it went. The United States Golf Association was formed in 1894.
The first international track meet was held at Manhattan Field in New
York in 1895. The contestants were the New York Athletic Club and the
London Athletic Club, and the Americans won all eleven events.
Basketball was invented by James A. Naismith in 1891; and by the turn
of the century the sport had become a major element in the American
culture.
This exploding interest in sports could hardly be ignored by the
media. According to the pioneering sports historian John R. Betts,
"Sports had merged into such a popular topic of conversation that
newspapers rapidly expanded their coverage in the 1880s and 1890s,
reiving in great part on messages sent over the [telegraph] lines from
distant points." Sporting papers proliferated, and William Randolph
Hearst developed for his papers the sports section in the last years
of the century. By 1900 baseball players could earn $2,000 annually,
as compared with a working man's salary of $700; and by 1910 top
players could make $10,000 a year, a very large sum for the time. Says
Mandell:
"By the turn of the century American sport had evolved into a pattern
or system that was unique. Sports spectatorship and (far less) sports
participation, sports business, and sports myth were smoothly
integrated into American life. The process had been swift, but it had
been natural and had gone much farther than the evolution of sport
anywhere else in the world."
Sport inevitably cut across all classes; but there was some tendency,
through the 19th century in any case, for it to be a gentleman's
activity, at least in certain areas. For one thing, developing a skill
at throwing a ball or hitting one with something took practice, and
practice required leisure time, which neither the farmers of the
earlier part of the century nor the immigrants of the latter part had
in much abundance. Certain sports, like sculling, sailboat racing,
even bicycling, cost money; others, like tennis and golf, required
grounds which needed a lot of upkeep. And only the rich could pursue
sports like yachting, automobile racing, and equestrianism. The
colleges provided the elite who attended them with leisure time for
practice, incentive in the form of status which accrued to successful
athletes, and the necessary playing grounds and equipment. Football
was, basically, college football; and in the first years of this
century fully a quarter of major league baseball players were college
graduates, at a time when less than 5 percent of the population had
college degrees. Other events, like sculling, swimming, and the track
and field sports, were also developed at colleges and are even today
dominated by college athletes.
But sport was too attractive to be ignored by the majority of the
population, and as it was increasingly professionalized it became a
route along which working people could escape from the slums. Most
games did not require the participants to speak English very well, or
the grasp of American customs and traditions. All you had to know was
how the game was played; and if you were good at playing it you could
be rewarded. (Blacks, of course, were generally disbarred from joining
white leagues and teams, although there were some exceptions, most
notably in boxing.) Whatever feeling gentlemen from the colleges felt
about allowing the lower orders in, the lower orders came anyway. By
1910 or so over half of the baseball players were of Irish or German
extraction, an over-representation. Boxing, whose first famous hero
was the Irishman John D. Sullivan, drew the attention of immigrants,
and when the black Jack Johnson won the heavyweight championship, he
drew his ethnic fellows to the sport. During World War I the services
often used boxing as a training device; through their wartime service
men of all classes became familiar with the sport, which helped to
give it more general acceptance; now the middle class could enjoy it.
Class lines were being crossed in both directions; it is probably safe
to say that in this respect sport has become, especially since the
admission of blacks to the main leagues, one of the most democratic
aspects of American culture.
It hardly needs to be said that modern sports, like vaudeville, were a
product of the industrial city. Like "vaudeville, sports needed a mass
audience within easy traveling distance of the playing fields. It
needed mass transit systems, and a lot of sports grounds were
established at the ends of the trolley lines which were then reaching
out to city limits. Financiers backing the electrical streetcars at
times actually invested in the building of baseball parks at the end
of the streetcar lines during the 1880s and 1890s. John R. Betts says,
"At the turn of the century the popular interest in athletic games in
thousands of towns and cities was stimulated to a high degree by the
extension of rapid transit systems."
Sports also needed railroad lines to carry teams from city to city:
most leagues were built around intercity, not intracity, rivalries: it
was New York against Boston or Chicago, not the East Side against the
West Side. When two teams existed in one city, as they often did in
the biggest cities, they were usually distributed into different
leagues, and did not compete directly. In addition, railways were
needed to bring spectators, often in the tens of thousands, to
isolated events, like championship fights, boat races, national track
meets. The telegraph, and later the telephone, helped to popularize
sports by providing results instantly: in small towns around the
country newspaper offices often posted inning by inning scores of
important baseball games in their windows. Says Betts, "By 1900 sport
had attained an unprecedented prominence in the daily life of millions
of Americans and this remarkable development had been achieved in part
through the steamboat, the railroad, the telegraph, the penny press,
the electric light, the streetcar, the camera, the bicycle, the
automobile, and the mass production of sporting goods." Modern sport
was tight in the embrace of modern technology.
Abetting the rise of sports was the belief, widely held by reformers
in the Progressive period, that a good deal of the disorder in the
slums was the direct result of a lack of recreation for young people.
One of the great functions of the settlement houses was to provide
decent occupations for the young, and to this end they formed bands
and orchestras, drama groups, clubs and classes of all kinds. Sports
were seen as ideal in this respect, for not only did it occupy spare
time that might otherwise have been given over to shoplifting or
sexual experimentation, but it expended a lot of the restless energy
which, so it was believed, often drove the young into unsavory
activities for lack of anything else to do with it. Basketball was
invented in 1891 precisely to provide a physically active indoor game
which could be played in bad weather, especially in the northern
cities with their hard winters. All through the period playgrounds,
softball fields, running tracks, were built with public funds.
"Indeed, among the masses of Americans," Mandell says, "sports came to
be considered a civic obligation . . . The Young Men's Christian
Association (YMCA) led the way in proposing organized training and
team games as methods for absorbing the idle time of poor city boys
and instilling in them habits of good hygiene, self-discipline and
respect for officials . . . Urban settlement houses and eventually
churches also promoted the standard American sports because they
presumably developed leadership and built character." It was not just
boys, however; girls' basketball, track, and other teams became common
even in small towns. The vast system of school sports which we now
take for granted was a product of this attitude.
--------------
The Rise of Selfisness in America
James L. Collier
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195052773/
Copyright © 1991 by James Lincoln Collier
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
1. Self-interest - History-2Oth century.
2. United States-Moral conditions - History-20th century.
