Returning to the Gymnasium

Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Dante, Copernicus, Shakespeare, Descartes, Newton, Rousseau, Kant, Darwin, Dickens, Tolstoy and Nietzsche.

Is this a hit-list for those who hate dead white males? May be so, but it is also a short (and not at all exhaustive) list of authors one does not have to read to graduate from Harvard. One must wonder, what ever happened to a humane education?

Well, it fell victim to political correctness, puerile students and weak-willed administrators. But maybe it's not as bad as it seems: one can still read all the aforementioned authors if one so desires, and as for the subject matter of a humane education, there are plenty of courses in metaphysics, ethics, mathematics, science, music, language, poetry, art and literature.

Sure, we do lack any serious instruction in rhetoric, but most of us are long-winded enough without further encouragement. So one can still get a legitimate, traditional education at Harvard, or so it appears.

But wait just one second. It seems something is missing. Gosh, it's been banished from the academy for so long it's hard to even recall it. Let's see, what was it? Oh yes, I remember now. We have no courses in...athletics.

Yes, until just a few decades ago, a truly humane education included gymnastics. (Don't worry, those of you with pictures of balance beams and pommel horses dancing through your mind: gymnastics was broadly understood as physical training.)

I don't know why it vanished from the standard curriculum, but I would hazard to guess that student laziness and truculence is the answer. In any regard, we should restore it to our curriculum. That's right: Harvard should have a P.E. requirement.

Physical training is an important part of a humane education for many reasons. For starters, as easy as it is to forget when passing the hours in cramped lecture halls, we are not disembodied entities. While one's character and virtue rest mostly in the mind and the soul, the body itself cannot be disregarded. It demands to be heard. Physical fitness, as Arnold Schwarzenegger loves to point out, is an important element in proper functioning of the mind and the soul.

And it is good in itself. Ask anyone who loves to get out and work up a good sweat, or one of those 95 year-old barefoot water-skiers from the TV ads.

Even more important than its intrinsic benefits, however, are its derivative benefits. Practically all the qualities we study so laboriously in our classes are much more easily learned and appreciated on the playing field; patience, cooperation, selflessness, responsibility, determination, perseverance and self-discipline are but a few.

Self-discipline: That's an intriguing notion. How little we hear of self-discipline in our indulgent and permissive society. Bill Bennett--perhaps America's greatest example of the value of a humane education--says that self-discipline means to be a disciple of oneself. "One is one's own teacher, trainer, coach and 'disciplinarian,'" Bennett says. Is this as fatuous as it sounds?

Actually, it's the central theme of mankind. Indeed, ever since Plato divided the soul into reason, passion and appetite, people have struggled to explain how to become disciples of themselves; they have groped to understand how to use reason--the most venerable of our faculties--to tame our less auspicious features. This relationship is, of course, the answer to the singular question which a humane education should answer: How should I live?

Unfortunately for our sorry selves, there is quite a difference between talking the talk and walking the walk.

If the answer to the question is the life in accordance with reason, how does one attain such a life? Well it can be certain that one doesn't just wake up one day and decide to live according to reason. No, in order to live this life, one must, as Plato's sharpest student Aristotle said (more or less), practice, practice, practice. But as Bennett so wryly notes, this "is the medicine so many people find hard to swallow."

We can learn untold lessons from the Great Books of the World, but speculative knowledge does not always lead to virtuous action. The philosophers and educators of yesteryear knew this axiom intimately. This is why they considered physical training so essential to a humane education: it allowed one to work on the principles of action that one had learned in classes and thinking.

By doing so, it augured one's knowledge with practice, that key ingredient to virtue and the life of reason. The nature of the training has always been unimportant; any sport--individual or team--helps one cultivate one's self-discipline. In other words, it helps one lead the good life.

The specifics of a physical training requirement can be negotiated. It should not be a hyper-gut in which everyone gets an A.

It should not be jocularly and irreverently approached. It should not be waved for laziness or pseudoinfirmities. It should involve rigorous and extensive practice in the sport one chooses, and a study of the principles that one learns from such practice. When this occurs, Harvard will have returned to one of the most noble pedagogical devices in the Western tradition.

Thomas B. Cotton, a junior living in Adams House, is a Crimson editor.