The influence on national life of military training in schools : [an address delivered before the Medical Officers of Schools, Thursday, February 15, 1906] / by T.C. Horsfall.

  • Horsfall, T. C. (Thomas Coglan), 1841-1932.
Date:
[1906?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The influence on national life of military training in schools : [an address delivered before the Medical Officers of Schools, Thursday, February 15, 1906] / by T.C. Horsfall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ridiculous that for which we wish them to feel reverence. It is, perhaps, not desirable to tell all boys that it is our duty to die for our country if it needs our death ; though, as dying for the country is an act which closed the careers of many of the people whose lives boys admire most, I believe that there is no risk in telling most boys of that duty, if they are helped to take to heart the much more difficult and unattractive lesson that it is our duty to live for our country. With this lesson may be, and ought to be, combined not only instruction in the laws of health, but also direct teaching that it is a very important part of our duty to our neighbour and to our country, as well as to ourself, to find out and to obey those laws. It seems very desirable that teaching respecting the need for fresh air, for light, for a sufficiency of varied physical and mental exercise, for abstinence from alcohol and tobacco and licentiousness, shall give as the motive for seeking all these right things not merely the child’s own good, but also the good of his family and of his country. Many children are quite capable in brain and heart of understanding and feeling that, if they make the best of all their powers, the influence of their health will be far- reaching, and the thought and feeling are distinctly helps towards rightness of life. The training to action which must accompany instruction given in words, if the instruction is to have lasting and large effect, must be in the main comprehensive physical training. Owing to the fact that in this country the great majority of the people have had no physical training except that which has come to them in games and different kinds of sport and in their bread-winning work, the immense potential value of physical training as a means for giving the highest moral training to a nation is not as generally recognised as it ought to be. It is true that in no other country in the world, except, perhaps, in the United States, is the value of games as means for keeping boys out of vicious habits so fully recognised as it is in the system of our preparatory and public schools ; and that system has trained here a larger proportion of well-to-do men than are probably to be found in any other country who look to physical exercises as a necessary auxiliary to good intentions in their struggle against temptations lo sensual indulgence. But, even by most of these exceptional people, the highest value of physical training is believed to lie in its power to give and defend physical, mental, and moral health and strength. And most English people who value physical exercise do so on account of the pleasure which