did the great Franciscan, Fr. Pedro de Gante, a relative of the Emperor, shelter in his Mexican convent the first elementary school in America, but as early as 1531 a college for girls was established under Cortes and was directed by his wife, the Marchioness of Valle, 293

The Queen had not been less concerned for the education of the religious whose duty it would necessarily become to perpetuate the institutions founded for the intellectual needs of her subjects. When Cardinal Ximenes began the work of founding the University of Alcalá, he heartily sympathized with the zeal of his Royal Penitent, and soon after the opening of the university, in 1508, he hastened to gather around it the various religious orders of the realm that they might profit by the advantages offered through the services of the foreign savants who came at his invitation to augment the number of native professors.294 Among the colleges here established was one founded and endowed by the Cardinal himself for the training of nuns. It was in charge of the Franciscan Sisters and was called San Juan de la Penetencia. The date of the foundation is not clearly evident but the work seems to have been well established before the death of Ximenes, in 1517. Philip II afterwards increased the endowment which the Cardinal had bestowed in favor of students without dowry. 295

In addition to their training schools for candidates to the cloister, the different sisterhoods, Augustinians, Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans, Tertians, and Carmelites, all had schools, in some places for the nobility, in others for the poor, and many of these schools either developed into colleges or were colleges by establishment.296 Among these latter, in addition to those already mentioned, were that of the Discalced Carmelites in Guadlajara, founded in 1591 by the Archbishop of Toledo, D. Gracia Girón de Loaisa,297 and other similar foundations in Santiago, Seville and Cordova.298

The Augustinian Convent of Santa Maria de Gracia, in Ávila, where St. Teresa spent a year and a half of study after she was

293 Ibid., Chapt. LXXXV; Arrangoiz, "Historia de México, tome 3, App. VIII, p. 66 ff." Cited in Ibid., 492.

294 Catholic Encyclopedia, Ximenes. 295 de la Fuente op. cit., II, 78, 386. 296 Ibid., Chap. LXXXIX.

297 Ibid., 511.

298 Ibid., 512.

something past 14, was founded in 1509, and in her time there were forty nuns "of great virtue, piety and prudence," who taught "seculars." Among these nuns was Sor Maria Briceño, whom her fond disciple described as "very discreet and holy."299

Precisely where many of the Iberian Renaissance women acquired their perfect Castilian and their fluent Latin seems to be a mystery concealed behind convent walls or hidden beneath ruined palaces, but the mode of acquisition is written in their lives and labors as well as in the lives and labors of the theorists and practical educators of their day. The literary merit of the great St. Teresa is not altogether uncommon.300 The Seraphic Saint was but one of that vast army of nuns, powerful in intellect and in soul, with whom the Peninsula Renaissance peopled the convents whence their virtue and wisdom reacted upon Iberian society to purify and enlighten it. Among these nuns were her own spiritual daughters, like Sor Cecilia of the Nativity and Sor Maria de San Alberto, and the great Franciscan abbess, Isabel Borja, the Venerable Francisca of Jesus. 301 Of such as these and of their foster children might an angelic Crashaw also sing:

"Thy bright

Life brought them first to kiss the light

That kindled them to stars."302

To these convent women and to their unassuming devotion to the New Learning Spain and Portugal owed much. Under the direction of zealous and learned ecclesiastics like Cardinal Ximenes and his worthy successors, the nuns labored to steady the current of the Revival, after the monastic Court of Isabel of Castile had passed away; and because of the multitude of strong women moulded here after the pattern formed by Christian humanism there was brought into the gayer life of the later Iberian Renaissance the spiritualizing and refining influences of Religion and Art powerfully to counteract Self-Culture and Vanity, the baneful elements of radical humanism and the false Renaissance.

299 Ibid., 511 ff.; Cf. Catholic Encylcopedia, Teresa of Jesus.

300 Cf. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, History of Spanish Literature, 193 ff., New York,

1898.

301 Supra, 68ff.

302 "Hymn to the Name and Honor of the Admirable Saint Teresa."

(To be continued.)

PHYSICAL EDUCATION

The reservation of the child's health and the development of his physical organism must be provided for by the educative agencies which undertake to control his conduct and to shape his destiny, since his instructive equipment is wholly inadequate to the attainment of those ends under the conditions prevailing in civilized life.

Man's instincts, while numerous, are so largely atrophied, or incomplete, that they would not suffice to sustain life even under the most primitive conditions of savagery. To the human infant, therefore, education is, under all conditions, not merely an added perfection, but an element essential to the preservation and continuance of life. This truth was pointed out long since by Professor Fiske1 and it has been accepted in current educational literature.

Physical heredity renders man's physical and intellectual development possible, but of itself it is not sufficient to sustain either. It demands, as its complement, social heredity, which reaches the individual only through education. Moreover, the farther man departs from savage ways, the further he enters into the complexities of civilized life, the less adequate becomes his instinctive equipment, and the more necessary to him is that guidance which comes to him through the channels of authority from the garnered wisdom of the race.

It is not the function of education to search man's past in order to recover therefrom the pattern of life and conduct which was lost by his atrophying instincts. On the contrary, the whole weight of evidence from biological science goes to show that man's instincts were atrophied precisely because they ceased to be effective and that they were gradually replaced by something better. His growing intelligence enabled primitive man to substitute habits formed in the light of individual experience and of the experience of the race for instinctive determinations

1 Cosmic Phil., ii, 342, 369 (Horne 33).

424

of conduct, which were designed by nature to meet the conditions of a relatively static environment.

As man congregates in cities and builds up the institutions of civilized life, he modifies his environment so profoundly that not only native instincts cease to be serviceable in the control of his conduct, but individual experience becomes increasingly inadequate, and, if he is to survive, he must learn to control his conduct even in those matters which concern his health and his physical development by a larger wisdom and a clearer light than that which arises from individual experience. He must accept on authority much that he will not even be able to verify for himself if he is to preserve his own health and avoid endangering the health of others with whom he is associated.

It is, of course, the business of education to lead the child into an understanding of the laws of health, employing thereto to the best advantage the child's individual experience, but it is also the business of education to teach the child to obey the laws and regulations which are promulgated for the preservation of individual and of public health, whether the individual is moved thereto by an adequate understanding of the scientific data back of these laws, or not.

The contrast here involved is not only that between the conditions of animal life and the conditions of human life, but between the conditions of primitive human life and the conditions that surround civilized man. Among primitive peoples we find instincts supplemented by habits which are formed in the young through rigid customs handed down from generation to generation. These primitive customs are sometimes as difficult to replace or to modify as the instincts of the individual. As man passes into a civilized mode of life, these customs, no less than native instincts, must be modified or replaced by habits better suited to further social ends. Many of these habits are at the same time calculated to preserve health and to secure individual development.

"Thus the habits of correct posture, graceful carriage, exercise, cleanliness, moderation, are ultimately hygienic

habits, and the ideals through which they are generalized are hygienic ideals-beauty, grace, health, chastity, temperance, love of outdoor life. These hygienic habits and ideals might be called the balance wheels of civilization; it is through their operation that man has so far escaped annihilation at the hands of the very agencies that have lifted him up."2

Education, in the sense in which we have been using the term, is much wider in its implications than the activities of the schoolroom. In this wider sense, all life is an educative process, but learning therein is incidental rather than intentional. To teach, however, is the express purpose of the school, and experience is there used primarily for its teaching power. In this same sense the home is the first school. There the infant is taught, and the basis should be laid there of those physical habits of cleanliness, posture, exercise, and moderation. The Church is also engaged in teaching these things as a part of its mission. and in using the experiences of life to bring home to man lessons of a higher wisdom, but these agencies do not remove from the school the serious and fundamental obligation of continuing and perfecting the child's physical education.

This truth is coming to be recognized more clearly day by day. "There is no sterner duty laid upon the teacher," says Dr. Bagley, "than the development of these habits and ideals. A large public school is a fertile ground for implanting the seeds of disease and vice. The mind of the child at any time after the eighth year is predisposed to impulses that are vulgar and degrading. Some of these reactions may be 'natural' enough: They are not always to be looked upon as abnormalities or perversions; but under the conditions of modern life they are none the less disastrous, and it is precisely at this point that some form of education or external guidance becomes essential to the salvation of the race. If the dictum, 'Follow nature,' is ever fallacious, it certainly is here, for here nature is working at cross purposes, pitting instincts and

2

Bagley, Education Process, New York, 1906, p. 346.