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10. Creation of Military Sports in the Secondary Schools
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200 10 Cr e at io n of Mili t ar y Spor t s in t he Sec o ndar y Sc ho ol s Military sports in the secondary schools substantially emerged after America’s entrance into World War I, when the country awoke to the need for military preparedness. During the war, high schools, as well as universities and colleges, began to train students not only in rifle marksmanship and physical conditioning but also in drill (marching and handling rifles with precision) and review (standing at attention with precision). These exercises were designed to instill discipline and obedience in future soldiers . In most of the secondary schools where military training was introduced during the war, it was sustained into the 1920s, but as a whole in the nation’s high schools it remained far from universal. Military training survived in a paradoxical environment where its advocates saw the need for military preparedness in an era of increasing isolationism, disarmament , and pacifism, growing out of a sense of disillusionment with World War I and foreign entanglements. Under Republican administrations, there was international engagement , but it took the form of trade agreements, naval disarmament treaties in 1922 and 1930 that reduced US military strength, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 that committed the country as one of the thirty-one signatories to the renunciation of war as “an instrument of national policy.” The latter reflected a national public mood of disillusionment with World War I and war in general. On the home front, the US Army went from a high of 2.8 million during World War I down to 117,000 men by the late 1920s. While the Republicans were strong advocates of disarmament, as Creation of Military Sports in Secondary Schools ✦ 201 well as their allies in business, they were strong advocates of army and navy appropriation bills and military preparedness.1 In this context, military training received considerable approval from educators and the public, but also met considerable opposition, especially when it came to the involvement of high school girls. Many educators also looked at school sports, and particularly football, as well as conventional physical education as valuable military preparation for the nation’s young men, and in part football’s growth during the twenties reflected this rationale . Some educators thought physical education should be the only form of military training in the high schools.2 Most of the same high schools that developed drill and review also included in their extracurriculum the military or quasi-military sports of fencing, rifle shooting, and, in some rare institutions, polo. While becoming skilled in such sports probably made American students perfectly prepared for the Polish cavalry of the 1930s, the finest in the world at the time, these martial skills were not of much use for modern warfare. What advocates of such sports stressed, however, was that these activities would help instill a fighting spirit in young men, imbue them with the desire for victory, create a common bond, and help turn them into future officerworthy leaders.3 Military sports had a pedigree in American schools prior to World War I, emerging in the late nineteenth century with the establishment of military academies. These academies provided preparatory-school training, but in a learning environment shaped by a regimen of militarystyle discipline and organization. These schools very soon became highly popular with upper-class and upper-middle-class families with problem children, who rebelled at conventional private-school education. In such schools, drill and review were frequent, and the sports of fencing and rifle marksmanship were encouraged. In the 1890s, some educators argued for the value of drill and review for public high school students. Such training was taking place in several public-school systems in the United States, notably in the Boston public schools after Reconstruction. Nationwide, some seventy-four hundred high school students were already taking drill as early as 1890. The Boston Physical Education Society—the physical education establishment in that city—took notice of this fact and issued a [3.235.186.149] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:32 GMT) 202 ✦ Triumph of National Governance, 1920–1930 report in 1896 adamantly opposing such drill as not only useless but physically harmful, objecting to the repetitive handling of heavy muskets by still growing young men. The tone was of an adamant distaste for guns in schools. The well-known leader in physical education Dudley A. Sargent also weighed in with a scathing essay denouncing...