Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III INSTRUCTORS — THEIR RESPONSIBILITY AND TRAINING Whenever any activity possesses the power of being either good or bad for the individual or group, the question of leaders becomes of the utmost importance. Athletics have this power as does no other form of physical activity. On the one hand they are capable of being carried on in such a way as to develop strength, nobility, generosity, truthfulness, fairness and force of character or they may bring out meanness, trickery, dishonesty, viciousness and weakness of character. It is useless to expect that girls will spontaneously develop only good qualities. It is idle to urge that athletics be used for their educational value unless they are under the supervision of teachers who are intelligent enough to understand their full significance, well trained enough to teach principles which make a clean, accurate game and strong enough to exemplify such principles on the field. It is therefore a question of competent teaching and capacity for leadership. Those now in the profession or who enter it within the next decade will, to a great extent, determine the standard of athletics now in the process .of making. This standard will depend, among other things, upon: (1) The qualifications of instructors. (2) Opportunity and thoroughness of training. (3) The demands of employing schools. Special Qualifications of Instructors.—What constitutes necessary qualifications are not always clearly defined even in the minds of those upon whom fall the selection and training of instructors. Our replies from about one hundred schools and colleges emphasized qualifications of character rather than of technical proficiency. Many private school principals showed little comprehension of the question, while a few thought our questions too ge...