The history of thought surrounding the combining or connecting of mental and physical education and training shows that it has gone through a variety of modalities or frames of reference. Evidence for this persistence through a variety of intellectual and academic frameworks has become the groundwork for interesting studies that critique academic structuring and programs.
Numerous frames exist to explain the concept of preparedness (skill and practice) and production (conscious production or creation) as central to educational activity. These intellectual and philosophical contexts, for example, can serve as frames my study of this notion of citizen education.
Pre-Socratic Philosophy and Sophism. Hawhee
Hawhee, Debra. "Emergent flesh: Phusiopoiesis and ancient arts of training." Journal of Sport and Social Issues 25.2 (2001): 141-157.
Hawhee looks at traditions of Greek language and philosophy to identify the links between the concepts of body and mind, thought and action, and mental readiness and bodily training. She calls these phusiopoesis, a word that brings together ideas of physical shape and condition (disposition) and poetry, art, arts that express (produce) human nature. She calls this "the shaping of the body-mind complex." (142)
Aristotle.
Aristotelian concept of training in rhetoric as the incomplete philosophy.
Eugenics
If we skip over the vast history of Medieval thinking, the Rennaisance, the Enlightenment, and the early Modernist period, we can come more to present-day considerations of connecting body and mind in education and notions of struggle and contest.
I'm reading in Dolmage's Academic Ableism about mental hygiene programs at US schools during the 20s and 30s. Dolmage shows how these programs, fueled by the Eugenics movement, shaped attitudes toward social groups.
Dolmage, Jay T. Academic ableism: Disability and higher education. University of Michigan Press, 2017.
These efforts proved to be tinged by homophobia and antisemitism, and powerfully shaped by sexism: “the focus on protecting women’s bodies and minds reflected widely- held beliefs about the physical and mental characteristics of the “weaker sex”” while “concerns about race suicide and racial degeneration would surface in discussions about the health of college men, serving to justify the development of hygiene programs aimed at building their bodies along with their brains” (29). (My italics).
These ideas beg the question as to what kinds of rhetorical and physical structures were being built around the UIL Ready Writing Contest, and other contests, both sporting and academic, during the revisionist times of the 1960s and 1970s.
Post-Structuralism
The linking of training to identity Foucault. In Mike Poster's, The Mode of Information and Postmodernity, Poster explains how Foucault emphasized a unity of educational and life experiences. Discussing Foucault's example of the Panopticon, Poster explains:
Foucault's ability is to specify the relation that a Panopticon inmate derives from his post-structuralist rejection of the separation of mind and body, language and action, ideology and institution in favors of their mutual imbrication." (Craig, 384)
At the core of these constructions of education as the development of mental and physical attributes of character is the notion of transformation. By transformation, we mean the engagement with ideas and training spaces within which a person, a student, could seek to transform him or her self. Hawhee quotes Foucault, who uses the terms "arts of existence" to describe these educational arts. Foucault describes the arts of existence in this way:
What I mean by the phrase are those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria. (pp. 10-11).
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.
In such a definition, and following the concepts of physiopoesis one can see how the Ready Writing contest, apart from the construction of it in any handbook or description, lends itself to being seen as a form of training through contest focused on readiness as in preparedness or a responsive toning of capabilities, and writing, a production or willed transformation of the self according to the rules of the contest.
These theoretical formations unite or can be seen as coalescing under the foundational concept of the connection of body and mind, the concept of the connected body and mind, the extension to the idea of preparation and skill derived through contest. The University Interscholastic Program did not encourage academic and athletic competition in the same contestant, but it nevertheless reinforced the idea that training and readiness in both these domains contributed to the development of productive citizens in Texas.
As noted earlier, these ways of framing the classical notions of connecting body and mind through engagement or transformational educational experiences can be carried over into ways that we see the Ready Writing contest in our times. Three frames, for example, that illustrate that would be two that are the focus of my current study (the versions by Powell and Kinneavy/Kline, and other versions, including the Werkentin revision of the Handbook (in the 1990s) and the recent handbook revision by Bobby Hawthorne (2017), Ready to Write, which contains a dedication to the memory of Dr. James Kinneavy.
Sources:
Hawthorne, B. (2017). Ready To Write Handbook, Hexco Academic.
Day, D. (2010). London Swimming Professors: Victorian Craftsmen and Aquatic Entrepreneurs. Sport in History, 30(1), 32–54.
Day, D. J. (2008). From Barclay to Brickett: coaching practices and coaching lives in nineteenth and early twentieth century England. https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/2086/4158/505228.pdf?sequence=1
Foy, M. (n.d.). Search KB Main menu. Kbjournal.org. http://kbjournal.org/foy
Frye, J. (2017). The Holism ± Reductionism Dialectic and Transhumanism’s Terministic Screens. KB Journal, 13(1).
https://www.academia.edu/download/63975102/The_Holism_Reductionism_Dialectic_and_Transhumanisms_Terministic_Screens20200720-7800-ifq0nc.pdf
Grano, D. A. (2010). Risky Dispositions: Thick Moral Description and Character-Talk in Sports Culture. Southern Communication Journal, 75(3), 255–276.
Hawhee, D. (2001a). Phusiopoiesis and Ancient Arts of Training. Journal Of Sport & Social Issues, 25(2), 141–157.
Hawhee, D. (2001b). Emergent Flesh: Phusiopoiesis and Ancient Arts of Training. Journal Of Sport & Social Issues, 25(2), 141–157.
Tulle, E. (2020). Sense and structure: Toward a sociology of old bodies. The Need for Theory.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315230849-8/sense-structure-toward-sociology-old-bodies-emmanuelle-tulle
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