Yeshiva University High School For Boys - Elchanite Yearbook (New York, NY)

Page 19 text:

Recreation is the re-creation of that which becomes damaged in human beings. It consists of the repair of human damage where it is reparable, and the prevention of it in the rising generation. There is an abundance of this human damage in the world. lronically, the cause of it is modern civilization, which, along with the benefits it confers, has done an enormous amount of harm to man- kind. Education for leisure is greatly needed, but it must take a new line. We can and ought to train young people, in the earliest childhood, to the point where they will be able to make a good choice of their leisure occupations. This we can accomplish by awakening their creative side, by giving them the opportunities for using those creative faculties which all humans possess to some degree. It is tragic that the creative streak of young people is often killed by their present education, to their great detriment in afterlife. The reason so many people are at a loss for what to do with themselves in their leisure time, and make foolish use of it in consequence, is that their creative faculties never were awakened when they were young. It is a mistake to suppose that creative activity has its place in leisure occu- pations only. The need for it is equally great in the more practical fields. What is more precious than creative thinking in business, in economics, in politics, in religion? The creative spirit in a human being, once aroused, spreads to all his endeavors. Teach a child to play creatively in his games and he will soon begin to think creatively in his lessons. Get it into leisure and it will soon spread to laborg into the fingers and it will soon find its way to the brain. The art of the ancient Greeks was due largely to their fine physical and mental culture, expressed in beautiful games. Games were the growing point of their arts. They learned to bring their bodies under the control of their minds, and having established skill in that fundamental form, they went on to the higher recreation in art and thought-creative wisdom, which is still one of our greatest treasures. There is no reason why we should not do likewise. But we shall never do it so long as we think of recreation as a mere affair of playing games. We must understand, as the Greeks understood. the integration of the body and the mind: to use lower forms of activities as motivation for the higher, to see the whole personality and educate the whole child. Howard Orenstein

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The art of living is indivisible. It is not the aggregate of leisure, labor, thought, education, and recreation. When life is divided into categories, it can never be an aft, but at best a patchwork, at worst, a mess. It becomes an art when the elements of life are governed by a single vision of excellence and a continuous passion for achieving it. A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his education and his recreation. Indeed, he probably could not even though he wished. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. His self perception is that of doing both. Enough for him that he does it well. The synthesis of education and recreation, a perfectly obvious phenomenon to any intelligent person who reflects upon the matter, is obscured in the minds of the thoughtless by the absurd associations that have gathered around the two words. Mention the word 'keducationi' and nine out of ten people will immediately recall their school days. They will remember the grind and the medley suifused of images-textbooks, classrooms, blackboards, courses of lecture, examinations- with overtones of boredom, and confinement between walls. V. The term recreation, however, will conjure up symbols of joyous escape from all that education means to these same people. It will suddenly remind them of the happy moment when the bell interrupted their education, and they raced out to kick up their heels in the playground during recess, or of the happier moment when the term came to an end and the vacation gave them the opportunity of suppressing their education. These unfortunate misconceptions are not confined to the multitude. There are pedagogues who seem impervious to the notion that anything can possibly be education when it is not written in a book, accepted in a sitting position, and tested by an examination, or that the function of recreation can be anything else than that of helping the student to stretch his limbs, digest his lunch, and so be more able to sustain the rigors of the classroom. But recreation is not an escape from the toil of education into meaningless vacation, but rather a vitalizing element in the process of education itself. The problem of leisure time exists only so long as we think of leisure as a vacuum separated from the rest of life and needing to be filled with activities specially designed for it. So greatly ingrained is our habit of putting recreation into one compart- ment and education into another, that difficulties are inherent in the presenta- tion of these two ideas as an indissoluble unity. Perhaps the situation would be eased if people made a practice of saying We-c1'eati011', instead of f'rec1'ezzti0n .

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