Strenuous play leads to strenuous work.
Play Ball.
Scarcely more than a generation ago every American boy came under the
spell of hunting and fishing; and there is no more powerful incentive
to laborious days, nor any anodyne so potent for bodily discomfort
and hardship! A hunting and fishing boyhood! Such has been the chief
source of human energy in this lazy world of ours, the chief basis of
life-long habit of persistent and strenuous effort; and the problem
of educational play is to a great extent the problem of finding an
effective substitute for the lure of the wild for stimulating young
people to intense activity.
The lure of the wild! Alas it is but a poet's fancy in this tame
world of ours. But our boys remain as a perennial race of Wild Indians
however tame the world may come to be; and fortunately they are not
dependent upon completely truthful externals. The genuine Wild Indian
becomes a sorry spectacle, even if he does not sicken and die, when he
is deprived of his millions of square miles of wild buffalo country;
but our boy Bill cannot have such an out-of-doors, never again as long
as the earth shall last. Indeed he has no need of such a thing, for
if his fancy is stirred by ardent playmates he will chase an imaginary
stag around a vacant lot all day if only there is a mixture of earth
and sky and greenery to set off his make believe--and eat mush and
milk when the day is done!
Indeed youngsters must hunt in packs, as Whitcomb Riley tells in his
Hunting Song of the American Bander-Log, and the gang idea contains
the ultimate solution of what would otherwise be an impossible
problem, namely, to find an effective substitute for the lure of the
wild for the energizing of the intensely active kind of play, the kind
of play that trains for application, the kind that approaches hunting
and fishing or tribal warfare or the settling of a blood-feud in its
persistent, single-minded and strenuous activity.
Many grown-ups seem to think that mere permission is now a sufficient
basis for play, as it was in pioneer and rural days. Indeed this is
largely true for very small children who can sit in the sunshine and
make mud pies or dig holes in a bed of sand; but with older boys it
is different. They may indeed fight or steal, or engage in the worst
varieties of gang activity, or sit by a fire in a back alley talking
sex like grown-up sordidly imaginative Hottentots in Darkest Africa;
but strenuous play requires suggestive example and organization,
as with our Boy Scouts; and it depends to a very great extent upon
competitive athletics. A dozen large ball fields and two or three
good-sized swimming pools are, next to his food, the most important
thing for our boy Bill; and they would do more to make him into an
energetic and industrious man than all the rest of his school work put
together.
* * * * *
Scarcely more than a generation ago every American boy came under the
spell of hunting and fishing; and there is no more powerful incentive
to laborious days, nor any anodyne so potent for bodily discomfort
and hardship! A hunting and fishing boyhood! Such has been the chief
source of human energy in this lazy world of ours, the chief basis of
life-long habit of persistent and strenuous effort; and the problem
of educational play is to a great extent the problem of finding an
effective substitute for the lure of the wild for stimulating young
people to intense activity.{4}
The lure of the wild! Alas it is but a poet's fancy in this tame
world of ours. But our boys remain as a perennial race of Wild Indians
however tame the world may come to be; and fortunately they are not
dependent upon completely truthful externals. The genuine Wild Indian
becomes a sorry spectacle, even if he does not sicken and die, when he
is deprived of his millions of square miles of wild buffalo country;
but our boy Bill cannot have such an out-of-doors, never again as long
as the earth shall last. Indeed he has no need of such a thing, for
if his fancy is stirred by ardent playmates he will chase an imaginary
stag around a vacant lot all day if only there is a mixture of earth
and sky and greenery to set off his make believe--and eat mush and
milk when the day is done!
Indeed youngsters must hunt in packs, as Whitcomb Riley tells in his
Hunting Song of the American Bander-Log, and the gang idea contains
the ultimate solution of what would otherwise be an impossible
problem, namely, to find an effective substitute for the lure of the
wild for the energizing of the intensely active kind of play, the kind
of play that trains for application, the kind that approaches hunting
and fishing or tribal warfare or the settling of a blood-feud in its
persistent, single-minded and strenuous activity.
Many grown-ups seem to think that mere permission is now a sufficient
basis for play, as it was in pioneer and rural days. Indeed this is
largely true for very small children who can sit in the sunshine and
make mud pies or dig holes in a bed of sand; but with older boys it
is different. They may indeed fight or steal, or engage in the worst
varieties of gang activity, or sit by a fire in a back alley talking
sex like grown-up sordidly imaginative Hottentots in Darkest Africa;
but strenuous play requires suggestive example and organization,
as with our Boy Scouts; and it depends to a very great extent upon
competitive athletics. A dozen large ball fields and two or three
good-sized swimming pools are, next to his food, the most important
thing for our boy Bill; and they would do more to make him into an
energetic and industrious man than all the rest of his school work put
together.