THE TRIBAL INSTINCTS AND THE WANDERLUST
We have dealt thus far more particularly with the anti-social and
predatory impulses of the gang, with the stealing and teasing
and fighting, which, while we cannot call them wholly evil, are
nevertheless to be rather checked than encouraged. With all their
incidental elements of good, they must be essentially transitory. The
boy may be allowed to steal and tease and fight; the man may not. The
problem is to suppress the undesirable activity with as little damage
as possible.
Now we pass to gang impulses which are inherently good. They may
need guidance and occasional pruning; but even if left alone, they
are likely, on the whole, to contribute both to the efficiency and
the happiness of life. Such evils as they bring are incidental; they
largely disappear when home life and gang life are perfectly adjusted
to one another.
For there must be a pretty accurate balance between the life of the
home and the life of the gang, if the boy is to get the best training
out of both. If the boy stays at home too much, he is likely to
become sissy. If he spends too much time with his gang, the wild and
savage impulses of boyhood receive too much exercise, and he becomes
wolfish. The boy must, for the most part, make his social adjustments
for himself, and the safest time for doing it is while he is still in
the home. Boys who have been kept too close, up to the time when they
go away to make life for themselves, too often afford most striking
lessons in how not to do it. In college and in business, under their
unaccustomed liberty, they go all to pieces for lack of the education
which they should have had as boys in the gang.
The problem of controlling the instinctive gang activities, therefore,
resolves itself into a question of not too much. The home will best
influence the gang by aiding its more wholesome interests, while to
a considerable extent it shuts its eyes to the rest. Each man does,
in his social development, pass through various stages of savagery,
and instead of trying to crush out even the most objectionable of the
tribal instincts of the growing boy, we ought rather to seek to satisfy
them in such wise that he may pass through the lower stages into the
higher as safely and as quickly as possible. As Froebel has well said,
“The vigorous and complete development of each successive stage depends
upon the vigorous and characteristic development of all preceding
stages of life.”
The way, then, to deal with the gang instincts is to gratify them.
We have already seen that approximately three quarters of our gangs
are wont to indulge in hunting, fishing, boating, building camps,
going into the woods or to ponds, playing Indians, and the like. This
is especially remarkable, as nearly all the gangs of our study come
from the cities. In country gangs, these forms of activity are always
present. With both city and country boys, they might be made of far
greater service than they commonly are.
All persons who have camped with boys know that their interest in the
outdoor world does not have to be kindled, but rather restrained and
guided. There is never any difficulty about filling in the idle time
of the gang with these tribal activities, while there is no doubt that
the rugged experiences of tramping, mountain climbing, and camp life,
of hunting, fishing, and boating, with the almost infinite forms of
manual training involved, wherever the boys do their own cooking and
camp work, and care for their own rods, guns, and kits, afford one of
the best, as it is one of the most natural, forms of manual education.
There is, besides, for the city boy, a training in resourcefulness and
gumption which he can hardly get elsewhere. Moreover, under the proper
sort of men leaders, this rough outdoor life furnishes the very best
conditions for instruction in physical and moral hygiene.
Somewhat paradoxically, therefore, much of this gang play trains a
boy to work. Play is work that one likes. But it is work, and it
cultivates the same concentration and persistence as work, and often
the same constructive imagination. Boys, moreover, often work hard
getting ready to play; and by a little tactful guidance from their
elders, they can be led through these play activities to the enjoyment
of work, and into sound developmental occupations. Notice how in the
Tennis Club, the boys, under the inspiration of Mr. M., the father of
one of them, went camping on a lake, and for the sake of going fishing,
built themselves their own boat. What better education in skill of hand
than that boat-building could be found for a crowd of boys on a summer
vacation; what better introduction to the joy of labor!
The life of the woods has, moreover, yet another important function
in the development of a boy’s inner life. I have often, in taking
cross country walks with boys, attempted to switch out from among the
trees into open meadow or pasture land to save distance. Over and over
again, however, have the boys protested. “No, don’t. Let’s stay in
the woods,” they have entreated. I am inclined to believe that the
religious life in boys has its natural birthplace in the forests,
in the temple not made with hands, where their fathers have been
worshiping these ten thousand years. If this be true, the Sunday School
teacher might well, at times, exchange the benches of an uninteresting
room for the spots where our race, from the beginnings of its
existence, has been learning its lessons of piety and reverence.
Sunday is, in fact, the great day of the week, for or against the
home. It is, as appears from the boys’ reports of their activities,
characteristically Nature Day; and there is a well-marked practice
among boys, no matter what they may do through the week, to go off in
groups into the country on Sunday. Parents who wish to keep control
of their boys should recognize this natural impulse, and be their
companions on their Sunday excursions. Family migrations, on the one
day of the week when the father is free to go with his boys, would be
an efficient means of keeping the home influence around the boy. Surely
there can in this be nothing irreligious.
Such a practice would, moreover, powerfully aid the parent in
controlling one of the most troublesome of gang instincts, the
_Wanderlust_. The roving impulse takes a sudden rise at the dawn of
adolescence, and then gradually subsides. Most red-blooded young men
hear the call of the red gods in the spring; not a few remain vagabonds
all their lives.
Certain it is that this strange _Wanderlust_ of man has been a
tremendous force in history. It drove the Angles and Saxons into
Britain, the English into North America, and the New Englanders into
the great West. The traditional Westerner is planning to sell out and
move farther on. The mere sight of the horizon is a challenge; and the
boy longs to repeat the ancestral experience.
In the normal boy, the migratory instinct is at times the most
imperious of his impulses. Many boys are driven by it to run away
from home; few, indeed, are there of us who have not made our plans
to go--and then changed our minds. It commonly takes the combined
influence of good parents, good teachers and good playmates to cool
us down; and where the neighborhood spirit is lost, as it often is in
city life to-day, or the home is broken by death or desertion, or made
inefficient by drunkenness, ignorance, or poverty, there is little
to check the boy’s response to the old fret. Off, therefore, the boy
goes, first by day, then by night. How far this running-away instinct
contributes to delinquency, it is difficult to estimate, but certainly
it is one of the greatest factors. About one boy out of every five in
most of our large cities is arrested before the age of twenty-one; and
in a considerable proportion of cases the beginnings of wrongdoing can
be traced to early wanderings.
On the other hand, running away from home does not always result
in permanent moral harm; while even at the worst, the boy gains a
self-reliance which nothing else can teach. Often, too, the impulse,
instead of growing with what it feeds on, tends to disappear with its
gratification. There is something to be said also for giving the boy
his fill of one sort of adventure before he is old enough for another.
As the migratory impulse is far too deep-seated and powerful to
be altogether restrained, the only method is to indulge it under
supervision and educatively. The boy should be taken on any sort of
interesting trip. If the expedition involves some bodily hardship,
so much the better. The son of a good home is usually made too
comfortable, and unconsciously he feels the need of some more
invigorating substitute for warm room and soft bed. When, therefore,
nothing better offers itself, it often does a boy good to sleep out in
his own back yard, with a dismantled revolver in his belt, and a lasso
hung beside him on the clothes pole. He will probably not get much
sleep, and he may catch cold; but the experience will be a powerful
stimulus to his imagination, and at the same time will help, at small
risk, to gratify a wholesome instinct.
The wise parent will take every opportunity to go on trips with
his sons to city or country; the gymnastic instructor will arrange
cross-country runs for his boys in spring and fall; and the
school-teacher will plan nature-study walks, trips to historic spots,
or visits to industrial plants, where, under a well-informed guide, the
class will learn about manufacturing processes from the raw material to
the finished product. All these persons are killing two birds with one
stone. They are satisfying the runaway instinct, while at the same time
they furnish the best sort of education.
In all sections of our land there are sacred historic spots, buildings,
graveyards, battle-grounds, which help to keep alive the memory of
noble men and women. There is a period in boy life when these have
an intense interest; when the boy, eager for any form of experience
or adventure, has his imagination powerfully stirred by whatever he
associates with the adventures and experience of other human beings. I
have often visited historic Concord with groups of school-boys, and
though they were of all nationalities, I have yet to find one who could
not be deeply impressed at the sight of Concord Bridge and the statue
of the Minute Man. Teachers who were present, and told their pupils the
story of what had happened on that ground, reported after their return
the extraordinary interest of the boys’ essays on their pilgrimage. The
boys had seen with their eyes and the past had become real. Could there
be any more effective method of teaching history, quite aside from the
incidental satisfaction of a deep instinctive need?
If, in addition to such informative trips, the parent or teacher can
go camping or tramping with his boys, then the climax is reached. Some
pond should be selected with good boating, fishing, and swimming, and
there ought to be a mountain near by which the boys can climb, camp on
its sides overnight, and go to the top for sunrise. Such an experience
will never be forgotten. Not only will it tend to kindle a lifelong
interest in hills and mountains; in addition and more important still,
the companionship in adventure gives the man a hold over his boys
that nothing else can bestow. In the woods, on the mountain top and
around the camp fire at night, come feelings of mystery, of awe, and
of friendliness, to which the boy is at other times a stranger. Here
is the opportunity for genuine moral and religious instruction. Better
one straight talk under these conditions, than a whole year of lessons
forced upon boys. Genuine morality and genuine religion are such deep
and sacred and natural things that a little real inspiration lasts
forever.
Probably, however, the most obvious and the most annoying aspect of
the _Wanderlust_ is truancy. It takes a shrewd teacher who knows boys,
backed by a good home, to hold a boy in the schoolroom in the warm
days of spring when the baseball fever is at its height. Most boys
become thoroughly tired of the inactivity, restraint and monotony of
the schoolroom; while the matter is by no means simplified by the
fact that the teacher herself commonly belongs to the sex to which
certain aspects of boy nature must be forever a closed book. Granted
that truancy is not to be tolerated, we must never, in dealing with
any actual truant, lose sight of the fact that truancy is not a sin.
It arises from two coöperating forces,--the lack of adaptation of the
schools to the needs of growing boys, and the determination of the boys
to be true to their own nature. For one of these factors we elders are
responsible; the boy is responsible for neither.
This is the day of athletics. The adult world has learned thoroughly
the lesson that there can be no perfect physical development without
the training which comes from the competitive and group games. Hardly
less important, of late years, has been the emphasis of those who know
boys best on the social and moral aspects of athletic training. The
best boys’ schools to-day provide for outdoor and indoor sports as
carefully as for any other branch of education.
This lesson, I say, we have at last pretty well learned. We have not
yet discovered, however, that the native impulses which lead a boy to
baseball and hockey are only part of his equipment of gang instincts.
The desire for athletic exercise which, at least for the favored few,
is now being gratified at so great an expense, is no older and no more
deep-seated than the desire for these activities which we have called,
for lack of a better name, tribal and migratory. The boy needs diamond
and gymnasium and running track. But quite as much he needs mountain
and lake and river and forests. He takes a step toward manhood when he
stands by his fellows through a hard-fought match. He also takes a step
toward manhood when he sleeps alone under the stars.
In one respect, moreover, the boy who plays ball is at no small
disadvantage in after life as compared with the boy who plays Indian.
The athlete will play his favorite game while he is at school. He will
get a thorough and wholesome physical training, and possibly some not
especially wholesome notoriety. If his parents can afford to keep
him four years in college, he plays there. Afterwards, unless he is
especially fortunate, he does not play at all; and all his carefully
acquired skill goes for nothing.
But the boy who has indulged wisely his tribal and migratory instincts
has for the rest of his life a never-failing source of happiness. He
has learned to love nature, and to delight in his own handiwork. To
walk in the woods, to climb mountains, to own the little camp which
succeeds to the place in his affections once occupied by the rude,
gang-built hut, to travel,--these are among the permanent satisfactions
of life. If we except the group of instincts which lead the young man
to found a family of his own, and to which, at the gang age, the boy
should be a complete stranger, the tribal instincts of boyhood, wisely
gratified and trained, are probably the greatest single factor in a
happy life.