THE INDIVIDUALISTIC ACTIVITIES AND THE GROUP GAMES
The boy, we believe, likes to play ball, to run, to dodge, to throw
accurately and hard, to hit any quick-moving object with a club,
because for untold ages his ancestors have been getting their food and
guarding their lives by swift running and quick dodging, by accurate
throwing and deft hitting of moving objects with clubs. These are the
natural activities of growing boys; incidentally they train the boy for
the chief employments of savagery, and for some of the most valuable
recreations of civilization.
All this, however, is more or less by the way. The great value of
athletic games is the education they give toward essential qualities
in our modern, civilized and work-a-day world. A judicious blending
of work and gymnastics would probably bring about as high a physical
development as would the same training supplemented by games; but it
would stop there. Only sports, one may say only competitive sports,
can bring about the perfect adjustment of hand and eye, the sense of
“time,” the quickness of resource, the steadiness under excitement,
which mark the successful athlete. Games are the easiest, the most
natural, the pleasantest means of acquiring certain highly valuable
qualities; they are, in addition, almost the only means of acquiring
certain others.
For we make a mistake when we think of athletic games as contributors
only, or even chiefly, to muscular development and to soundness of
body. Their most important function is to train the nervous system,
the intelligence, and the will. As has often been pointed out, the
successful athlete is not necessarily an especially strong man. He is
a man who has learned to use his strength, whose nervous adjustment is
precise, whose body responds perfectly to the demands of his will. The
baseball field, in short, is one of the easiest roads to self-command.
But the playing-field has also an important social function. Games are
really the great social events of boyhood; in them he learns the great
art of getting on with his fellows. It is a curious sight to watch a
group of little boys when they first begin to play ball together. Such
wrangling and disputings as there are, such refusals to play unless
each can have completely his own way, such protracted controversy over
each least difference of opinion! Shortly, to begin with, each little
boy takes his bat or his ball, and departs for home and sand pile. The
next day they will play together a little longer. They are beginning
to learn one of the great lessons of life, and by the time these boys
have “made” their college team, their nice adjustment of nerve and
muscle will be hardly more manifest than their utter conformity of
intelligence and will. The erstwhile discordant group will have become
a single instrument. The separate individuals will have been trained to
coöperation.
Thus the playing-field confers both a muscular and a social education.
While it is training the muscular sense, it is cultivating also the
sense of human brotherhood, and the knack of getting on with other
people. “Activities calling for coöperation and self-sacrifice,” says
Luther Gulick, “form the natural basis upon which a life of service can
be built.... This life for others is far more probable, natural, and
tangible, when it comes as the natural unfolding or development of that
instinct which has its first great impulse of growth in the games of
adolescence.”
The wise parent, therefore, will look well to his sons’ games for
reasons which do not lie wholly on the surface. The money that he
spends on bats and balls and mits is going toward their education, and
in no other way will he get more education for his money. It will be
recalled that one of the past members of the Tennis Club believed if
he had remained in the gang, it would have saved him from the Reform
School. This was an especially fine gang, and its goodness was in no
small measure due to the same Mr. M. who took the boys camping. He saw
to it that the boys had a place to play and apparatus to play with, and
he used the gang in dealing with boys, as he probably used club and
lodge and union in dealing with men, “for all there was in it.”
The place to play is too often the point at which the boy’s education
breaks down. Consider the conditions in almost any house-bordered
street in the more thickly settled parts of any large city. It is the
breathing-space, nursery, thoroughfare, market, and playground for
crowded tenements. Here the boys congregate and play, and come daily
into conflict with the officers of the law,--the very worst possible
education that can be given to a boy. This conflict causes enmity
to spring up between the boys’ gang and the organized government,
where there should be coöperation and good will. The mischief-making
tendencies which spring from this enmity land many a boy in the
delinquent class.
Too often in our cities and villages the park is found near the centre,
while the playgrounds are pushed to the outskirts, and relegated to
vacant lots of good-natured or absent owners. Boys love best to play
close to their homes, at the centres of interest, where they can be
watched at their games. Experience shows that the boy will not commonly
travel more than a short distance to his playground, even though he
will go miles to a swimming-hole. Somehow the distant field is the
enemy’s country, and he has the vague ancestral dread of stranger’s
territory.
Wise, then, is the village or city that provides frequent small
open spaces for neighborhood playgrounds. It helps to develop the
neighborhood spirit which is so sadly lacking in a modern city, and
it helps to meet a normal demand of boy life. Such an arrangement is
also a far-sighted economy, since, to quote Lee, “the boy without a
playground is father to the man without a job.”
We ought not to forget that, from time immemorial, the education of
boys has been almost entirely by spontaneous imitation of their elders,
and by free play. The formal and compulsory portion of their education
has, for the most part, been limited to various initiation ceremonies
at puberty. Aside from these, boys have largely educated themselves.
The English public schools have for some years been organizing
the boys’ free play, and using it as an instrument to a definite
educational end. An English school will run fifteen simultaneous
cricket matches of an afternoon, each with only a handful of
spectators. We in this country have hardly begun this method of
education; and have not thus far advanced beyond the stage where a team
of nine or eleven specialists play the game, and a hundred or two more
spectators “support the team.” The best schoolmasters to-day are using
the group games as a valuable educational instrument and the tendency
each year is to use them more and more.
But the schools which are doing this are few. At best they can hardly
touch the tenth part of the boys who are now growing up, while even
this tenth is precisely the portion which needs the training least.
If the group games are to be made an efficient tool for the physical
and moral training of our boys, it will have to be done by the
municipalities,--and still more by the parents. Sooner or later, the
time must come when an honest and enthusiastic game of ball will be
recognized as an important factor, not only in the physical training
of every boy, but in his intellectual, moral and even his religious
training.
In addition, however, to these coöperating group games, the basis of
which is, at least in part, the inherent instincts of boyhood, there
still remain to be considered certain other gang activities, the
instinctive basis of which is much less specific, activities which
arise from the general impulse to do something interesting, and to do
it in conjunction with one’s fellows. These are gang activities, but
only in the sense that the ordinary boy actually does take part in them
as a member of the group, and while he might do the same things in
solitude, actually seldom does do so.
First of these comes swimming. Swimming is perhaps the most popular of
all sports during the summer season. The adolescent boy has a craving
for the water, and, if not checked, will remain in it for half a day at
a time. It is probably, on the whole, the safest way for most boys to
get their necessary exercise in very hot weather, while at any time of
the year it is, by general consent, the best all-round exercise there
is. Moreover, except for the chance of drowning, it is the safest of
athletic sports. Neither falls nor sprains nor broken bones nor any
of the common accidents of ball field and gymnasium are possible to
the swimmer. He cannot so much as strain a muscle against the yielding
element.
For these reasons and because, of all interesting sports, swimming
contributes most to the symmetrical muscular development of growing
children, every community ought to provide some sort of convenient
swimming place for its boys and girls. If it can manage to give them,
in addition, a daily half-hour throughout the year, so much the
better. Even an artificial swimming-tank is not especially expensive,
when one considers to what large use it may be put. It would certainly
be a great improvement if there could be in every public playground a
children’s swimming-pool, two or two and one half feet deep, in place
of the dirty and useless wading-pool one so often sees.
Natural pool or artificial tank, however, every swimming-place ought
to be under the supervision of the right kind of man. He ought to be a
teacher, for the modern swimming-strokes are by no means easy to get
exactly right, and boys seldom pick them up correctly for themselves.
His chief function, however, should be to keep the moral atmosphere of
the swimming-place clean and pure, for here if anywhere the tone of the
company is likely to drop. Boys in their games keep pretty closely to
associates of their own age and station in life, but the swimming-hole
takes in all ages, and its society is apt to be somewhat too democratic.
While, however, the careful parent will take all reasonable pains to
avoid any moral contamination at the swimming-hole, he ought never
to allow his boy to fall into the other extreme of prudery. For
healthy-minded men and boys the bathing-suit is at best a necessary
evil, and trunks an utter absurdity. The last thing to be desired for a
boy is anything resembling the modesty of a girl.
Of skating there is little that need be said. As simple skating or as
ice hockey, it is, for three months in the year, the most valuable of
winter sports in our Northern States, and one of the least expensive.
It is a short-sighted community that does not keep cleaned and ready
for daily use a safe, central skating-field. An active boy during the
winter is often hard-pressed to find wholesome outlets for his energy,
and the ice is often the only efficient rival of poolroom and saloon.
The skating-field is, besides, one of the natural places for the boy
toward the end of the gang period to graduate into a new social life.
The fresh, wholesome air, the brisk exercise, the sharp cold act
together to discourage dalliance. Outside a better equipped home than
one half of our boys and girls come from, there is no more wholesome
place for them to meet one another than on the ice.
This last advantage, though at a long interval, skating shares with
dancing; that is to say, if the dancing is properly conducted. A badly
conducted dance comes near to being the worst environment in which a
boy is ever likely to find himself. Boys at the gang age, however,
except toward the end of the period, seldom care spontaneously for
dancing at all. On the whole, probably, the wisest plan is to respect
the natural impulses of the average boy and to discourage much
departure from the type. The boy’s manners will probably suffer, but
the boy who is a perfect gentleman at fourteen usually has something
permanently the matter with him.
As for theatres, circuses, and shows, for which boys have commonly
a raging passion, it all depends on the show. All penny arcades and
peep-shows are pretty certainly bad. Better keep the boy away. All
performances attended predominantly by men are also bad, except
athletic exhibitions and horse-races. The general run of vaudeville
shows, with singing, dancing, and the like, are probably harmless
enough in themselves, but they are commonly pretty inane, while the
slight demand which they make on the voluntary attention cultivates a
distinct trashiness of mind. Ordinary stage dancing, by women who are
in no sense artists, is degrading both to performer and spectator,
though, fortunately, to this influence the boy at the gang age,
unless precociously educated, is nearly immune. At best, however, the
vaudeville show, except its athletic turns and its exhibitions of
trained animals, is a good deal foreign to the interests of boyhood;
so that for various reasons, a taste for this sort of entertainment is
something whose cultivation may well be postponed until extreme old age.
Circuses and other performances of like types are in a different
category. Their feats of skill and strength and daring are a
revelation to the boy, and a stimulus to emulation. The cowboys
and Indians appeal strongly to his imagination, and help him to
visualize the people whom he reads about in books. In many ways, these
exhibitions are educative and valuable; such evil features as they
sometimes have slip off the boy’s mind like water from a duck. At the
gang age, he is quite impervious to them.
Much the same is true of the moving-picture show, which seems to offer,
just now, the pressing moral problem of the city parent. Where these
are good,--and it is always the simplest matter in the world to find
out whether they are or not,--they are likely to be very good indeed.
They give the boy at second-hand all sorts of delightful experiences
of travel and adventure. Where the films present scenes of industrial
activity, historic settings, important contemporary events, interesting
places, customs, or scenery, their educational value is often high.
Like the circuses and “Wild West” shows, they help to gratify the
migratory instinct, and to satisfy the boy’s native curiosity and his
desire to go out into the world and see things. I doubt whether we half
realize how much the moving-picture show might be made to do for a boy
if some one would show him what to look for, and tell him what it is
all about.
On the other hand, the general drift of the moving-picture shows during
the last few years has been in the direction of “playlets” of a rather
stupid type, together with criminal and vicious suggestion for its
own sake. This last is highly dangerous and ought to be controlled by
strict censorship. Even here, however, we need to beware of attributing
to the boy the standards and sensibilities of mature men and women.
As for the old-fashioned theatre, no one who studies the question
without the old inherited church prejudices can think that the
melodrama is dangerous. On the contrary, it furnishes, for the most
part, a decidedly wholesome type of amusement. The usual form, in which
the villain elaborates a mean, underhanded plot, only to be outwitted
and defeated by the hero in the last act, produces a distinctly
beneficial effect on the unsophisticated listener. It furnishes a vent
for bad emotions, and at the same time gives a tonic shock to the rest.
It does the boy good to see the paragon of all masculine virtues fight
against all odds for the sake of the paragon of all feminine ones. The
part that moves us elders to derision is precisely the part that has
the most moral value for the inexperienced boy. What to us hints of
evil, he simply does not see.
It is a suggestive fact that of the long list of plays which boys have
told me they especially like to see, the great majority are good, with
plenty of the fightings and shootings, villains and heroes and dogs,
which boys like, and humor of a clean, if not especially subtle sort.
To see such a play once a week will not hurt any boy. He will go home
and reproduce it, as he reproduces the feats of the circus. And this
reproduction is itself a promising activity of which much more use
might be made in the boy’s education.
In many ways, therefore, it is distinctly a social misfortune that
vaudeville show and motion picture film have pretty much driven out
the old-fashioned melodrama. Even at its worst, it had a coherent plot
that enforced some sort of demand on the young hearers’ attention, so
that intellectually as well as morally it was superior to the types of
entertainment which have supplanted it. All this, however, is from the
point of view of the member of the gang. The effect of theatre going on
older boys is a much more complicated matter.