THE GANG IN CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIAL WORK
_The Gang and the Boy Scouts_
Of all present-day organizations for the improvement and the happiness
of normal boyhood, the institution of the Boy Scout is built at once
on the soundest psychology and the shrewdest insight into boy nature.
The Scout Patrol is simply a boys’ gang, systematized, overseen,
affiliated with other like bodies, made efficient and interesting, as
boys alone could never make it, and yet everywhere, from top to bottom,
essentially a gang. Other organizations have adopted gang features.
Others have built themselves around various gang elements. The Boy
Scout Patrol alone is the gang.
How thoroughly this is true, appears at once in the actual details of
the scout’s training. He must learn to build a fire with two matches;
to swim a specified distance, and to take a companion ashore; to
handle and to care for, according to the situation, canoe or boat or
horse; to find his way across country and through woods to a designated
spot and back, within a specified time; to track a companion by his
foot marks; and to spy upon a, constructively, hostile camp without
being discovered. In short, he is taught to “play Indians” with a
thoroughness and success which no unaided gang can approach.
Like the spontaneous gang, the patrol puts special emphasis on
coöperation, loyalty, obedience, and honor. The scout is a soldier; he
may discuss and argue and protest to his heart’s content--afterwards.
But he will obey first. The scout is a gentleman; whatever he declares
“on his honor” is to be received without question. He is to stand by
his friends, to respond to the call of any other scout. These are the
simple rules of the organization, as they are the rules, written or
unwritten, of every boys’ gang that ever existed.
Most ingeniously does the scout’s training feed his social instincts.
He is taught all sorts of sign languages,--marks on the ground or in
the woods that tell which way he has gone, where there is water, or the
wrong path which those who follow him should avoid. He learns to signal
with smoke and with flashes of sunlight from a mirror, to telegraph,
to wigwag, to do semaphore signals with his arms. In all these ways he
is given one of the most precious possessions of boyhood, the secret
code which only he and his friends understand; while at the same time
he is initiated into the great company of soldiers, sailors, engineers,
explorers, railroad men, and other romantic adventurers who also
comprehend these mystic signs. The ordinary gang would give the boy
this same sense of solidarity with other boys; the patrol gives him in
addition a contact with the world of men.
Incidentally, of course, the patrol, like any other gang, goes swimming
and skating, plays ball and the other group games, has its local
habitation and its stamping-ground. In these respects it is simply
an especially good gang--as good, let us say, as the Tennis Club
of our earlier reports. In one way and another, therefore, it does
everything that the spontaneous gang does, and does it a great deal
more interestingly. The whole Boy Scout movement is a shrewd and highly
successful attempt to take the natural, instinctive, spontaneous boys’
society, to add nothing to what is already there, but deliberately to
guide the boy into getting completely just that for which he blindly
gropes.
The obvious answer to the whole gang problem, therefore, is this: Turn
your gang into a Boy Scout Patrol.
_The Gang and the Church_
If one were to give to an average boy a religious education which
should be thoroughly psychological, and quite independent of any
particular theological bias of those who had him in charge, one may
fancy that method would be something as follows.
While the boy is still a child, before he arrives at the gang age,
and while he is still educating himself through his larger muscles
and the cruder perceptions of his sense organs, he should attend a
place of worship with an elaborate ritual. The child at this stage
is developing rapidly his acquaintance with sound and color, and is
learning to coördinate the larger movements of his body. He is in the
period of drum and trumpet and the running-games, so that the appeal of
the church service to eye and ear, the processions and recessions, the
movements of clergy and choir, even his own changes of posture as he
sits, stands, or kneels, all fit in with the strongest interests of his
secular life. The ornate ritual, therefore, with short sermon or none,
makes precisely the appeal to which the way is most open. This, then,
is the time to instill reverence through the ministration of the church.
Now, reverence, which is fundamental to religion, is itself founded
on the muscles. Just as we are angry, so the psychologists tell us,
because we clench our fists and snarl our lips, so we are reverent
because we bow our heads. As one cannot be thoroughly angry so long
as he keeps his hands open and makes himself smile, so he cannot tip
back in his chair, put his feet on the table, and pray. The mood will
not come till the muscles point the way. There are, to be sure, genuine
conversions late in life, as there are miracles of other sorts. But the
normal religious man is one who, in boyhood, at the period of life when
he was establishing his other great muscular correlations, has been put
through the movements of worship till they became habits. We make a
devotee, in short, precisely as we make a musician or an athlete.
With the advent of the early gang period, however, the boy’s relation
to the world undergoes a sudden change; and naturally his attitude
toward religion will alter with it. He who once babbled to any listener
becomes reserved. The desire for sensation is now replaced by a desire
for experience. Woods and sea and the greater forces of nature are
now the objects of his religious instincts. His interest is in the
creation, and the proper channel through which to instill reverence is
friendship with Nature. The child has become a savage, and he worships
the red gods.
With the later gang period and the stage which immediately succeeds it,
comes normally the veneration of a hero. By this time the boy leader
of the gang has emerged from the general ruck of its members, and his
word has become law. Now is the time of greatest influence of the
man leader--father, trainer, scout-master, pastor, or older friend.
Now, for the first time, the boy, beginning to find himself, becomes
capable of special and enduring friendships; probably, too, he falls
frequently in love. In short, his one absorbing instinctive interest is
in personality.
The proper minister of religion at this stage is no longer the
ritualist, but the inspired preacher; and the less of form and ceremony
and church millinery, the better. The boy’s instinctive hero-worship
turns him toward any prophet of righteousness whose theme is the moral
life, the duties of this present day, and “the religion of all good
men.” At the age of sixteen, he normally experiences conversion.
After that comes, of course, the period of intellectual skepticism; and
when that is by, the erstwhile boy settles down to the enduring faith
of his manhood, in which all the religious experiences of youth have
their part. For the rest of his life, few changes will go deeper than
mere matters of taste and opinion.
We, however, are concerned only with the boy at the gang age. His
problem is simple in theory,--and anything but simple in practice.
Preaching at this stage does him little good, nor does form and ritual.
He should already have fixed his habits; now is the time for ideals
and dreams. The boy is instinctively a nature worshiper, and the one
essential thing is to get him out of doors in company with the right
sort of man. This is no time for bible or hymn book; there is time
enough for these both before and after. What the boy wants now is to
learn about life. To set him at Sunday School lessons under a woman
teacher is a pedagogic crime.
We need, then, in church and Sunday School, for influencing boys at
the gang age, simple manliness far more than we need either learning
or piety. If we have done our full duty by the boy up to the age of
twelve, and if we are prepared to go on with his formal religious
instruction after he passes sixteen, we may safely leave the welfare
of his soul for these intervening four years to nature and to the
unconscious example of almost any good man. For boys at the gang age,
I would choose as a Sunday School teacher the sort of man who makes a
good scout-master, even if he himself made no profession of religion
whatever, rather than the stanchest pillar of the church who has
forgotten his boyhood, or than the most angelic maiden lady that ever
lived. This is one of the cases where the children of this world have
been appreciably wiser than the children of light.
_The Gang and the Sunday School_
Of the gang and the Sunday School, as apart from the church, little
need be added to what has already been said. The common mistake is
to pick out the proper number of boys, of about the proper age, but
with small regard to their other qualities, and out of these to form a
class. The result is, that unless the teacher possesses most uncommon
gifts, the class never has any coherence. It is not a natural group,
and it never develops the internal structure of a real gang. There
may be too many natural leaders. There may be too few. Or the class
may combine fragments of rival gangs that are “licking” one another
on sight, six days in the week. More commonly, the class contains a
considerable fragment of one gang, with one or two individuals out
of several others, and perhaps an occasional out-lier who belongs to
none. The remainders of the broken gangs are in other Sunday Schools.
Thus the class remains always at cross purposes with the boys’ native
impulses; and rarely, therefore, wins their instinctive loyalty.
The remedy is the method of the Boy Scouts. Organize your Sunday
School classes on the basis of natural affiliations. Found each on
some spontaneous group. Add, if you think it wise, some boys whose
ganginess is less developed. But don’t put fragments of well defined
gangs together. Then, if some of your own boys follow their gangs to
other schools, you can trust that, in the end, enough others come to
you to even up. The essential matter at the gang age is the boys, not
the denominational interests of their parents.
_The Gang and the Home_
There are three primary social groups in a modern state,--the family,
the neighborhood, and the play group, which is, for our purposes, the
gang. The second of these has become pretty much extinct in our cities,
in spite of the efforts of settlement workers to preserve or revive
it. The typical city dweller does not know the people in the next
house by name, and views with instinctive hostility the family in the
neighboring flat.
This really leaves only the home and the gang for the boy’s informal
training in citizenship, so that these two need more than ever to stand
together; and although in essence, this entire book is a discussion of
the ways in which the home may utilize the gang, there still remain one
or two points that are worthy of special emphasis.
A thoroughly “good” gang, to do its best work, ought to have a meeting
place, a shop, a man leader, a playground, and a stretch of wild
country for its members to roam about in. All these, in some form or
other, the home ought to furnish. Allowing for two or three pairs of
brothers in the same gang, each group will commonly represent at least
a half-dozen households; and these, among them, ought to be able to
provide the gang with the essentials of its profitable existence.
Somewhere in those families, there should be at least one spare room,
one large back yard, and one father, uncle, cousin or big brother who
likes boys. Somewhere in those families, there ought to be country
relatives or the owner of some sort of a camping-ground.
The only thing, then, for a group of households related to one another
through a boys’ gang to do is to recognize frankly this relationship,
and to live up to it. The father who has no room for a shop can put up
the money for bats and balls; the mother who cannot stand the boys’
racket can provide grub for the summer trip. Somehow or other, six
reasonably well-to-do households, if only they will stand together,
can always manage to give the gang about all it needs for its best
efficiency.
What I especially urge, then, is that the good home shall recognize the
good gang as among the most efficient of its allies. As the careful
parent keeps an eye on school and church and social set, so ought he to
keep his eye on the gang. He should make it his business to know, not
only that his boy gets into the right gang, but that he enters it at
the right age, neither too early nor too late, and that he graduates
at the right time, after the gang has done its perfect work and more
would be too much. He should see to it also--as I shall point out at
some length in another volume--that the boy, being in the right gang,
has also the right place in it, so that he gets his due training in
the great art of making his will count in actions of other men. Most
especially, as I have all along been pointing out, he should see that
the gang as an organization gets its chance and lives its life, with
its fitting environment and its proper tools.
_The Gang and the Boys’ Club_
Unfortunately, however, taking the mass of boys as they come, about
one boy in every two, either because of lack of room in his home, or
because of sickness or death or poverty, cannot look to his parents for
any aid in his group life. For him there remains the boys’ club. The
best of these are those which recognize themselves as mere adjuncts to
the gang, which furnish a chance for wholesome exercise and play under
the direction of a man who knows when to be blind and deaf, and for the
rest lets the boys a good deal alone.
[Illustration: AN INADEQUATE PLAYGROUND
The outdoor gymnasium is not enough]
[Illustration: A MODEL PLAYGROUND
Boys at the gang age need room for the group games]
During the warmer months of the year, the city boy, for whom naturally
the boys’ club is designed, will spend his time out of doors. Playing
field and swimming place, trips into the country on foot, with
longer journeys by rail and trolley, keep the gang actively engaged in
ways which are for the most part wholesome. Even the least desirable of
them serve to work off the boy’s abounding energy, and keep him from
worse things.
The peril of the city gang comes with the cooler weather of fall, when
the early darkness hides its doings, and any meeting place becomes
attractive if it is warm. This is the time for the boys’ club to
capture the gang. The game is to keep the boys off the streets, and out
of worse places, between the hours of four in the afternoon and ten in
the evening. If at this critical time a boy can explode his energy in
wholesome ways and amid good surroundings, the rest of the day will
largely take care of itself. The gang demands a place to meet and to
do things. This place will either be the home, the boys’ club--or
elsewhere.
_The Gang and the Playground_
In certain of its aspects the problem of the playground is not unlike
that of the boys’ club. Each exists primarily to give the boy
opportunity of activity, spontaneous and largely self-directed, yet
under supervision, adequate but not meddlesome.
The playground, however, is vastly the more important of the two. Our
artificial city life fails, more than anywhere else, in its handling of
boys. We have parks and boulevards and speedways, public baths and golf
courses and wading-pools and sand piles, free museums and art galleries
and libraries, not, to be sure, in any profusion, but often in number
fairly adequate to the demand. The one thing our cities commonly lack
is enough places where growing boys can indulge in a wholesome game of
ball without getting themselves into some sort of trouble.
To be of any use to boys, a playground must be large. A small ground,
with swings and teeters and sand piles, is for children. But the gang
needs room to play the specialized group games against its rivals.
How the city gang is to get this is another question, and one worthy
of very careful consideration by those having the welfare of boys at
heart.
_The Gang and the Summer Camp_
It might be inferred from what I have already written in praise of
camp life for boys that I place the boys’ summer camp high on the list
of favorable environments for youth. This is by no means the fact.
The typical summer camp, such as is advertised by the score in every
magazine, is altogether too much an affair _de luxe_ to be of much
real value. It is too apt to be merely a school under canvas, or worse
still, a summer hotel. So much is done for the boys that they lose
all the training in skill of hand, in woodcraft, in self-reliance, in
gumption, which a proper camp ought to give. Worst of all, they have
little chance to “endure hardness.” Life is nearly as soft as in the
city; and for all the primitive manliness that the camp puts into them,
they might as well have stayed at home.
Summer camps, also, for business reasons, are likely to be too large.
The ideal arrangement is six or eight, or at most ten, boys who have
already made themselves into a gang, with a man leader. A natural
group, in short, with a natural man added on, is far superior to a
selection on any other basis. If for any reason, the group must be
larger, then there should be two or more men leaders, and provision for
the group to break up into several natural gangs.
The best time to camp is late in the summer. Boys when left to their
own impulses build their camps in the fall, urged thereto by as blind
an instinct as that which sets the birds to building nests in the
spring. Late summer is as near the natural building-time as the school
system of civilization permits us to get; and besides this, the camping
trip at the end of the vacation serves as the climax to be looked
forward to all through the hot weather.
The two months’ camp in the summer is based rather on custom than on
experience or sound theory. Four short periods, during four different
seasons, are far better than a single long stretch during one. Boys
at the gang age desire ardently experience. That they get in fourfold
measure, when to the common sports of summer are added hunting and
trapping and nutting, expeditions on skates and snowshoes, fishing
through the ice in the winter or in the first open water of the spring,
and all the other rich and varied doings of the yearly round. It is any
season but summer, also, for the touch of hardship which for every true
boy is the salt of camp life.
As for formal instruction in camp, the less of books the better.
Natural history, of course, there is, and the simpler handicrafts, and
the various outdoor arts, from boat-building to camp cookery. Practical
surveying may sometimes be conveniently managed, together with some of
its attendant mathematics. There is often a chance, too, for a limited
amount of physics, especially on the practical and the observational
sides, and in the region between block and tackle on the one hand and
the theory of the weather on the other.
But the one subject above all others for camp study is hygiene. Here is
illustrated, practically and on a convenient scale, the entire subject
of communal hygiene, from the obtaining and storage and preparation
of food, to the disposal of waste, and the necessity of order and
system in any sort of group housekeeping. As for personal hygiene, the
white light that beats about a camp, where every act has to be done in
public, reveals many a need for instruction on this side; while the
frankness and naturalness of camp life make such lessons easy to give.
Example, too, counts here as it rarely can where existence is more
private. For public hygiene, therefore, and for private, a well-managed
camp is an ideal school.
Most especially is a camp an ideal spot for instruction concerning sex.
The candor and wholesomeness of camp life, the busy days and the solemn
nights, the absence, one must confess, of one half the human race, all
make for purity of heart. At no time, probably, can a high-minded man
do so much toward setting a boy’s feet along the narrow way.