THE GANG AND THE SCHOOL
The problem of the school, so far as the gang is concerned, is not
so much to use actual gangs for the furtherance of its objects, as
it is to use the underlying instincts of boyhood, which lead to the
formation of gangs. These instincts normally lead the boy to associate
himself with other boys in a gang and in this gang to pursue certain
lines of activity. It is quite possible, in addition, to turn these
gang instincts in the direction of the activities of the school. The
emotional reaction of the boy toward his gang and its doings, can be
extended, in part, to the school and its life.
For this purpose, the teacher must first of all understand the gang
spirit. She is too apt, being herself a woman, to treat the boy as only
a rougher and more troublesome sort of girl. She tends to interpret
his acts as if they were those of a girl, and to forget how different
in the two cases may be the inner meaning of the same overt deed. She
errs, in short, by thinking of the boy in terms of her own woman’s
nature, when she should be studying him objectively as the quite
different sort of creature that he actually is.
Take, for example, a rough-and-tumble fight. It is a rare woman who
can see that as a boy sees it. She feels the brutality of the contest
with something of the disgust with which she would view a case of
fisticuffs between two women. She sees the dirt and blood, and she
feels sympathetically the blows. What she does not feel is the “hour
of glorious conflict, when the blood leaps, and the muscles rally for
the mastery,” the “joy of battle,” the “seeing red,” the decent, manly
pride in taking one’s punishment and “fighting it out as long as one
can stand and see.” The same teacher, because she is a woman, will face
with steady courage an experience more dreadful than twenty fist fights
rolled into one; and yet, because she is a woman, she may fail to see
how long a step some bruised and disheveled youngster has taken toward
manhood.
There are many acts of boyhood which, like fighting, seem brutal or
depraved or absurd, until one makes out their instinctive basis, and
realizes their inner meaning. Take, by way of another illustration,
this case which fell under my own eye. A boy whose gang was “playing
Indians” happened upon a flat piece of some dark red, hard-grained
stone, and after days of labor fashioned from it a very respectable
stone knife of the Neolithic period. As a tool, naturally, this stone
knife was nearly worthless. As a piece of boyish handicraft, it was by
no means without merit; and the maker had wrought it lovingly, with
some vague instinctive feeling, I am sure, for the far-away times when
a stone knife was an article of value to be handed down from father to
son.
The boy carried this primitive tool in his pocket along with his
other treasures, and showed it proudly to his companions, who, being
themselves boys, admired and understood. One day, however, he left it
on his desk, and returned to search for it, just in time to see his
teacher pick it up and toss it contemptuously into the waste-basket.
There it remained; for the owner was too grieved and hurt to take it
out again.
So that teacher made an enemy where she ought to have made a friend.
The trouble with her was that she did not know her business. Even if
she could not understand all that the strange treasures of boyhood
mean to a boy, that stone knife ought to have fairly shouted at
her--Indians! Look out! To the seeing eye that fragment of stone
bristled with meaning--the wild instincts of boyhood, its strange
acquisitiveness, its joy in creation. To any reasonably sympathetic
adult, it ought to have meant the opportunity to get a little nearer to
one bewildered little soul.
The woman teacher, then, must learn to get outside herself and to see
the boy as he is. She must study him as she would study any other
wild creature. He has his own habits, his own instincts, and his own
emotional reactions toward experience. These are to be studied in the
spirit of a naturalist. Then, being understood, they are to be used.
Now, the boy, for our present purposes, differs from the girl in
two respects. In the first place, he is vastly more active and
motor-minded; and in the second, he is intensely and spontaneously
loyal to a small but highly organized group of his fellows, in which
his own individual will tends to become more or less merged.
The treatment of the first of these qualities of boyhood is perhaps
a problem for superintendents and school boards rather than for
individual teachers. One rejoices to see that, more and more every
year, attention is being given to this aspect of boy nature. Manual
training, industrial education, practical work of all sorts are
relieving boys from the unnatural burden of acquisition and offering
them instead their proper chance to do. Why is it, when we can all see
so clearly the general superiority of the color sense in girls, we are
so blind to the boy’s preëminence in the muscular sense!
Much of this, I say, is not the problem of the individual teacher,
who must, for the most part, conform to the school programme. Even
here, however, an insight into boy character will help her in smaller
matters, here and there, to handle the boy with the grain instead of
across it. Outside school hours, there is sometimes opportunity for
the teacher to enter into many of the activities dear to boyhood which
I have already discussed. The excursions to interesting and historic
spots, the nature walks, the visits to industrial plants, and the like,
the value of which I have already emphasized, are for the most part
quite within the range of most teachers. A few women of my acquaintance
have even gone camping with their boys, and done it successfully.
The most important thing, however, is that the teacher, while she
appeals at every turn to the natural activities of boys, shall always,
so far as she possibly can, organize these activities on the basis of
the boy’s own spontaneous groups. When she cannot manage this, as in
many cases she inevitably cannot, let her imitate in her artificial
groupings the size, the quality, and the internal structure of the
native gang.
For example, let us suppose that a teacher, fully alive to the
motor-mindedness of boys, sets out to take special pains with the
gymnastic work of her room. Suppose, too, she decides to follow a
common practice and divide her pupils into squads or files, each with
its separate leader. It will not do, in such a case, for her merely
to pick out a half-dozen docile youths, and put each in charge of a
random group. She ought, in the first place, to make her squads of
about the same size as the gangs which the boys are forming of their
own accord; and she should, in addition, select for her leaders, not
the boys whom she happens to like or even the best performers, but the
boys who are actually leaders in their own gangs. Then she should, so
far as possible, let the leaders choose their squads, keep the groups
together, and not make alterations without good reason.
By this device the squad becomes a gang, artificial and temporary,
to be sure, but still enough of a gang to have some touch of the gang
organization and the gang spirit. The amount of these will probably be
small, but whatever there is is so much clear gain.
Or suppose a teacher goes in especially for nature study, and has her
pupils make collections for the school, butterflies, beetles, minerals,
it does not make much difference what,--stamps, if nothing else offers.
By this means she appeals strongly to the acquisitive instinct, which,
as we have seen, is especially strong in boys, and often the sole
reason for their thievery. By this means also, since the collection
is for the school, she appeals to the instinct of loyalty, and turns
this powerful impulse of boyhood in the direction of the institution
and of herself as a part of it. She may, however, without added labor,
go still further. Let her organize the collecting on the basis of the
boys’ natural groups; let her work, in short, less with individuals
and more with gangs. She can set one group to collecting one set of
objects, and another group another set. But her groups should be like
the natural gangs in size, and each should have one member, though
not commonly more than one, who is already the natural leader in some
permanent group. Thus, as before, the instinctive, spontaneous gang
loyalty will unconsciously attach itself to the school and the school
work.
The teacher, then, in dealing with boys, must learn to think in terms
of gangs, as well as in terms of individuals. She must, in certain
cases, go even further than this and think of gangs entirely, and not
of individuals at all. Suppose, for her arithmetic class, she plans to
take up as a practical problem, in mensuration and denominate numbers,
the material which is, let us say, going into a dwelling-house in
process of construction near by. Her thought should not be: I will
send ten individuals to measure foundation or cellar or frame, and
see which boy comes out best. She should think rather: I will send
two gangs of five each, and see which gang comes out best. And these
gangs should be as far as possible real gangs. The best device is to
select the leaders, who, in turn, one need not say, must be boys whom
the rough-and-ready election of their fellows has already elevated to a
like post outside. These, then, should select their companions; and at
once there results something of the gang structure and spirit. Then the
rivalry of the gangs will make each boy expend far more effort than he
would ever put forth for his own glory.
So it should be with any attempt to accomplish anything for the school.
Is the room to be decorated for some occasion? The pupils as a whole
should not attend to the room as a whole; nor should the pupils as
individuals work as assistants to the teacher. Instead, the work should
be divided into parts, and each part should be given to an independent
group; to a natural group, as far as possible, but at any rate to a
group under a natural leader.
Or is it a question of self-government, either in the schoolroom or
on the playground? The head monitor, or whatever he is to be called,
should pick his own assistants, and be responsible for their results.
When the time comes for a change of authority,--it is well to have
such change come periodically and somewhat often,--the whole group,
prime minister and cabinet together, should go out of office at once,
and another group take their place. That is the way men organize their
industries and manage their governing. It may often be advisable to
have the entire body of pupils elect the successive leaders; but
the leader’s assistants who are to work with him should be his own
selection. Only thus can one make sure that they “will be in sympathy
with the administration”--or, in other words, belong to the same
temporary gang.
The main point, then, in dealing with school-boys at the gang age is
to utilize to the full their natural groups. The little boy is an
individualist, and we train him as an individual. But when later at
the age of ten or twelve, the gregarious instincts begin to appear,
the significant thing, the interesting thing, the unit with which,
oftentimes, we have to work, is not the individual but the gang. For
certain purposes, at this stage, we may ignore the boy and attend to
the boy group. After sixteen the group dissolves, and once more we may
take up the education of the individual.
The problem of the school is to utilize, to the full, the great moving
passions of boyhood,--its loyalty, its self-sacrifice, its desire for
coöperation, its thoroughgoing gregariousness. We do that best, in
school and home and everywhere, when we learn to think of each boy in
his gang relations, and to utilize these natural groupings as the basis
of our artificial assemblages, and our guide in forming them.
Good citizens are sometimes quite as much the product of good gangs, as
of good schools or good homes.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected.
Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained; occurrences of
inconsistent hyphenation have not been changed.
A sequence error in the List of Illustrations was corrected.