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 as125 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.
126 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 co?peration.
thus the playing-field confers both a muscular and a social education. while it127 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 co?peration 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.128 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 co?peration 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,129 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 formal130 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 portion131 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 co?perating 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.
132 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.133 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 moral134 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 together135 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 certainly136 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 revelation137 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 curiosity138 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 last139 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 distinctly140 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.
