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,158 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 co?peration, 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 training159 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 especially160 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 still161 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 co?rdinate 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 thoroughly162 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 instill163 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 good164 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 sunday165 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 common166 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, if167 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 in168 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,169 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 art170 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.
an inadequate playground
the outdoor gymnasium is not enough
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,171 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’172 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.
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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 a174 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, when175 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, the176 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.
