The Minister and the Boy Part 4

Games of this sort are also the most effective means of developing, through expression, the boy's sense of justice or fair play. And this sentiment will always be found strong and operative in him unless it has been overcome by the pa.s.sion to win or by imitation of the bad example of certain debased athletes, popularly known as "muckers." Under proper leaders.h.i.+p, the boy soon learns that the true spirit of manly sport is the farthest removed from that of the footpad and the blackguard.

Appreciation of successful opponents and consideration for the vanquished can be made effectually to supplant the cheap, blatant spirit which seeks to attribute one's defeat to trickery and chance and uses one's victory as an occasion for bemeaning the vanquished. The presence of a capable director of play is sure to eliminate this evil which has crept in under the sanction of vicious ideals and through gross neglect of boys' play on the part of adults in general and educators in particular. The Decalogue itself cannot compete with a properly directed game in enforcing the fair-play principle among boys. It is worth something to read about fair play, but it is worth much more to practice it in what is, for the time being, a primary and absorbing interest.

A large part of the morality which is most obviously desirable for human welfare consists in bringing the body into habitual obedience to the will. The amount of individual suffering and of loss and expense to society due to failure in this struggle is nothing less than appalling.

The victims of emotional hurricanes, "brainstorms," neurotic excess, and intemperate desire are legion. A nation that is overfed, under-exercised, and notably neurasthenic should neglect nothing that makes for prompt and reliable self-control. Lycurgus said, "The citizens of Sparta must be her walls," and in building up a defense for the modern state against forces more disastrous than Persian armies we must turn to the ancient device of the playground and athletic games.

The moral value of play in this respect arises from the instant muscular response to volition. Delay, half-hearted response, inattention, preoccupation, whimsicalness, carelessness, and every sluggish performance of the order of the will, disqualifies the player so that when we take into account the adolescent pa.s.sion to excel, and the fact that 80 per cent of the games of this period are characterized by intense physical activity, we are forced to place the highest valuation on play as a moral educator; for this enthronement of the will over the body, although having to do with affairs of no permanent importance, has great and abiding value for every future transaction in life.

Indeed, the physical competency attained in athletic games has its reaction upon every mental condition. Many boys who are hampered by unreasonable diffidence, a lack of normal self-confidence and self-a.s.sertion, find unexpected ability and positiveness through this avenue alone and, on the other hand, the physical test and encounter of the game serves to bring a proper self-rating to the overconfident.

Dr. George J. Fisher, international secretary of the Physical Department of the Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation, says, "An unfortunately large number of our population haven't the physical basis for being good." No one with even the slightest knowledge of sociology and criminology will be disposed to deny such a statement. One might as well expect a one-legged man to win the international Marathon as to expect certain physical delinquents to "go right." Thousands of boys and girls sit in our public schools today who are the unhappy candidates for this delinquency, and we are monotonously striving to get something into their minds, which would largely take care of their own development, if only we had the wisdom to address ourselves to their bodies.

There is indeed not only a physical basis of _being_ good, but, what is not less important, a physical basis of _doing_ good. Many people avoid blame and disgrace who fail utterly in making a positive contribution to the welfare of the community. They do not market their mental goods.

Thousands of men remain in mediocrity, to the great loss of society, simply because they have not the requisite physical outfit to force their good ideas, impulses, and visions into the current of the world's life. For the most part they lack the great play qualities, "enthusiasm, spontaneity, creative ability, and the ability to co-operate." Whenever we build up a strong human organism we lay the physical foundations of efficiency, and one is inclined to go farther and think with Dr. Fisher, that muscular energy itself is capable of transformation into energy of mind and will. That is to say that play not only helps greatly in building the necessary vehicle, but that it creates a fund upon which the owner may draw for the accomplishment of every task.

There is ground also for the contention that grace of physical development easily pa.s.ses over into manner and mind. The proper development of the instrument, the right adjustment and co-ordination of the muscular outfit through which the emotions a.s.semble and diffuse themselves, is, when other things are equal, a guaranty of inner beauty and the grace of true gentility. A poor instrument is always vexatious, a good instrument is an abiding joy. The good body helps to make the gracious self. Other things being equal the strong body obeys, but the weak body rules.

One should not overlook the heartiness that is engendered in games, the total engagement of mind and body that insures for the future the ability "to be a whole man to one thing at a time." Much of the moral confusion of life arises from divided personality, and the miserable application of something less than the entire self to the problem in hand. Do not the great religious leaders of the world agree with the men of practical efficiency in demonstrating and requiring this hearty release of the total self in the proposed line of action? The demand of Jesus, touching love of G.o.d and neighbor, or regarding enlistment in His cause, is a demand for prompt action of the total self. Possibly no other single virtue has a more varied field of application than the ability for decisive and whole-souled action, which is constantly cultivated in all physical training, and especially in compet.i.tive athletic games.

It should be noted also that the hearty release of energy is, in every good game, required to keep within the rules. This is particularly true in basket-ball, which takes high rank as an indoor game for boys. While the game is intense and fatiguing, anything like a muscular rampage brings certain penalty to the player and loss to his team. So that, while the boy who does not play "snappy" and hard cannot rank high, neither can the boy who plays "rough-house." Forcefulness under control is the desideratum.

Besides this there is always the development of that good-natured appreciation of every hard task, that refinement of the true sporting spirit, by which all the serious work of life becomes a contest worthy of never-ending interest and buoyant persistency. In the midst of all the sublime responsibilities of his remarkable ministry we hear Phillips Brooks exclaim, "It's great fun to be a minister." An epoch-making president of the United States telegraphs his colleague and successor, with all the zest of a boy at play, "We've beaten them to a frazzle"; and the greatest of all apostles, triumphing over bonds and imprisonment, calls out to his followers, "I have fought a good fight."

"It is doubtful if a great man ever accomplished his life work without having reached a play interest in it."

The saving power of organized play, in the prevention and cure of that morbidity which especially besets youth, can hardly be overestimated.

This diseased self-consciousness is intimately connected with nervous tensions and reflexes from s.e.x conditions and not infrequently pa.s.ses over into s.e.x abuse or excess of some sort. So that the diversion of strenuous athletic games, and the consequent use of energy up to a point just below exhaustion, is everywhere recognized as an indispensable moral prophylactic. Solitariness, overwrought nervous states, the intense and suggestive stimuli of city life, call for a large measure of this wholesome treatment for the preservation of the moral integrity of the boy, his proper self-respect, and those ideals of physical development which will surely make all forms of self-abuse or indulgence far less likely.

The normal exhilaration of athletic games, which cannot be described to those without experience, is often what is blindly and injuriously sought by the young cigarette smoker in the realm of nervous excitation without the proper motor accompaniments. Possibly if we had not so restricted our school-yards and overlooked the necessity for a physical trainer and organized play, we would not have schools in which as many as 80 per cent of the boys between ten and seventeen years of age are addicted to cigarettes. In trying to fool Nature in this way the boy pays a heavy penalty in the loss of that very decisiveness, force, and ability in mind and body which properly accompany athletic recreation.

The increased circulation and oxidization of the blood is in itself a great tonic and when one reflects that, with a running pace of six miles an hour the inhalation of air increases from four hundred and eighty cubic inches per minute to three thousand three hundred and sixty cubic inches, the tonic effect of the athletic game will be better appreciated. This increased use of oxygen means healthy stimulation, growth of lung capacity, and exaltation of spirit without enervation.

"Health comes in through the muscles but flies out through the nerves."

It was well thought and arranged by the ancients [says Martin Luther] that young people should exercise themselves and have something creditable and useful to do. Therefore I like these two exercises and amus.e.m.e.nts best, namely, music and chivalrous games or bodily exercises, as fencing, wrestling, running, leaping, and others..... With such bodily exercises one does not fall into carousing, gambling, and hard drinking, and other kinds of lawlessness, as are unfortunately seen now in the towns and at the courts.

This evil comes to pa.s.s if such honest exercises and chivalrous games are despised and neglected.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHAT SHALL WE PLAY?]

The feeling of harmony and _bien-etre_ resulting from play is, in itself, a rare form of wealth for the individual and a blessing to all with whom one has to do. Every social contact tends to become wholesome.

And who will say that the virtue of cheerfulness is not one of the most delightful and welcome forms of philanthropy? Play, rightly directed, always has this result.

Possibly no social work in America is more sanely constructive than that of the playground movement. In the few years of its existence it has made ample proof of its worth in humane and beneficent results; and our city governments are hastening to acknowledge--what has been too long ignored--the right of every child to play. It is only to be regretted that the play movement has not centered about our public schools for it const.i.tutes a legitimate part of education. The survivors who reach high school and college receive relatively a good deal of attention in physical training and organized play, but the little fellows of the elementary grades who have curvatures, r.e.t.a.r.dation, adenoids, and small defects which cause loss of grade, truancy, and delinquency receive as yet very meager attention.

In dearth of opportunity and in cruel oversight of the normal play-needs of boyhood, there probably has never been anything equal to our modern American city. But the cost of industrial usurpation in restricting the time and area of play is beginning to be realized; and the relation of the play-time and of the playground to health, happiness, morality, and later to industrial efficiency, begins to dawn upon our civic leaders.

If "recreation is stronger than vice," it becomes the duty of religious and educational inst.i.tutions to contribute directly and indirectly to normal recreative needs.

But what can the minister do? He can help educate the church out of a negative or indifferent att.i.tude toward the absorbing play-interests of childhood and youth. He can publicly endorse and encourage movements to provide for this interest of young life and may often co-operate in the organization and management of such movements. Every church should strive through intelligent representatives to impart religious value and power to such work and should receive through the same channels first-hand information of this form of constructive and preventive philanthropy. He can partly meet the demand through clubs and societies organized in connection with his own church. He can plead for a real and longer childhood in behalf of Christ's little ones who are often sacrificed through commercial greed, un-Christian business ambition, educational blindness, and ignorance. He can preach a gospel that does not set the body over against the soul, science over against the Bible, and the church over against normal life; but embraces every child of man in an imperial redemption which is environmental and social as well as individual, physical as well as spiritual. In short, he can study and serve his community, not as one who must keep an organization alive at whatever cost, but as one who must inspire and lead others to obey the Master whose only reply to our repeated protestations of love is, "Feed my lambs."

CHAPTER VI

THE BOY'S CHOICE OF A VOCATION[7]

It is practically impossible to overemphasize the importance of the boy's vocational choice. Next to his att.i.tude toward his Maker and his subsequent choice of a life partner this decision controls his worth and destiny. For it is not to be supposed that play with all its virtue, its nourish and exercise of nascent powers, and its happy emanc.i.p.ation into broader and richer living can adequately motivate and permanently enn.o.ble the energies of youth. Until some vocational interest dawns, education is received rather than sought and will-power is latent or but intermittently exercised. Play has a great orbit, but every true parent and educator seeks to know the axis of a given life.

For some boys presumably of high-school age and over, this problem becomes real and engrossing, but for the vast majority there is little intelligent choice, no wise counsel, no conscious fronting of the profoundly religious question of how to invest one's life. The children of ease graduate but slowly, if at all, from the "good-time" ideal, while the children of want are ordinarily without option in the choice of work. But for all who, being permitted and helped, both seek and find then-proper places in the ranks of labor, life becomes constructively social and therefore self-respecting. To be able to do some bit of the world's work well and to dedicate one's self to the task is the individual right of every normal youth and the sure pledge of social solvency. Ideally an art interest in work for its own sake should cover the whole field of human labor, and in proportion as each person finds a task suited to his natural ability and is well trained for that task does he lift himself from the grade of a menial or a pauper and enter into conscious and worthy citizens.h.i.+p.

Here then, as in the case of the mating instinct, the vocational quest rightly handled forces the ego by its very inclination and success into the altruism of a social order. For it is the misfits, the vocationally dormant, the defeated, and those who, however successful, have not considered such choice as an ethical concern of religion that make up the anti-social cla.s.ses of the present time.

Hence this problem of vocational guidance which is so agitating the educational world comes home to the minister in his work with youth. It may be that he shall find new and practical use for the maligned doctrine of election and that he shall place under intelligent, and heavenly commission the ideals and hopes of later adolescence. At any rate where the life career hinges, there the religious expert should be on hand. For what profit is there in society's vast investment in early and compulsory education if at the crucial time of initial experiment in the world's work there be neither high resolve nor intelligent direction nor sympathetic coaching into efficiency?

But the importance of vocational choice does not turn upon the doubtful supposition that there is one and only one suitable task for a given youth. Probably there are groups or families of activities within which the constructive endeavor may have happy and progressive expression.

Nor, from the minister's point of view, is the economic aspect of the problem paramount. It is true that an investment of $50,000 worth of working ability deserves study and wise placing and it is true that the sanction of public education is to return to the state a socially solvent citizen who will contribute to the common welfare and will more than pay his way; but the immediately religious importance of this commanding interest consists in the honest and voluntary request for counsel on the part of the youth himself.

Fortunately in the very midst of a reticent and often skeptical period there comes, through the awakened vocational interest, an inlet into the soul of youth. No religious inquisitor or evangelistic brigand could have forced an entrance, but lo, all at once the doors are opened from within and examination is invited. It is invited because the boy wishes to know what manner of person he is and for what pursuit he is or may be fitted. When once this issue is on and one is honored as counselor and friend, the moral honesty and eagerness of youth, the thoroughgoing confession on all the personal and moral phases of the problem in hand are enough to move and humble the heart of any pastor. Such conference solemnizes and rea.s.sures the worker with boys, while to have spent no time as an invited and reverent guest within this sacred precinct is to fail of a priesthood that is profoundly beautiful.

Several experiences with both individuals and groups are fresh in mind at this writing. On one occasion a guild of working boys in later adolescence were living together in a church fraternity house, and it was their custom on one evening of each week to have some prominent man as guest at dinner and to hear an informal address from him after the meal. It chanced that on the list of guests there was, in addition to the mayor of their city and a well-known bishop of the Episcopal church, the manager of one of the greatest automobile factories in America. On the occasion on which this captain of industry spoke, he told in simple fas.h.i.+on his own experience in search of a vocation.

It was of a kind very common in our country: early privation, put to work at thirteen, an attempt to keep him in an office when he longed to have hold of the tools in the shop. In time his request was granted.

While he worked he observed and studied the organization of the shop and the progression of the raw material to the finished product. Having mastered the method he left this shop and hired in another, and then in due time in still another shop, much to the disgust of his friends. But in reply to their warning that "a rolling stone gathers no moss" he said that that was not his aim. As a result of faithfully following his bent he was ready to respond to the great demand for men to organize and run bicycle factories, and when that demand was followed by the much greater need of doing a similar work in the manufacture of automobiles he was chosen for the very responsible position which he now holds.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GUILD, First Baptist Church, Detroit, Mich.]

There was, to be sure, nothing distinctly spiritual in his story, but after he had finished the young men kept him for two hours answering their questions and there was there revealed to the pastor more of their fine hopes and purposes and possibilities--their deep-buried yet vital dreams--than he had ever heard unfolded in any religious meeting. Many of these youths were taken in hand in a personal way and are now "making good." Their subsequent use of leisure, their patronage of evening schools, Y.M.C.A. courses, and many other helps to their ambitions testified to the depth and tenacity of good purposes which were timidly voiced but heroically executed. On the other hand, the writer has knowledge of many cases of delinquency in which apparently the deciding cause was the vocational misfit foisted upon the young would-be laborer in the trying years between fourteen and sixteen.

There comes to mind the instance of a lad of seventeen found in the Cook County jail. He had left his Michigan home with fifty dollars of savings and had come to Chicago to make his fortune. His mother's story, which was secured after he got into trouble, narrated how that as a boy he had taken to pieces the sewing-machine and the clocks and, unlike many boys, had put them together again without damage. Reaching Chicago he hired in a garage and conceived the idea of building an automobile.

After the fas.h.i.+on of a boy he became totally absorbed in this project.

His ingenuity and thrift and the help of his employers enabled him to get well along with his enterprise. But at last he was balked because of lack of a particular part which he knew to be essential, but as to the nature of which he was not informed.

Going along the street one day in profound concern over this matter an impulse seized him to learn at once the nature of the needed part. He jumped into an automobile standing by the curb, drove it to the nearest alley, and crawled under it to make the necessary disconnections, when the police caught him in the act. The case was a clear one and he was thrown into jail. The mother in her letter to the Juvenile Protective a.s.sociation which was working for his release said that now, since he had been so unfortunate as to fall into the hands of the authorities, she wondered whether they might not perform an operation for his benefit, for she had heard that there was an operation by which the skull could be opened and a certain part of the brain removed, and she thought that possibly they might do this for her boy and take out that part of his brain which made him so "wild about machinery"!

Public education in America is only beginning to respond to the need of intelligently connecting our educational product with the world's work.

Trade schools for boys and girls, half-time schools, continuation schools, night schools, and in a few cities vocational bureaus are at work, but so are poverty and the helpless ignorance of the hard-pressed home. The children who must in tender years be offered to our rapacious industries are the very children who are without hope of parental counsel and direction.

In New York City 42,000 children between fourteen and sixteen years of age take out their "working papers" every year, and out of 12,000 to 13,000 taking out working papers in Chicago annually about 9,000 are only fourteen years of age and 1,500 have not yet reached the fifth grade. Many of these walk the streets and degenerate while in search of work or because of such fitful employment as only serves to balk the department of compulsory education, which has the power to insist upon school attendance for children of this age if not employed.

It is not that work is uniformly bad for these children. Indeed, idleness would be worse. And it is not that all these children are forced to turn out bad. But as a matter of fact children under sixteen are not generally wanted save in positions of monotonous and unpromising employment, and their early experience, which is quite without reference to taste and native ability, is likely to turn them against all work as being an imposition rather than an opportunity. In the long run this cheap labor is the most expensive in the world, and society cannot afford to fully release children from school control and training prior to sixteen years of age. Much less can it permit them at any time to approach the employment problem blindly and unaided. Nor should it fail to reduce the hours of labor for such children as fall into permanently unprogressive toil and to organize their leisure as well as to provide opportunities whereby some may extricate themselves.

What is this industrial haste which cuts so much of our corn while it is only in ta.s.sel, that drives square pegs into round holes, that harnesses trotting stock to heavy drays and draughting stock to gigs, that breaks up the violin to kindle a fire quickly, thoughtless of the music, that takes telescopes for drain pipes and gets commerce--but not commerce with the stars? It is the delirium in which strong men seek the standard American testimonial of genius and ability, namely the acc.u.mulation of great wealth; and in this delirium they see labor as a commodity and childhood as a commercial factor. They do not think of people like themselves and of children like their own.

But the minister is the very champion of those higher rights, the defender of idealism, and as such the best friend of an industrial order which is perversely making this expensive blunder and reaping the blight of sullen citizens.h.i.+p and cynical and heartless toil. How can these thousands who, because of "blind-alley" occupations, come to their majority tradeless and often depleted, having no ability to build and own a home--how can these who have no stake in the country aid in making the republic what it ought to be? Partly they become a public care, expense, or nuisance, and largely they const.i.tute the material for bossism and dynamite for the demagogue if he shall come. The economic breakdown, because of vocational misfit and the exploitation of childhood, usually results in a corresponding moral breakdown. To be doomed to inadequacy is almost to be elected to crime.

Now the pastor certainly cannot right all this wrong, neither will he be so brash as to charge it all up to malicious employers, ignoring the process through which our vaunted individualism, our free-field-and-no-favor policy, our doctrine for the strong has disported itself. But is it not reasonable that the minister inform himself of this problem in all its fundamental phases and that he both follow and ardently encourage a public-school policy which aims increasingly to fit the growing generation for productive and stable citizens.h.i.+p? Our schools are fundamentally religious if we will have them so in terms of character building, elemental self-respect, social service, and accountability to the G.o.d of all.

The "G.o.dless schools" exist only in the minds of those who for purposes of dispute and sectarianism decree them so. Furthermore, in every effort toward vocational training and sorting, the employer will be found interested and ready to help.

But to come more closely to the place of this problem in church work it must be recognized that the Sunday schools, clubs, and young people's societies offer wider opportunity for vocational direction than is now being used. The curricula in these inst.i.tutions can be greatly vitalized and enlarged by the inclusion of this very interest, and life can be made to seem more broadly, sanely, and specifically religious than is now the case.