Play is motor poetry. Too early distinction between play and work should not be taught. Education per- haps should really begin with directing childish sports aright. Froebel thought it the purest and most spir- itual activity of childhood, the germinal leaves of all later life. ' Schooling that lacks recreation favors dul- ness, for play makes the mind alert and its joy helps 1 Education by Plays and Games. Pedagogical Seminary, October, YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE all anabolic activities. Says Brinton, " the measure of value of work is the amouiit of play there is in it, and the measure of value of play is the amount of work there is in it." Johnson adds that "it is doubtful if a great man ever accomplished his life work without having reached a play interest in it. ' ' Sully ^ deplores the increase of '' agolasts " or '' non-laughers " in our times in merry old England ^ every one played games; and laughter, their natural accompaniment, abounded. Queen Elizabeth's maids of honor played tag with hilarity, but the spirit of play with full abandon seems taking its departure from our overworked, serious, and tense age. To requote Stevenson with variation, as lahorari,^ so liidere, et joculari orare sunt.* Laughter itself, as Kiihne long ago showed, is one of the most precious forms of exercise, relieving the arteries of their tension.^ The antithesis between play and work is generally wrongly conceived, for the difference is essentially in the degree of strength of the psycho-physic motivations. The young often do their hardest work in play. With interest, the most repellent tasks become pure sport, as in the case Johnson reports of a man who wanted a pile of stone thrown into a ditch and, by kindling a fire in the ditch and pretending the stones were buckets of water, the heavy and long-shirked job was done by tired boys with shouting and enthusiasm. Play, from one aspect 1 An Essay on Laughter. Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1902, 2 See Brand's Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, 3 vols., Lon- 3 To labor.
* To play and to jest are to pray.
* Psychology of Tickling, Laughing, and the Comic, by G. Stanley Hall and Arthur Allin. American Journal of Psychology, October, 1897, PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES of it, is superfluous energy over and above what is nec- essary to digest, breathe, keep the heart and organic processes going; and most children who can not play, if they have opportunity, can neither study nor work without overdrawing their resources of vitality. Bible psychology conceives the fall of man as the necessity of doing things without zest, and this is not only ever repeated but now greatly emphasized when youth leaves the sheltered paradise of play to grind in the mills of modern industrial civilization. The curse is overcome only by those who come to love their tasks and redeem their toil again to play. Play, hardly less than work, can be to utter exhaustion; and because it draws upon older stores and strata of psycho-physic impulsion its exhaustion may even more completely drain our kinetic resources, if it is too abandoned or prolonged. Play can do just as hard and painful tasks as work, for what we love is done with whole and un- divided personality. Work, as too often conceived, is all body and no soul, and makes for duality and not totality. Its constraint is external, mechanical, or it works by fear and not love. Not effort but zestless en- deavor is the tragedy of life. Interest and play are one and inseparable as body and soul. Duty itself is not adequately conceived and felt if it is not pleasure, and is generally too feeble and fitful in the young to awaken much energy or duration of action. Play is from within from congenital hereditary impulsion. It is the best of all methods of organizing instincts. Its cathartic or purgative function regulates irritability, which may otherwise be drained or vented in wrong directions, exactly as Breuer ^ shows psychic traumata 1 1. Breuer and S. Freud. Studien uber Hysteria. F. Deuticke, Wien, 1895. See especially p. 177 et seq.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE may, if overtense, result in '' hysterical convulsions." It is also the best form of self-expression; and its ad- vantage is variability, following the impulsion of the idle, perhaps hyperemic, and overnourished centers most ready to act. It involves play illusion and is the great agent of unity and totalization of body and soul, while its social function develops solidarity and unison of ac- tion between individuals. The dances, feasts, and games of primitive people, wherein they rehearse hunting and war and act and dance out their legends, bring in- dividuals and tribes together.^ Work is menial, cheer- less, grinding, regular, and requires more precision and accuracy and, because attended with less ease and pleas- ure and economy of movement, is more liable to produce erratic habits. Antagonistic as the forms often are, it may be that, as Carr says, we may sometimes so suffuse work with the play spirit, and vice versa, that the present distinction between work and play will vanish, the transition will be less tragic and the activi- ties of youth will be slowly systematized into a whole that better fits his nature and needs; or, if not this, we may at least find the true proportion and system between drudgery and recreation.
The worst product of striving to do things with defective psychic impulsion is fatigue in its common forms, which slows down the pace, multiplies errors and inaccuracies, and develops slovenly habits, ennui, flit- ting will specters, velleities and caprices, and neuras- thenic symptoms generally. It brings restlessness, and a tendency to many little heterogeneous, smattering 1 See a valuable discussion by H. A. Carr. The Survival Values of Play, Investigations of the Department of Psychology and Education of the University of Colorado, Arthur AUin, Ph.D., Editor, November, PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES efforts that weaken the will and leave the mind like a piece of well-used blotting paper, covered with traces and nothing legible. All beginnings are easy, and only as we leave the early stages of proficiency behind and press on in either physical or mental culture and en- counter difficulties, do individual differences and the tendency of weak wills to change and turn to some- thing else increase. Perhaps the greatest disparity be- tween men is the power to make a long concentrative, persevering e:^ort, for In der Beschrdnkung zeigt sick der Meister} Now no kind or line of culture is com- plete till it issues in motor habits, and makes a well-knit soul texture that admits concentration series in many directions and that can bring all its resources to bear at any point. The brain unorganized by training has, to recur to Richter's well-worn aphorism, saltpeter, sul- fur, and charcoal, or all the ingredients of gunpowder, but never makes a grain of it because they never get together. Thus willed action is the language of com- plete men and the goal of education. When things are mechanized by right habituation, there is still further gain; for not only is the mind freed for further and higher work, but this deepest stratum of motor association is a plexus that determines not only conduct and character, but even beliefs. The person who deliber- ates is lost, if the intellect that doubts and weighs alternatives is less completely organized than habits. All will culture is intensive and should safeguard us against the chance influence of life and the insidious danger of great ideas in small and feeble minds. Now fatigue, personal and perhaps racial, is just what arrests in the incomplete and mere memory or noetic stage. It makes 1 The master shows himself in Hmitation.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE weak bodies that command, and not strong ones that obey. It divorces knowing and doing, Kennen and Konnen, a separation which the Greeks could not con- ceive because for them knowledge ended in skill or was exemplified in precepts and proverbs that were so clear cut that the pain of violating them was poignant. Ideas must be long worked over till life speaks as with the rifle and not with the shotgun, and still less with the water hose. The purest thought, if true, is only action repressed to be ripened to more practical form. Not only do muscles come before mind, will before intel- ligence, and sound ideas rest on a motor basis, but all really useless knowledge tends to be eliminated as error or superstition. The roots of play lie close to those of creative imagination and idealism.
The opposite extreme is the factitious and superficial motivation of fear, prizes, examinations, artificial and immediate rewards and penalties, which can only tattoo the mind and body with conventional patterns pricked in, but which lead an unreal life in the soul because they have no depth of soil in nature or heredity. However precious and coherent in themselves, all subject-matters thus organized are mere lugs, crimps, and frills. All such culture is spurious, unreal, and parasitic. It may make a scholastic or sophistic mind, but a worm is at the root and, with a dim sense of the vanity of all knowledge that does not become a rule of life, some form of pessimism is sure to supervene in every serious soul. With age a civilization accumulates such impedimenta, traditional flotsam and jetsam, and race fatigue proceeds with equal step with its increasing volume. Immediate utilities are better, but yet not so much better than acquisitions that have no other than a school or exam- ination value. If, as Ruskin says, all true work is PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES praise, all true play is love and prayer. Instil into a boy's soul learning which he sees and feels not to have the highest worth and which can not become a part of his active life and increase it, and his freshness, spontaneity, and the fountains of plaj^ slowly run dry in him, and his youth fades to early desiccation. The instincts, feelings, intuitions, the work of which is always play, are superseded by method, grind, and education by instruction which is only an effort to repair the defects of heredity, for which, at its best, it is a vulgar, pinchbeck substitute. The best play is true genius, which always comes thus into the world, and has this way of doing its work, and all the contents of the memory pouches is luggage to be carried rather than the vital strength that carries burdens. Gross well says that children are young be- cause they play, and not vice versa; and he might have added, men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely, for play is, at bottom, growth, and at the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type of research from sheer love of truth. Home, school, church, state, civilization, are measured in one supreme scale of values, viz., whether and how, for they aid in bringing youth to its fullest maturity. Even vice, crime, and decline are often only arrest or backsliding or reversion. National and racial decline beginning in eliminating one by one the last and highest styles of development of body and mind, mental stimulus of excessive dosage lowers general nutrition. A psj^cholo- gist that turns his back on mere subtleties and goes to work in a life of service has here a great opportunity, and should not forget, as Horace Mann said, " that for all that grows, one former is worth one hundred re- formers. ' ' CHAPTER VII FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES Classifications of children's faults — Peculiar children — Real faults as dis- tinguished from interference with the teacher's ease — Truancy, its nature and effects — The genesis of crime — The lie, its classes and re- lations to imagination — Predatory activities — Gangs — Causes of crime — The effects of stories of crime — Temibility — Juvenile crime and its treatment.
SiEGERT ^ groups children of problematical nature into the following sixteen classes: the sad, the extremely good or bad, star-gazers, scatter-brains, apathetic, mis- anthropic, doubters and investigators, reverent, critical, executive, stupid and clownish, naive, funny, anamnesic, disposed to learn, and blase; patience, foresight, and self-control, he thinks, are chiefly needed.
A unique and interesting study was undertaken by Kozle ^ by collecting and studying thirty German writers on pedagogical subjects since Pestalozzi, and cataloguing all the words they use describing the faults of children. In all, this gave 914 faults, far more in number than their virtues. These were classified as native and of ex- ternal origin, acute and chronic, egoistic and altruistic, greed, perverted honor, self-will, falsity, laziness, frivol- ity, distraction, precocity, timidity, envy and malevo- lence, ingratitude, quarrelsomeness, cruelty, superstition; 1 Problematische Kindesnaturen. Eine Studie fiir Schule und Haus. Voigtlander, Leipzig, 1889.
2 Die padagogische Pathologie in der Erziehungskunde des 19 Jahrhunderts. Bertelsman, Giitersloh, 1893, p. 494.
FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES and the latter fifteen were settled on as resultant groups, and the authors who describe them best are quoted.
Bohannon ^ on the basis of questionnaire returns classified peculiar children as heavy, tall, short, small, strong, weak, deft, agile, clumsy, beautiful, ugly, de- formed, birthmarked, keen and precocious, defective in sense, mind, and speechj^ nervous, clean, dainty, dirty, Age 11 12 15 16 17 18 74 73 72 71 70 69 64 63 62 61 60 59 58 r / 1 / -V / \ H \ / \ / \ \ \ ^ J \J \ r 13 / \ r 1 \/ \J xNumuer of Case, orderly, obedient, disobedient, disorderly, teasing, buoy- ant, buffoon, cruel, selfish, generous, sympathetic, in- quisitive, lying, ill-tempered, silent, dignified, frank, loquacious, courageous, timid, whining, spoiled, glutton- ous, and only child.
Marro ^ tabulated the conduct of 3,012 boys in gym- nasial and lyceal classes in Italy from eleven to eighteen years of age (see table given above). Conduct was marked as good, bad, and indifferent, according to the 1 Peculiar and Exceptional Cliildren. Pedagogical Seminary, Octo- 2 La Pubertd. Schleicher Freres, Paris, 1902, p. 72.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE teacher's estimate, and was good at eighteen in 74 per cent of the cases; at eleven in 70 per cent; at seventeen in 69 per cent; and at fourteen in only 58 per cent. In positively bad conduct, the age of fifteen led, thirteen and fourteen were but little better, while it improved at sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen. In general, conduct was good at eleven; declined at twelve and thirteen; sank to its worst at fourteen; and then improved in yearly increments that did not differ much, and at seven- teen was nearly as good as at eleven, and at eighteen four points better.
He computed also the following percentage table of the causes of punishments in certain Italian schools for girls and boys near pubescent ages: Boys Girls Quarrels and blows 53.90 17.4 Improper language 41 14.6 Indecent acts and words 1.00.24 Refusal to work 82 1.26 Various offenses against discipline 19. 00 19. 9 Truancy 9.60.0 Plots to run away 1. 70.0 Running away 72.0 Mr. Sears ^ reports in percentages statistics of the punishments received by a thousand children for the following offenses: Disorder, 17^; disobedience, 16; carelessness, 13 J; running away, 12|; quarreling, 10; tardiness, 6|; rudeness, 6; fighting, 5J; lying, 4; steal- ing, 1; miscellaneous, 7^. He names a long list of pun- ishable offenses, such as malice, swearing, obscenity, bullying, lying, cheating, untidiness, insolence, insult, 1 Home and School Punishments. Pedagogical Seminary, March, I FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES conspiracy, disobedience, obstinacy, rudeness, noisiness, ridicule; injury to books, building, or other property; and analyzes at length the kinds of punishment, modes of making it fit the offense and the nature of the child, the discipline of consequences, lapse of time between the offense and its punishment, the principle of slight but sure tasks as penalties, etc.
Triplett ^ attempted a census of faults and defects named by the teacher. Here inattention by far led all others. Defects of sense and speech, carelessness, in- difference, lack of honor and of self-restraint, laziness, dreamy listlessness, nervousness, mental incapacity, lack of consideration for others, vanity, affectation, dis- obedience, untruthfulness, grumbling, etc., follow. In- attention to a degree that makes some children at the mercy of their environment and all its changes, and their mental life one perpetual distraction, is a fault which teachers, of course, naturally observe. Children's views of their own faults and those of other children lay a very different emphasis. Here fighting, bullying, and teasing lead all others; then come stealing, bad manners, lying, disobedience, truancy, cruelty to animals, untidiness, selfishness, etc. Parents' view of this subject Triplett found still different. Here wilfulness and obstinacy led all others with teasing, quarreling, dislike of applica- tion and effort, and many others following. The vast number of faults mentioned contrasts very strikingly with the seven deadly sins.
In a suggestive statistical study on the relations of the conduct of children to the weather. Dexter ^ found 1 A Study of the Faults of Children. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 2 The Child and the Weather, by Edwin G. Dexter. Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 512-522.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE that excessive humidity was most productive of misde- meanors; that when the temperature was between 90 and 100 the probability of bad conduct was increased 300 per cent, when betw^een 80 and 90 it was increased 104 per cent. Abnormal barometric pressure, whether great or small, was found to increase misconduct 50 per cent; abnormal movements of the wind increased it from 20 to 66 per cent; while the time of year and precipita- tion seemed to have almost no effect. While the effect of weather has been generally recognized by superintend- ents and teachers and directors of prisons and asylums, and even by banks, which in London do not permit clerks to do the more important bookkeeping during very foggy days, the statistical estimates of its effect in general need larger numbers for more valuable determina- tions. Temperature is known to have a very distinct effect upon crime, especially suicide and truancy. Work- men do less in bad weather, blood pressure is modi- fied, etc.^ In his study of truancy, Kline ^ starts with the as- sumption that the maximum metabolism is always con- sciously or unconsciously sought, and that migrations are generally away from the extremes of hot and cold toward an optimum temperature. The curve of truan- cies and runaways increases in a marked ratio at pu- berty, which probably represents the age of natural majority among primitive people. Dislike of school, the passion for out-of-door life, and more universal interests in man and nature now arise, so that runaways may be interpreted as an instinctive rebellion against limita- 1 Psychic Effects of the Weather, by J. S. Lemon. American Journal of Psychology, January, 1894, vol. 6, pp. 277-279.
2 Truancy as Related to the Migrating Instinct, by L. W. Kline. Pedagogical Seminary, January, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 381-420.
FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES tions of freedom and unnatural methods of education as well as against poor homes. Hunger is one of its most potent, although often unconscious causes. The habit- ual environment now begins to seem dull and there is a great increase in impatience at restraint. Sometimes there is a mania for simply going away and enjoying the liberty of nomadic life. Just as good people in foreign parts sometimes allow themselves unwonted liberties, so vagrancy increases crime. The passion to get to and play at or in the water is often strangely dominant. It seems so fine out of doors, especially in the spring, and the woods and fields make it so hard to voluntarily incarcer- ate oneself in the schoolroom, that pubescent boys and even girls often feel like animals in captivity. They long intensely for the utter abandon of a wilder life, and very characteristic is the frequent discarding of foot and head dress and even garments in the blind instinct to realize again the conditions of primitive man. The man- ifestations of this impulse, if read aright, are grave ar- raignments of the lack of adaptability of the child's environment to his disposition and nature, and with home restraints once broken, the liabilities to every crime, especially theft, are enormously increased. The truant, although according to Kline's measurements slightly smaller than the average child, is more energetic and is generally capable of the greatest activity and useful- ness in more out-of-door vocations. Truancy is aug- mented, too, just in proportion as legitimate and interest- ing physical exercise is denied.
The vagrant, itinerant, vagabond, gadabout, hobo, and tramp, that Riis has made so interesting, is an arrested, degenerate, or perverted being who abhors work; feels that the world owes him a living; and gen- erally has his first real nomad experience in the teens, YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE or earlier. It is a chronic illusion of youth that gives '' elsewhere " a special charm. In the immediate present things are mean, dulled by wont, and perhaps even nauseating because of familiarity. There must be a change of scene to see the world; man is not sessile but locomotor; and the moment his life becomes mi- gratory all the restraints and responsibilities of settled life vanish. It is possible to steal and pass on undis- covered and unsuspected, and to steal again. The vagabond escapes the control of public sentiment, which normally is an external conscience, and having none of his own within him thus lapses to a feral state. The constraint of city, home, and school is especially irk- some, and if to this repulsion is added the attraction of a love of nature and of perpetual change, we have the diathesis of the roadsman already developed. Ado- lescence is the normal time of emancipation from the parental roof, when youth seeks to set up a home of its own, but the apprentice to life must wander far and long enough to find the best habitat in which to set up for himself. This is the spring season of emigration; and it should be an indispensable part of every life curriculum, just before settlement, to travel far and wide, if resources and inclination permit. But this stage should end in w^isely chosen settlement where the young life can be independently developed, and that with more complacency and satisfaction because the place has been wisely chosen on the basis of a wide comparison. The chronic vagrant has simply failed to develop the reductives of this normal stage.
Crime is cryptogamous and flourishes in concealment, so that not only does falsehood facilitate it, but certain types of lies often cause and are caused by it. The begin- ning of wisdom in treatment is to discriminate between FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES good and bad lies. My own study ^ of the lies of 300 normal children, by a method carefully devised in order to avoid all indelicacy to the childish consciousness, suggested the following distinct species of lies. It is often a well-marked epoch when the young child first learns that it can imagine and state things that have no objective counterpart in its life, and there is often a weird intoxication when some absurd and monstrous statement is made, while the first sensation of a delib- erate break with truth causes a real excitement Avhich is often the birth pang of the imagination. IMore com- monly this is seen in childish play, which owes a part of its charm to self-deception. Children make believe they are animals, doctors, ogres, play school, that they are dead, mimic all they see and hear. Idealizing tem- peraments sometimes prompt children of three or four suddenly to assert that they saw a pig with five ears, apples on a cherry-tree, and other Llunchausen won- ders, which really means merely that they have had a new mental combination independently of experience. Sometimes their fancy is almost visualization and de- velops into a kind of mythopeic faculty which spins clever yarns and suggests in a sense, quite as pregnant