WORK AND PLAY IN YOUTH

M. V. O'SHEA, PROFESSOR OF SCIENCE AND ART OF EDUCATION,
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN

Crabbed age and youth cannot live together;

Youth is full of pleasance, age is full of care;
Youth like summer morn, age like winter weather;
Youth like summer brave, age like winter bare.
Youth is full of sport, age's breath is short;
Youth is nimble, age is lame;

Youth is hot and bold, age is weak and cold;

Youth is wild, and age is tame.

I'll serve his youth, for youth must have his course;
For being restrained it makes him ten times worse,
His pride, his riot, all that may be named

By times recalled, and his madness tamed.

- Coleridge.

-Shakespeare.

People have always felt that some of the manifestations of young blood were hostile to the best life in society. "The imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth," say the Scriptures. Job defends himself against his accusers, protesting that they make him possess the iniquities of his youth, which he has long outgrown; while David offers a prayer to his Creator, imploring him not to remember the sins of his youth, nor his transgressions. And men have sought by one means or another to repress these excesses and madnesses of adolescence. They have said that hot passion must be bridled, that the exuberant egoism of the boy just coming to feel the independence and power of manhood must be checked down on all sides; the wild colt must early be broken to the harness of life. These persons have counseled a strenuous life for the adolescent; it is good for one to bear the yoke in his youth, they say; for there is virtue in honest combat with the difficulties of the world, since mental and moral muscle can be nurtured only by conflict. But from another side we receive advice of a different sort. We are told that the impulses of youth must be indulged and not suppressed; that they are essential to a full, round character; that each urgent instinct, if permitted to run its course, will contribute to the completed structure of the human soul. If we should follow these last voices, we would serve instead of compel youth; we would allow girls and boys to speed out along the lines of least resistance; we would expect them to expend their energies largely in play, in a certain sense.

Shakespeare would be patient with the pride and riot of the adolescent, but the great poet nevertheless realizes that ultimately the madness. of youth must be tamed. The intemperance, the egoism, the bravado of young blood must be brought into correspondence with the requirements

of community life as it exists here and now. Activity must be drawn off from profitless, and sometimes even harmful, enterprises and turned into productive channels. Undue self-exaltation, the vanities of looks and possessions, the pride of purse or of intellect, must be tempered by consideration for the feelings and claims of others, and an appreciation of their worth. Passion must be bridled and subdued that it may not lead its possessor athwart the laws of health or morality. And in many another way the deep-seated, instinctive activities of adolescence must be inhibited, or, at least, modeled into conformity to the requirements of adaptation to a complex altruistic, ethical, and social order. And how may this inhibition be best brought about? How can pride and madness be tamed? By direct repression? Or is it a matter of guiding the forces of life, depending upon it that, if we employ them all at certain points of our own choosing, there will be nothing left to operate at other points against our wishes?

Now, we must inquire of the neurologist what he has to say regarding the modus operandi of inhibiting activities; and when we do, receive the answer that an action may be checked in its progress by putting against it one of an opposite character, and of its strength; or it may be inhibited by using in other ways the energies which would be required to produce and sustain the action. The neurologist would lay chief emphasis upon this last mode of inhibition, especially in the immature brain, where organization is still imperfect, where the checking system is still inoperative for a great variety of actions. Now, the great racial traits bequeathed to the child as instincts constitute the routes which the adolescent may pursue with greatest facility and pleasure; as a result of unnumbered ages of traffic these old ancestral thorofares have been made easy and comfortable to the modern traveler, and so he is but too apt to choose them beyond all other courses for his journeying.

But this sounds pessimistic. If the fate of every young voyager has been determined by the practices of his ancestors, what can we do about it? The adolescent will live out his instincts, and we cannot stop him, do what we may. Yet hold a bit there is a way of throttling instinctive actions that alienate the adolescent from the world about him. We can bring to bear upon him, with tremendous force, stimulations which meet with responses that absorb the whole of his life; stimulations emanating from impressive, commanding personalities with whom he comes in contact; stimulations from biography, from history, from literature, from science, from his games and plays, and all the rest that is good and elevating. These reactions will drain off the forces of the organism, will monopolize the thought, and leave nothing for the support of conduct antithetic to the environment which is acting upon the individual.

This doctrine of inhibition is seen in its outward effects in all the phenomena of daily life. One who observes the activities of the young

sees how behavior is determined absolutely in view of this principle of the expression of energy at one point and its withdrawal from other points. How quickly a child's conflicts with his companions, or his assault upon household finery, or anything of the sort, is abandoned when there is made to play upon him some strong stimulus which incites activities of a different character, as when a game is organized for him, or he is given tools to work with, or he is invited to go to the circus, or he is furnished with an attractive book to read! The world beats in upon the child, and that which makes the strongest impression, depending upon its significance for him as determined by the qualities of objects themselves, and by his whole previous experience with them, or something like them-the strongest impressions win the child's recognition and determine his conduct.

Again, the principle under consideration is seen in the case of sickness, where the organism is depleted of its energies and few activities of any sort occur. Even profound and instinctive actions, which in fair weather urge their possessor on to action, now have no force. There is no energy to set a-going and to support such action. But as the sick one returns to health, as the ravages of disease are repaired and there is something over and above what is necessary for the support of vital function, then the old accustomed reactions begin to reappear, and in time return with all their original force, provided that in the interim some new interests have not gained a foothold.

And this brings us more particularly to the problems of play and work in adolescence. When a boy's energies find an outlet thru those channels worn deep from the ceaseless treading of the race; when he does the thing that humanity before him has done for a practically limitless reach of time, whether this produces immediately valuable results or not, then he plays. These old racial activities constitute the lines of least resistance for the individual; there is no opposition, no impediment, no opening up of new highways. But in work there are barriers to be broken down, new pathways to be blazed forth, unpracticed activities to be learned. The boy responds subconsciously to the old enticements, and there is of necessity a struggle in doing the new thing when the old seems so much easier. Thus play affords for the adolescent, or for anyone else, the highest degree of pleasure, since the whole being becomes engaged in it without reserve and without compulsion. There is no division of personality in such a situation, no tension between motives, no long weighing of considerations; the whole life is given up in harmonious unity to the doing of the thing which is felt as play. But in work enterprises foreign to the one in hand make a constant appeal for the attention and devotion of the worker; the boy pores over his geometry, and a small voice within him whispers of football, of skating, of the ball-room, of the billiard table; and it gains an audience

it secures some response-enough, at any rate, to set up a struggle in the soul, which gives a consciousness of effort for the student in holding himself to his task.

Now, if one purpose in the treatment of youth be the direction of the superabundant forces of young life into channels of social and moral action, of usefulness and frankness and diligence and courteous demeanor and courageous action-if this be our leading purpose, can we attain it best by engaging the adolescent mainly in play or mainly in work? Shall we seek to beget conduct of the right sort by soliciting from our pupil reactions that enlist his whole being, and that to him have all the joys of play; or shall we, for the sake of cultivating a vigorous, stalwart character, one that will regard with equal stoicism both drudgery and happiness in the affairs of daily life, deliberately bring the boy and girl face to face with situations which must be dealt with in a stern and serious and painful manner, and which are not of themselves in accord with the child's interests and spontaneity? Perhaps we may receive help in

our difficulty if we take counsel of the great masters who have been students of child nature, and who have reflected long and earnestly upon the best manner of teaching the young idea how to shoot. If we question Aristotle, Quintilian, Montaigne, Rousseau, Locke, Spencer, and all the rest, we shall receive but one sort of answer, namely, that the best success is attained when thru the child's play we guide and direct him until he has arrived at the estate of manhood. Play, says the modern scientist, organizes and solidifies personality in the most efficient way, since it commands all the powers and faculties of the mind in its prosecution. What the child can play at will attract him, and so will exert a profounder influence upon him than if it was forbidding to him. "Little profit grows where no interest is ta'en," says Shakespeare, and both psychology and experience indorse the proposition.

But what of work? Shall the adolescent do nothing but that which engages him in a pleasurable way? Shall he not be made to struggle with difficulties, to put aside the blandishments that lure him from the tasks that must be performed if he is to realize the most in his life? The solution of the problem will seem the easier when we consider that much that is of profit to one in the present age of the world is of recent origin in the race, and it has not yet become established so deeply that it is inherited by the young as instinct, thus constituting an easy way for energy to express itself. Much of what a youth must learn if he is to become adapted to the world about him, the world of men and things alike, is new and difficult. Life is certainly more complex today than it was when the race was at the starting-point. The crude, instinctive actions which served well enough when things were simple, are now wholly inadequate to successful living, and in some instances are hostile to the best success in life. The race is ever growing more altruistic, and

the scope of individual action must grow more restricted, in a certain sense in the sense that purely selfish deeds which characterize the early years of life must be more and more inhibited; the boy must observe the golden rule today more fully than his ancestors did. The sphere of knowledge is widening every day, and the adaptations to the world which this gives is growing more complex and intricate, but at the same time more perfect and desirable.

And these higher phases of life must be mastered by effort; youth must work, if maturity is to be happiest and most successful. Play gives mastery of only the simplest processes of living; the fundamental. requisites are certainly gained in this way, but everything finer and more subtle and complicated comes only by diligent application, and that not voluntary or spontaneous, at the start at any rate. Growth in the higher reaches is secured only by struggle; the tendency is to stop on a lower plane of development, where the fundamental instinctive activities suffice to keep body and soul together, and there must be constant pressure brought to bear upon the learner of life's ways to get him to ascend to the point which the race has reached in social, intellectual, ethical, and even physical living. The boy will not, undirected, unaided, and unforced, equip himself for the duties and privileges of life in civilized society by making his own the insight and power and skill and control which history and literature and science and mathematics give; other and simpler things will appeal to him too immediately and seductively. And what, then, is the doctrine? Youth climbs the mountain of life most naturally and in a sense most effectively by play; but the topmost point can be reached only by work. What is the golden mean? There is seen to be a harmonizing principle, when it is recognized that work becomes, most effective when one has an end in view to attain by his efforts. If there is nothing but a blank wall ahead of him, his life will be miserable indeed. Work must always have a clear goal toward which it tends, and this must be worth reaching. Mere drudgery for the sake of discipline alone disintegrates personality, kills initiation and spontaneity; the activities it produces are always the results of force imposed from without. Drudgery which is not tributary to some useful end does not stir the inner life to noble deeds, it does not result in that organization of the being where all works together in harmony. And youth is the time of all others when things that receive any consideration must have a life-relation; they must help to solve some of the problems that confront a mind opening up rapidly to the meaning and responsibilities of existence- problems of a social, an ethical, an intellectual, and a physical character. Anything which promises to be a guide to youth thru the unknown country which it is to enter will be mastered, no matter what effort is required to attain it. And herein lies the possibility of making work effective, of leading the adolescent boy and girl to apply