【英文读物】The Boy and His Gang.docx

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1、【英文读物】The Boy and His GangPREFACESixty-six boys who were members of gangs are responsible for this book. They told me the stories of their gang life and I wrote them out in the form illustrated in Chapter II. I showed these stories to President G. Stanley Hall, who asked me to present them in the Pe

2、dagogical Seminary, where an article appeared in June, 1905. These original stories of Boys Gangs and Boy Leaders later became the basis for a series of lectures on Boy Problems. In revising my material for book publication, many interesting criticisms by parents, teachers, and social workers, in va

3、rious sections of the country have been consciously or unconsciously incorporated into it. I have found a wide interest in and demand for such a book as thisbearing upon the group psychology of boyhoodand a lamentable scarcity of readable literature on the subject.For aid in preparing this book I am

4、 indebtediv first of all to the boys for their confidence, which I have tried to keep; to President G. Stanley Hall for his kindly encouragement at the right time; to President Edmund C. Sanford and Professor William H. Burnham for pedagogical guidance; to my wife, E. Hope Puffer, who has shared in

5、the task from the beginning; to Mr. E. T. Brewster for his invaluable assistance in editing the book, and to McClures Magazine for permission to reprint the illustrations.J. Adams Puffer. INTRODUCTIONThe gang spirit is the basis of the social life of the boy. It is the spontaneous expression of the

6、boys real interests. A boy must have not only companions but a group of companions in which to realize himself. This book had its origin in the minds and hearts of boys still active in their gangs.It is evident that nearly all the activities of boys in their group life are not injurious but wholesom

7、e, or can readily be made so. What grown people too often interpret as done from evil motives the boys in the gang do from their love of fun. The educational world has not yet taken the interesting view point, that in the group activities of boys are cultivated the great fundamental virtues, co?pera

8、tion, self-sacrifice, and loyalty. Now that we are coming to understand and realize what the gang life means, and what can be done with it, the surprise grows that it has until so recently been left almost entirelyxii out of account in the work of helping and saving boys.Mr. Puffer as a graduate stu

9、dent and fellow at Clark University has taken time to acquaint himself with the literature in this and adjacent fields, and as a practical worker has shown himself unusually sympathetic with boys and helpful to them. Mr. Puffers writing is uniquely effective and his book ought to be read by all pare

10、nts and friends of boys.G. Stanley Hall.Worcester, Mass.,February 12, 1912. CHAPTER I THE ETERNAL BOYWe adults do not commonly understand boys. Half of us, to be sure, were boys ourselves; but when we became men and settled down to our work, we did not merely put away childish thingswe went further

11、and forgot them. To-day, we read a story of boy life and we say, “Why, yes. Thats just the way boys do. I used to do exactly that sort of thing myself.” But the next hour we have forgotten again, and the boy we were is once more a stranger. Boyville is so far removed, both from Delos and from Babylo

12、n, that we seldom think the thoughts of its inhabitants, nor see the world with the boys eyes. Only a few men are at home in both worlds,Lindsay, George, some schoolmasters, an occasional father,and these can do anything with a boy.2 The difficulty seems not so much to be that we have forgotten the

13、incidents of our boyhood as that we have lost its feelings. So far as specific doings are concerned, we probably remember those crowded years more distinctly than any equal period of our entire lives. Most of us, too, remember them happily, as happily probably as any years we have lived. No, the tro

14、uble is not with the memory, but with the self. The experiences of life since we were boys have shifted our psychic centre of gravity, so that we realize the particular incident far more easily than we realize the being to whom it occurred. We do not completely feel that the boy that was is quite ou

15、rselves; and while the memory of the fact is sharp, the memory of the mental state that went with it has become dim. Therefore, it costs a distinct effort to put ones self in the boys place. Any proper man will recite by the hour tales of the old swimming-hole in the summer. But if men actually felt

16、 toward the water as boys do, every club and half the private houses would have a swimming tank instead of a smoking room.3 But if we men fail to comprehend boys, what shall we say of the women! The experiences which we have forgotten, they have not even had; if there is a psychic fence which separa

17、tes men from boys, there are at least knot-holes in the boards; but between boys and women there is a solid wall. There are parts of a boys soul which any woman may observe or imagine, but which no woman can ever feel. That women often do understand boys, understand them sometimes better than men do

18、, is simply one of the marvels of feminine insight.This book is, then, addressed, first of all, to fathers, with the hope that it will, in some sort, serve to revive memories of boyhood days, not so much of specific acts of boyhood as of long-dead impulses and past ways of envisaging the world. Ever

19、y man who sits down and thinks out for himself, not only what he did as a boy, but also how it feels to be a boy, and how the world and the people in it appear through a boys eyes, has taken a long step toward the understanding and the control of his own sons. A scientific account4 of certain aspect

20、s of boy psychology, such as this book aims to be, may aid this introspective process.On the other hand, so far as this book is an account of the natural history of the genus boy, it may well be an aid to mothers, and to other women who, with no children of their own, are yet concerned for the welfa

21、re of adolescent males. If it does not help these to a sympathetic understanding of a boys soul, one may at least hope that it will serve to warn them of those regions of it most foreign to their sex. Next to a knowledge of boy nature, comes the knowledge of when to keep hands off and let some man h

22、ave his chance. To the smaller group of women, mothers and aunts and elder sisters, and especially teachers, who already possess the heaven-sent gift of understanding boys, any assistance may well seem superfluous. Still, intuition may often be supplemented by science. The clearest insight does some

23、times fail, and need to be helped out by a more analytical approach from another side than its own. To men, women, and teachers, then,5 this book,an apology, in a sense, to women, of men who once were boys.Whoever it was that opined that“Men are but children of a larger growth”knew little about boys

24、. The child becomes a youth, and the youth becomes man, by virtue of a process not so very different from that which transforms the caterpillar into a butterfly or the tadpole into a frog. As truly as the caterpillar takes on wings, and the tadpole lungs and limbs, of which neither had any trace bef

25、ore, the child and the boy take on not only habits and instincts and ways of getting on in the world, but actual new structure as well. Boyhood begins with the second set of teeth; it ends with the advent of the beard and a new set of enzymes in the blood. Neither child nor boy nor grub nor pollywog

26、 passes on to the next stage of his existence by any mere enlargement.Nor is it altogether true that with the approach of manhood“Shades of the prison-house begin to closeUpon the growing boy.”6 The little child, in his fathers house and under his fathers care, feels the stir of newborn gregarious i

27、nstincts, and takes his first steps into the larger life of the world. Boyhood proper begins with the rise of impulses which make us citizens and lead us to take care of ourselves; and it ends with the rise of impulses which make us heads of families and lead us to take care of other people. Each st

28、ep is an enlargement of life. Each transition is marked by a psychic change so profound that it makes the previous narrower condition appear as shadowy almost as a dream, and almost as difficult to recall.We are concerned here with the second of the seven ages of men: with the period, that is, which

29、 begins at about the age of ten with the rise of the herding instincts, and ends with the rise of the mating instincts at, say, eighteen. The child, who thus far has been a solitary animal, suddenly becomes a social one. He is profoundly interested in youth of his own sex, while at the same time he

30、cares less than nothing for youth of the7 other. Therefore, he associates himself with other boys and forms gangs.The gang, therefore, while it lasts, is for the boy one of the three primary social groups. These three are, the family, the neighborhood, and the play group; but for the normal boy the

31、play group is the gang. All three are instinctive human groupings, formed like pack and flock and hive, in response to deep-seated but unconscious need. Like all such instinctive associations, the gang appears useless or stupid to those who have never felt the inner impulse which caused it, or who,

32、having felt, have forgotten. The boys reaction to his gang is neither more nor less reasonable than the reaction of a mother to her babe, the tribesman to his chief, or the lover to his sweetheart. All these alike belong to the ancient, instinctive, ultra-rational parts of our human nature. They are

33、 felt, and obeyed; but only in part are they to be explained, for no man understands any of them fully unless he knows how it feels from the inside.CHAPTER II THE GENERAL NATURE OF THE GANGThe gang age, from ten to sixteen, is one of the most important eras in a boys life. One man out often may belo

34、ng to a church, one out of five to a fraternity: but as Sheldon has shown, three boys in every four are members of a gang; and the character of this gang determines in no small degree what sort of men these boys shall become. Taking our lives through, our parents probably make us most, and next to t

35、hese our wives. But next to our wives, in their influence over our characters and careers, come for most of us, the group of companions whom we knew as boys and who together with us formed our special gang. Our domestic education takes place in our parents home and in our own; but our social trainin

36、g has had at least its foundations in our gang.9 Curiously enough, in spite of the fact that three quarters of all boys are members of gangs, the gang plays a somewhat inconspicuous part in the literature of boyhood. Neither in “David Copperfield,” nor in “Being a Boy,” nor in “A Boys Town,” nor in

37、“Tom Brown,” does the gang, qua gang, appear. There are traces of it in Owen Johnsons Lawrenceville stories, and in certain tales of Elisha Kellog, dear to the heart of a generation ago. Only one story of boy life, so far as I know, gives the gang anything like its full value in boy psychology.This

38、tale is “The Story of a Bad Boy” of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. The “Centipedes,” to which the Bad Boy belonged, were a real gang. They had their local habitation, their badges, their ceremonies, their secrets. They went camping together, swam and boated and fished, snowballed the constables, fought the

39、boys from the other end of the town, bombarded the sleeping inhabitants of Rivermouth on the night before the Fourth, and altogether comported themselves like the indefatigable young savages10 which all proper boys have been since boys were. The story is said to be highly autobiographical, to be, in

40、 short, the inside history of Aldrichs own gang. At any rate, it seems to be the most adequate account yet in print of a typical boys gang, told with insight and skill. One can hardly imagine a better introduction to the ways of all boys than this story of a bad one.Like most persons who were once b

41、oys, I was myself in my boyhood days a member of a gang; but I never began to realize the spirit and power of gang life until, between 1902 and 1905, I sat behind the Principals desk in an Industrial School for Boys. Before that desk stood each new-comer, and it was my duty to place each boy in his

42、school work, and to be responsible in part for his discipline. I soon learned that rightly to guide a boy in the School, it was essential that I know pretty thoroughly, not only the boys personal traits, but also the social conditions of his home and of his neighborhood. I asked, therefore, many que

43、stions about home, school, and playmates,11 especially about playmates and the way in which the boys spent their leisure time.Many boys, after a short acquaintance, told me freely the inside stories of their gang life. Occasionally, to start a narrator when he stopped talking, I would put in a quest

44、ion: “When do you meet?” “Where?” “What do you do nights?” “Saturdays?” “Sundays?” “Whom do you let in?” “Have you any rules?”and the like. Where a boy had a good memory and a fair command of English, no questions were necessary; he simply went ahead and told me quite frankly all he knew, while I wr

45、ote down the story as nearly as possible in the boys own words. Later when, as probation officer in a juvenile court, I became responsible for the behavior of dependent and delinquent boys, I carried the study further.As a result of this information, it soon became evident that certain gangs were do

46、ing irreparable harm. Two boys, for example, out of one gang had been sent to the State Reform School on the same day; another12 contributed to the same institution, five of its six members. Good, promising boys, too, they were, though the world thought otherwise. Apparently, then, some gangs at lea

47、st were pretty thoroughly bad.On the other hand, some gangs proved to be almost as thoroughly good. Their members were real boys, but on the whole the gang was helping them to become worthy citizens and upright men.I have especially full information concerning sixty-six gangs; and I pass without mor

48、e ado to the boys account of certain of them. Most men who read these pages can supply the inside history of at least one other.The Morse Hollow Athletic ClubThis is a typical all-round gang, though its main purpose was to play games. Its membership varied somewhat with the game, but it usually cont

49、ained from nine to eleven boys, between twelve and seventeen years of age. Of these one was Irish, two were French, two Americans, one Negro, and one Scotch. The historian of the gang is13 the Scot, a distinctly bright boy who is now doing well at the printing trade.“Met nearly every day in vacation time; had a shanty for a clubhouse over in the woods; met there most of the time; met on R. As hill.“R. A. was the leader.