of the whole play so firmly in his mind as to enable them to hold it, and to participate in his single-minded determination to see it carried out. You have intimate experience of the ways in which individual members contribute to the team and of how the team, in turn, builds up their spiritual nature. . . .
It is one thing to be able to feel the swing and unity of a company marching or wheeling on a level floor; it is a very different thing to retain your sense of organization when there is a tangle of bushes or a stone wall between you and the next man on your right. . . . The triumph of the trained imagination in still holding its sense of organization under such circumstances is a notable one; especially when, as in the most successful teams, the player 's grasp of the whole movement is of so masterly and flexible a nature as to be adequate not merely to carrying out a prearranged manœuvre in a rigid and unadaptable form, but to sharing with the other members of the team in the intuitive perception of such modifications as may be required by instant and unforeseen emergency.
And the team is not only an extension of the player's consciousness; it is a part of his personality. His participation has deepened from cooperation to membership. Not only is he now a part of the team, but the team is a part of him.[1]But the social consciousness of the gang and-the team has the defects of its virtues. Intelligence and adaptability may be stimulated when boys of widely differing social strata and races meet on a common footing and learn a meaning of equality which is not incompatible with assertion of individual abilities. Nevertheless, the closeness of contact and the powerful emotional appeal may induce a narrow corporate egotism sustained by uncritical custom and the hardening process which attends all institutions. Neighborhood and school may become demoralized by in-grown associations which resist all attempts to harmonize the ends of the small groups with the rights of the community. To preserve the legitimate function of primary groups and at the same time to connect them with the legitimate activities of institutions possessing wider outlooks is a problem confronting secondary schools and colleges. If the process of carrying over the attitudes built up in family and playground, of modifying and redirecting spontaneous impulses, is not done in the school, there is little guarantee that corporate loyalty, so valuable in itself, shall enter into the larger loyalties to the city and the nation.
The general difficulty, therefore, which the school has to meet is to utilize the socializing forces which seek expression in gangs, clubs and fraternities, and to eliminate harmful secrecy and clannishness. The question of fraternities in secondary schools (to which the present discussion is confined) is important because the fraternity is a type of relatively advanced associations arising when a degree of intelligence and ability to discriminate has appeared, when groups are not merely taken for granted, as they were in the period of childhood. Play in
- ↑ Joseph Lee, "Play as a School of the Citizen, Charities and the Commons," August 3, 1907, pp. 489-490.
