The High School Boy and His Problems/Social Activities
The social activities of the young almost always seem excessive to the middle-aged. There are few things we forget so easily as the escapades of youth. A middle-aged father was advising his young son against the evils of dancing.
"But you danced, father, when you were a boy," the son protested.
"True," the father replied, "but I have seen the folly of it."
"Well," the boy replied, "I want to see the folly of it, too."
It is a very normal desire for a young boy to want to have regular and pleasant association with other young people both girls and boys, and in what I say in this paper I do not overlook this fact. It is a desire the gratification of which may very easily be carried to excess; it is a desire which parents, especially fathers, are wont to forget that they ever themselves felt. I have never had a son, I am sorry to say, to whom I could tell how hard I worked when a boy, how little money I spent, how seldom I stayed out at night or went to social parties, but I have listened to other fathers discoursing thus virtuously to their sons, so I know that they had forgotten their youth as I might have done had I but had a chance. Social customs change. We should not expect our children to enjoy themselves quite as we did at their age. The pleasures in which I indulged as a boy are very different from those in which my young nephews take delight, though I can not see that mine were either saner or more restrained than theirs, and I try to remember this fact when I am tempted to criticise the social life of the young people of today. I should hardly be excusable, however, if I did not try to give them the benefit of my experience.
Men, young and old, are social animals. All of us like to join things. It is as difficult for me to refuse an invitation to become a member of a club or a fraternity or an organization as it is to resist the seductive talk of a book agent when he spreads his attractive wares before my eyes. I feel like a hero if I can summon the courage to turn him down. We joined church or the Democratic party, I have no doubt, not so much from any strong religious or political convictions as from the fact that we were asked; we found it difficult to resist a chance to join, and we yielded. I am not arguing, however, that there is always profit in joining. Boys feel very much about joining things as men do. When they go into a high school fraternity, they are but imitating their fathers or their older brothers in college each of whom, no doubt, has his club or his fraternity. Yet, on the whole, I am convinced that membership in a high school fraternity is not a good thing.
Such an organization might be beneficial if it were based upon more strictly democratic principles than it often is. Boys are chosen usually for membership not so much because of similarity of tastes and similarity of character as from similarity of their fathers' income and social or business position. Even in the country town in which I live, I could without much chance of error pick out the boys' who, when they leave the graded schools, will be asked to join one or another of the high school fraternities existing in the local high school, and I could do it without knowing the boys personally at all, but simply from my—knowledge of their parents and from my acquaintance with their financial rating. A boy in moderate or meager circumstances very seldom gets into such an organization, unless perchance he be an athlete, who is likely to be taken because he is a hero. The poor boy can not afford to belong; the boy without social prestige would queer the others.
The high school fraternity, excepting in private academies and boarding schools, exists not so much to bring boys together and to strengthen the friendly relations existing between them as to develop a rather excessive social life in which girls are also to a large degree involved. In a private or boarding school the conditions of living are different and the necessity for banding together more justifiable. Such boys are away from home, and they miss their customary social life, and whatever helps to make for them some of the associations and comforts of home is good. A boys' fraternity in a private academy, is, in a large degree, like a college fraternity and usually is free from the objectionable features which characterize such an organization in a city high school. It is largely to make boys acquainted with each other, and not so much to bring the members into closer and more frequent association with girls. It makes for healthy friendship.
The high school fraternity is too frequently little more than a dancing club. Its meetings are taken up largely with discussions of the girl friends of the members, in making arrangements for the next dance, or in trying to determine how best to meet the expenses of the last one. If it gave boys definite work to do, if it developed in them qualities of leadership, or helped them the better to assume responsibility while giving them social training, I should not so much object, but as I have seen the members of such an organization after they are out of high school and in college, I can not see that it often does any of these things for them.
My observation of the high school fraternity man after he has entered college is that he is usually a very indifferent student with little scholastic ambition. His ambitions are mainly social. He makes a poor fraternity man in college, beause he has not realized in his high school fraternity any of the fundamental principles of adult fraternity life. Fraternity officers all over the country are agreed upon this point, and have passed a resolution that after 1920 no high school fraternity man will be eligible for membership in a college Greek letter fraternity. The reason for this action is that the high school fraternity man is selfish, undemocratic, hard to control, and unwilling to assume responsibility.
The expense of membership in such an organization, even for people in good circumstances, is not to be overlooked. The high school fraternity member considers himself quite grown up, and is not content in his social activities to be considered other than a man with all the accessories that accompany adult, manly, social life. Taxis and candy and flowers and evening clothes all form a part of his social functions; dinner dances and all night sessions are not unusual. The high school boy attempts to imitate all the social excesses and extravagances of his older friends and acquaintances. Sometimes there are even rumors of drinking and gambling and immorality, exaggerated perhaps, but having, no doubt, some small foundation in fact.
Only last year I called to my office two freshmen in college who were developing a reputation for idleness and intemperance. They came from conservative, religious, and well-to-do families, so that I could scarcely believe the tales concerning them which were floating about the campus of. They admitted, however, that they were drinking, but of this fact their parents had no suspicion, they said.
"When did you begin?" I asked.
"When we were sophomores in high school," was the a reply. "The fellows in our fraternity all thought it was smart to drink."
It is the secrecy of the fraternity no doubt, that encourages such escapades. It is one of the privileges of club life, the boy thinks, to be able unmolested to attempt risque things, and being alone in his deliberations and free from the guiding hand or the warning voice of older men, he slips easily into temptation.
The high school fraternity is in little or no sense a real brotherhood. Its purpose is not to bring boys together for mutual self-help. It seldom inculcates high moral ideals or develops interest in good scholarship even if it does not actually discourage these things. The members are not selected because they show fitness for doing well the work of high school, but rather because they dress well, dance well, are popular with the girls, and are able to spend money freely upon social pleasure. The high school fraternity seldom if ever has for its purpose the improving of general social conditions in the school or the desire to be an aid to the school authorities in the intelligent and satisfactory control of school affairs. On the contrary it often pulls down scholastic standards, it is a hindrance rather than a help in school management, and it contributes to the pleasure of only a very limited and select number of students. Healthy social activity in the high school should be general, democratic, an activity into which every respectable and well-mannered member of the school may enter, and not limited to a few people who are possessed of money.
I have seldom known a high school fraternity which did not stir up trouble. The exclusiveness of it arouses envy in the minds of those who are not invited to join. It develops cliques and factions, and breaks down rather than strengthens high school spirit. It often makes a boy arrogant and something of a cad. For all these reasons I believe the high school fraternity is in a majority of cases not the healthiest and best medium for the social activities of the high school boy. It develops social selfishness, its members are likely to overestimate their own social importance, it encourages extravagance in money matters and a contempt for others who are outside of this social aristocracy. If I had a boy I should be sorry if he became a member of such an organization.
A few evenings ago I attended a dance to which one of these high school fraternity boys had been invited. He came in his own car and brought with him his "steady girl." He was dressed with extreme care in a decidedly extreme style. She was fifteen perhaps, and he a year older. She showed all the toilet artifices, all the shades of coloration, of the beauty parlor. They danced together continuously throughout the evening, they exhibited the most extreme contortions and gyrations of the "shimmy" they omitted the usual courtesy of speaking to the chaperones, and held themselves entirely aloof throughout the evening from contact with their conservative companions. They admitted by their actions that they were the social elect, the aristocracy who could not bring themselves to the vulgar level of the crowd.
I should not, perhaps, blame the boy's lack of good manners and good taste upon his fraternity any more than I should hold it responsible for his failure to pass his high school course in English, but the fraternity, when it took him in, knew what he was, that he had neither moral nor intellectual ideals, that he had no conception of good manners, though his father, it is true, is a prominent professional man. It was this last fact that weighed most heavily in the balance when the boy was being considered for membership. My quarrel with the fraternity lies in the fact that having taken him in it has done nothing to improve him, but on the contrary has rather encouraged him in his extreme habits. It is not giving him the sort of social training that a boy should get in high school.
We can never quite get away from the fact in the discussion of a high school boy's social activities that most high schools are coeducational. In considering boys, we can not ignore the fact that girls, too, come in for a large share of consideration. It is a good thing for a young boy to have a healthy conventional association with girls. It helps him morally and socially. I think that a boy can have no stronger moral influence than the companionship of a high-principled, well-balanced girl. The boy, however, who limits his as associations to girls, or especially to one girl, or who gives a considerable part of his leisure time to such an association is weakened by it. He becomes soft and mushy; he moons around sentimentally taking little pleasure, usually, in the vigorous physical sports which go far to make a man. He develops feminine rather than masculine traits. Highly as I regard the benefits which come to a young fellow from his regular relationships with the right sort of girls, I have no hesitancy in saying that the strong, aggressive, manly qualities which we all want to see in a developing boy come from his regular contact and association with those of his own sex. Constant and uninterrupted association with girls induces fastidiousness and overrefinement in a boy. It takes the fight out of him, it tends toward laziness and lassitude. Such a boy drops easily into a rocking chair or a porch swing. He learns usually to play some stringed instrument like the ukelele or the mandolin, and he talks sentimental non sense.
The young boy with the steady girl is the worst of all. Whenever a boy begins to sing with feeling:
Only one girl has my sympathy,
his high school work is likely to go glimmering. It is not always helpful to have a half dozen to divide his attention during his leisure hours; it is positively hopeless if he can see only one on the horizon. The high school boy who devotes his social attentions exclusively to one girl gets little social training or experience. He does not learn to adapt himself to different temperaments, he is likely to become lax in his manners and to ignore social conventions. He comes to know the girl so well that he often does not take the trouble to be scrupulously polite to her. There is likely to develop a dangerous familiarity which breaks down the respect and the courtesy which every boy ought to show to the girls of his acquaintance and to women generally. "Spooning" is ruinous to a boy, morally and socially.
Such a boy I see every day. He is in reality girl crazy. Every morning he walks down the street to meet her and to carry her books to school. Twice a day they walk back and forth together, each quite oblivious of any presence but the other. They hang on each other. Every evening, if the weather permits, they go strolling until long past the proper hour for children to be in bed. Late at night I often recognize his sentimental whistle as he goes back home after being with her during the evening. He is failing in his studies; he could be expected to do nothing else, for he sees nothing, thinks of nothing, dreams of no one but the girl; and he treats her and speaks of her with a suggestion of ownership that is disgusting. In this relation as in many others, there is safety in numbers, for if there were a half dozen he would waste far less time and energy than in the present instance, and he would learn more that is useful and helpful in social matters.
There is the boy in high school also who goes to the opposite extreme—who "can't see a girl at all." He is speechless when in the presence of the girls, he blushes crimson if one addresses a remark to him, he has no interest in social activities, and no finesse in social conventionalities. When he comes into a room he is all hands and legs; the furniture seems to become animate and to take delight in getting into his way so that he may the more easily stumble over it. It agonizes him to enter a room where there are girls, it is utterly impossible for him unassisted to get out of one. He can never think of anything to say.
Such a boy would be benefited immeasurably if he forced himself a little more into social activities, if he studied to some extent how to carry on a conversation, how to please people, how to come and go without awkwardness and embarrassment. Nothing causes self-consciousness more than a lack of acquaintance with social usage and social forms, and nothing acquaints one with these details more quickly than a little practice and experience. No boy is so awkward or so crude or so shy that he can not learn with a little training to overcome these traits and to enjoy his social relations with other young people. As soon as he overcomes his first embarrassment he will be surprised at his former point of view.
There is a real value to the growing boy in social activities, in learning to meet men as well as women, and older men and women as well as those who are of their own age; boys can learn how, and it should be considered a necessary part of their education that they do so. I was settling down after dinner, not long ago, to a quiet evening of reading before the grate fire when the telephone rang. I answered the call.
"It's Billy Charters," I explained, as I came back with a rather downcast air. "He has just come to town, and he wants to come over and call this evening. It's a trial, I know, but I couldn't in decency say less than that we'd be glad to see him."
We had known Billy's uncle a number of years ago, and had met his mother once on a visit to Boston; there was no mistaking our duty, and we braced up for a dull evening. The prospect seemed all the more dull in view of the memory of Barker's call on the previous Sunday afternoon. Barker is a neighbor's boy who had arrived just after dinner—we have dinner at one on Sundays—and we wore ourselves to a thin edge in an attempt to introduce topics of conversation that would arouse even a remote interest and enthusiasm on his part. He could not be made to talk, so we lapsed into silence and filled up the time by playing band pieces on the victrola. Other callers came and went, but he hung on.
"He was eager to go, but he did not know how. Finally he arose and expressed an intention of bringing his call to a close. Everyone stood—and continued to stand twenty minutes—watching Barker trying to get out. It was only by my moving him gradually toward the front door and all but pushing him into the street that he ultimately got away; and yet Barker was having as unpleasant a time as we were. He had had no social experience.
I heard Billy's step on the walk at a quarter of eight, and I laid down my book with a regretful sigh to usher him in. He proved to be a healthy, cheerful fellow of eighteen who settled down in one of our arm-chairs with a comfortable, easy air that relieved the situation at once. He asked for the people whom he had met when he had visited in our town as a child. He brought us cheerful messages from his uncle's family, and he related a few hilarious tales of his experiences in learning to fly. He seemed interested in all that we had to say, and followed up every conversational lead with a few ideas of his own. If the talk ever gave signs of lagging, he was ready with a question or a remark. He was in no sense fresh; he was simply alert and ready to do his share of the social drudgery. He showed that he had made the most of his social experiences. He rose at a quarter past eight.
"I knew it was a shame to disturb you on an evening like this," he said, "when you'd no doubt far rather read than be bored by me, but it will please mother to know that I've called, and you've given me an awfully pleasant half hour. May I come again?" He shook hands, and in a moment we heard his quick footsteps going down the walk.
"What a nice boy Billy Charters is," my wife said to me as we were going up stairs after a pleasant two hours of reading. "I believe we ought to ask him to dinner next Sunday."
"That's just what I was thinking," I replied. And yet all the difference between Billy and Barker was that Billy had learned by observation and experience and Barker had not.
Too much of the social energy of the high school boy at the present time, especially in his relations with girls, is expended in dancing. There is scarcely an organization of young fellows, no matter what its primary purpose seems to have been, whether athletic, philanthropic, religious or educational, which does not, when it comes to any expression of social life, think first of giving a dance. It seems, barring the practice of strolling aimlessly about the streets, the only way a boy can conceive of to give a girl a good time. He could play tennis with her, if he only thought so, and, even if her serve is not so good as his, it might improve from practice and under his careful teaching. He could develop her interest and her skill at golf and by so doing contribute to her pleasure and her physical health. He could take her for a walk into the country, he could teach her to row a boat or to drive a car, or perhaps some time she might teach him one of these things. He may object to some of these pastimes on the ground that they are too strenuous and tiring, but I am sure it can easily be shown that to drag oneself over a none too smooth floor for four hours or so, in an atmosphere that is often close and stuffy and full of dust is quite as tiring and much less stimulating than is an equal amount of exercise in the open air. In the open air, moreover, in the cultivation of those sports to which I have referred, there is a chance for far more friendliness and far less familiarity than in dancing. There is, too, the opportunity for the development of courtesy and thoughtfulness, for the cultivation of little polite attentions which are good for a boy to know and to practice.
Before he gets through the high school a boy should have learned a good many things about conventional social customs, and should have gained a certain respect for them. In themselves these customs may mean very little, but observance of them marks us as experienced and thoughtful, and failure to observe them generally indicates that we are crude and careless. It is a little thing to call after one has been invited to dinner, to rise when a lady comes into the room, to speak to the hostess or the chaperones at a party, to take your hat off when you talk to a woman on the street, or to eliminate "say" and "listen" when beginning a conversation, but these are the little things which prove either that one has kept his eyes open and has seen how really careful, experienced people act, or that one has gone about with those whose social activities have been pretty limited.
If there were no other reason for a boy's not confining his attentions to but one girl the reason I have suggested above would be sufficient. Social activities are for training as well as for pleasure. Through his associations with other young people a boy comes to know how to adapt himself to varying conditions and varying temperaments. He learns how easily to meet different sorts of people and ultimately to enjoy different sorts. The man who travels from one state to another or from one county to another comes in time to have a broader view of things. He gains in experience at each new stopping place, he finds new pleasures and new interests wherever he goes, and more than this he develops new powers of enjoyment. The man who knows but one city or who has lived in a country town all his life does not know what his powers of enjoyment are until he has given himself a chance to see what other places there are to give him pleasure. So every young boy in the developing of friendly relationships between his boy and girl associates should give himself as diversified an acquaintance as possible. The more people he knows the better; the more girls he knows the safer for him. It is only through experience and the testing of ourselves that we really come to know the sort of people the association with whom will give us most help and most happiness.
I have seen a good many young fellows who in high school settled their girl friendships for life. It is usually a mistake. Boys are too inexperienced and too immature at that age to determine what will satisfy them later in life. High school friendships are healthy and stimulating; high school engagements are more often than otherwise a handicap to intellectual and business progress. The high school boy who comes to college engaged to be married seldom does well in college, and is unlikely to get out of college life as much as he should. He is like the college boy who always goes home at week ends; his interests are divided, his heart is in two places, and he does justice to neither.
In his eagerness for a good time the boy, like his older brother at times, is rather careless in his choice of his girl associates. He chooses the girl who is a "good fellow," who is not too prudish and exacting in her insistence upon conventionalities, who is ready for any sort of lark, and who, while she is not in any sense of disreputable character, is at least careless and thoughtless and "easy" to get on with. She does not hold him to his best behavior or criticise him when he is careless in his talk or familiar in his manner. It is doubtful if such a relationship, and there are far too many of them, results in any more enjoyment to either of the persons concerned. It is quite certain that such a girl always loses the respect of the boy who takes advantage of her weakness and carelessness, neither derives any helpful social training from the relationship, and one of them at least loses something of idealism and cleanness of character.
I watched a cheap show unload at the railway station the other day. It had come to town for a nine-days run in the open air. There were following it all sorts of careless and disreputable women. The disheartening thing about it all was the rapidity with which these women picked up the young boys standing about. Most of these young fellows had no evil intentions, but the daring and the adventure appealed to them. They thought it was good fun; it was something to joke about later. I wish I could make it clear that nothing stains a boy's character and lowers his ideals, nothing leaves so permanent a vulgar impression upon his mind as associating with women whose character is low. It leaves the stain that will not come off.
A boy who wants to get the greatest good and the greatest permanent satisfaction and happiness out of life will keep his social relationships on the highest possible plane. The girl who keeps him at a distance, who holds him to his best manners and his best behavior is giving him the best training and in reality the best time.