The High School Boy and His Problems/The High School Boy
Bill and I were walking down town one September afternoon talking in a friendly way as we were accustomed to do. School was to open the next day, and Bill was to begin his high school course. He seemed more thoughtful than usual; something I could not make out was on his mind.
"What is it, Bill?" I asked finally. "What big scheme are you working out?"
"Won't tomorrow be a wonderful day!" he exclaimed. It was to him the beginning of a new existence.
The entrance of the boy into high school comes at the most critical period of his life. He is fourteen years of age usually, if he is a normal boy, and fourteen marks the dividing line between childhood and youth—childhood which passes all too soon, youth which opens up a thousand possibilities, which stirs a thousand new emotions, new impulses and new desires, which puts before him a thousand opportunities and a thousand new temptations for which he is often unprepared. It is a time of restlessness and change for the boy, perhaps which tends often to make him give up school and to drive him upon the rocks. It is perhaps to be deplored that high school and adolescence should come at the same time.
It is for this reason that many thoughtful teachers have tried to change the situation by making it possible for children to complete the work of the grades by the time they are twelve, so that they may be well entered upon the work of the high school before the time of physical transition comes. Whether or not such reorganization of school work is feasible and whether or not it will ever be generally made, depends upon a good many things which it is hardly desirable to discuss here.
It is about the boy himself that I want most to speak and of the various problems which at the high school age he is called upon to solve. A lot of things are happening to him about the time he enters high school, very important things, too, and yet he is seldom prepared for these. He does not understand the situation at all himself, and those who know anything about it seldom help him out. His teachers are generally afraid to tell him what he ought to know about himself, or they are perhaps so taken up with presenting to him facts about history and economics and grammar and mathematics and the lives and accomplishments of other men, that they have no time to give to the boy himself. Even his Sunday school teacher who ought to get down to practical every day matters, generalizes on the facts and the phrases of the Bible and seldom if ever makes any personal or practical application of its teachings to the boy's daily life. His mother has never been a boy, so she has no idea what revolutions are going on in his mind and body unless he tells her as he infrequently does, of the changes in view point which passing childhood and dawning youth bring, and his father—his father has long ago forgotten that he ever was a boy, so that he gives the son no concern.
The sensible, sympathetic father who takes his fourteen-year-old boy into his confidence and who talks to him frankly about the changes which are going through and within him is so rare as to be a negligible quantity in the discussion of the boy and his problems. Ninety-five per cent of the boys who enter college from high school will say, if asked, that their fathers have never so much as mentioned to them anything that had to do with sex or adolescence. What the boy learns at this time about his body and about the mysteries of life generally comes from boys as ignorant as himself, or more likely than not from some one who is not only ignorant but whose moral ideals are low and whose tendencies are vicious. It is the rowdy and the street loafer, and the nomadic hired man who has picked up his facts from the gutters, and the ignorant and the vulgar minded who solve our boys' sex problems for them—more's the pity!
A good many things are happening to a boy who is just entering high school, as I have said. Educationally he is forming an entirely new relationship. High school is differently run from the elementary school. He will have more liberty and less restraint than he has been accustomed to, his teachers will treat him more as a man than he has ever before been treated. The subjects which he will take up are in themselves more interesting, they require more thought and less memory, more independence and more originality. He will need, if he is to get ori, to apply his mind more seriously and for longer periods of time than has been necessary before. He will have, almost for the first time, opportunities for thought and reasoning. As he takes advantage of these opportunities and begins to think and plan and act for himself, he will gain the sort of strength that he will need later in life. The more responsibility he can take at this time the better for him. If he has a job or an obligation of some sort that requires regular daily attention it will be of tremendous advantage to him. It will strengthen his body and so reinforce his will. The more he is repressed, the longer some one else does his thinking for him and shoulders his responsibilities, the longer and the more assuredly he will remain a, child.
But the most important things that are happening to him are physical and emotional. His body changes rapidly. His shoulders broaden, his arms and legs shoot out so fast that it is almost impossible to keep him inside his clothes. He grows up overnight, like a mushroom. His voice deepens, and he begins to realize for the first time perhaps that he is a boy and that he will soon be a man. It is his awkward age when no one understands him and when he least of all understands himself. He is not so frank as he was. He keeps a great many things to himself, or if he tells them at all, he tells them to his boy friends only, because most of all he dislikes being laughed at or thought ignorant. A thousand things about his own being awaken his curiosity, and about these he is eager for information, but he seldom asks questions, because he would not for the world suggest the fact he does not know the things that he is the most eager to learn. He will even lie rather than admit ignorance of the questions which concern him most vitally. He is alert; he keeps his ears and his eyes open; but too often what he learns is in no sense enlightening or illuminating, and injures rather than helps him out of his quandary. Few people talk frankly and openly about the subjects which interest his developing mind. He wants very much to be a man all at once, and it is this desire very largely, no doubt, which causes him so easily to fall into the temptation of forming the bad rather than the good habits of men. I have never been able to understand why to a boy bad habits are likely to seem so much more manly than good ones.
In addition to the physical changes which are going on in his body there are within him emotional changes quite as great if not more so. He is subject at this time more than at any other time of his life to religious influences. If there is a religious revival in the community, he is among the first to show interest in it, and to "come forward." If he gets by this period of life without taking any definite stand in religious matters it will take a considerable amount of logic or persuasion later to stir him. This is his time of idealism, of the awakening in him of respect and reverence for God and that which is best in man. Those who teach him may not wisely forget this fact.
He is becoming a hero worshiper, too, and it is the physical hero who receives his devotion. Football stars and clever baseball players and prize fighters attract his attention. If the question of legalizing prize fights were left to the vote of high school boys the affirmative vote would be overwhelming. If he reads the newspapers at all it is the sporting sheet for which he first asks; he soon learns who is high man in sporting circles, it is not long before he can call all the better known ones by their first names, and he follows their performances like a personal friend. Adventure, deeds of heroism, physical prowess of all sorts fill his mind and fire his imagination. It is unfortunate if his teacher at this time is a physical weakling or unsympathetic with physical fitness and athletic sports. Such a man will have little influence, moral or intellectual, with the fourteen-year-old. It is the man who can knock a home run, or break through the interference, or lick anybody who challenges him, who is a hero in the boy's eyes.
I have always been in theory opposed to corporal punishment and a strong advocate of moral suasion. An experience I had soon after I got out of college almost converted me to the opposite theory. I was principal of a school with an enrollment of several hundred boys, a good many of them of high school age. They were rough, ill-trained, and notoriously hard to control and had driven out more than one timid teacher before my arrival. For two weeks I got on with them moderately well without Jaying a hand on any one. I was pleasant and firm; I took a good many of their pranks lightly, with the hope that if I did not notice their deviltries too much they would be discontinued.
I was quite mistaken, however. The boys misinterpreted my point of view entirely. They thought me soft-hearted, afraid to wield the willow switch, a weakling, in fact. It was only after I had soundly thrashed a half dozen or so of the leaders that they had any respect for me. They all adored physical strength, and those whom I castigated most vigorously were throughout my régime the most docile and they love me today.
If the boy develops a taste for reading at this point in his life, and it is well if he does, it is no sentimental stuff such as his sister dotes on, that pleases his taste. War and bloodshed and adventure hold him. Strategy and deep-laid plots and hairbreadth escapes are to his liking. Indians and burglars and highwaymen are his ideals. He courts danger and adores exhibitions of physical courage. He will probably break a bone or two in attempting to emulate the physical stunts which most please him. If he ever runs away from home it will be now, and most normal boys of fourteen have at least seriously contemplated such an action more than once, if they have not actually put it into effect. It is, of course, not pleasant to have a favorite son or pupil "turn up missing" as an Irishman would say, but it is nothing to be especially worried about, for the boy who does so is only following a natural tendency, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he will return better satisfied with home and school than before, and be none the worse for the adventure. It is as normal and as harmless for a young boy to run away as it is for a young girl to weep or to be sentimental.
It is this spirit of adventure, largely, this desire to be independent and to show early in life manly characteristics that leads most boys into certain habits that are either harmful or immoral. It is this reason, I am sure, that caused me first to smoke. The older boys with whom I was associating were smoking—big, black and very cheap cigars they were—and I had never smoked. As I recall now I had never felt any desire to do so nor had I had been given any parental suggestions on the subject. But when one of the fellows handed me a cigar, never guessing that I was quite innocent of any personal experience with smoking, I felt a thrill go through me. He had paid me a compliment as he might have done had he asked me to give him change for ten dollars, or as I might feel if some one should apply for the position of butler at my humble dwelling; and I smoked the bitter sickening thing to the last available shred thinking myself by so doing so much the more a man. The worst of it all was that, though it made me a trifle dizzy, it did not turn me pale nor nauseate me as it should have done, and cure me of the habit. On the contrary my success made me the more conceited and tended to confirm me in the opinion that I was very rapidly taking on manly characteristics, as I suppose such experiences affect other boys of the age I was at that time.
I do not wish to be thought to condone the habit of smoking by this explanation of the cause which leads to it, for few people have been in better position to see how frequently it injures a boy's nervous system and reduces his efficiency than I have been, and fewer people, perhaps, have been so willing as I to relinquish the habit when they recognized just how detrimental it was in its effects.
The habit of swearing comes in the same class. I trust that none of my readers are addicted to profanity nor ever have been, but if it happens that any one has used or does use an occasional profane word somewhat stronger it may be than "darn" or "gosh" or "golly," if he will recall for me when he first succumbed to the temptation, I am sure it was in an attempt to simulate courage, or strong manly emotion of some sort. It shows experience with the world and contact with bold men, the boy thinks, to be able to rip out a few careless oaths or other strong words. The habit is a low, vulgar, irreverent one, it is true, which to sensible thinking people can give only the impression of crudity and careless rearing, and bad taste, even if it goes no further than that and does not suggest actually bad morals; but to the boy himself who falls into such a habit there is often only the desire to be thought a man.
It was a somewhat puzzled teacher who talked to one of his pupils not long ago. The boy was only seventeen, he came of a very quiet, respectable and even religious family, and he had himself been in the habit of going to church and Sunday school quite regularly. No one had thought of accusing him of hypocrisy or inconsistency, and yet the night before he had been drunk. He could not himself quite explain how or why it had all happened. He had not planned the orgy deliberately, but he had been working hard, he had had little recreation, and he had grown tired of the situation, and, to use his own words, had "just cut loose." Now that it was all over and he had a little time to think, he found no special satisfaction in the memory of his escapade, and, stranger still to his teacher, he had no special regret excepting that his unwise combining of various forms of intoxicants had made him horribly sick and had left him with a coated tongue and a dull headache.
"I don't suppose I'll ever do it again," he said, "but I just had to have that experience once in my life."
He was learning slowly a fact that many boys and their teachers find it difficult to learn, and that is that the main problem of the high school boy whether in school or out is the problem of self-control—control of the body, control of the mind, control of the emotions.
The most important problem which the high school boy has is the discipline of his mind. It isn't easy to hold one's attention to a dull stupid book on mathematics or Latin when one would far rather be climbing a tree or playing at baseball, but it is often very necessary. A boy does not go to high school so much for the facts he learns in mathematics or Latin or chemistry as for the discipline he gets through learning these things. Of course every one needs information, and a boy may be excused if he thinks that the information he acquires at school is the main thing for which he spends his days and nights; but if he does think so, he is mistaken. The most important thing for any boy is to learn to think quickly and correctly, so to train his mind that it will do what he wants it to do within a definite time and at a definite time.
"I was in a hurry," you explain to your teacher or the boss when he calls your attention to the fact that the work you have accomplished is inaccurately or carelessly done, "and did not have time to do the job as well as I could have done had I had more time;" or "My mind was wandering, and I could not get down to business," you offer as an alibi for not having a piece of work accomplished when it was called for. But the well-trained boy or man will be the master and not the slave of his mind, and will have so done his work in high school or in college that his brain will submit to his direction and will plan the composition or solve the mathematical problem, or get the right answer when these things need to be done. There is little time for inspiration when we are engaged in doing the regular work of the world. When there is a job to be done we can not wait until we "feel like it" before taking up the work. If he has developed these qualities of regular work and concentration of mind which it is possible for every high school boy to develop, he can do what has to be done whether he feels like it or not. Men could not wait until they were emotionally prepared when they were called into battle; they went to the front when the call came; they went "over the top" on the second. They had been trained to be ready at any time, and a boy's mind should be so trained.
Now an athlete soon learns that no matter how physically clever he may be, no matter how much natural strength of body or fleetness of limb he may possess, he will never really excel unless he practices regularly, unless he is constantly striving to do his best and to make each succeeding best a little better than was the former. It is often very difficult, however, for the high school boy or for his older and presumably wiser brother to recognize the fact that the training of his mind is not materially different from the training of his body. A clever, quick-witted boy can pick up a lot of information if he keeps his eyes and ears open; he can, in truth, with little or no concentrated study pick up quite enough to get by his high school examinations creditably or even to be excused from them, if that is the custom of the school, on account of his cleverness, and still have disciplined his mind very little. Unless he studies regularly, unless he pushes himself often to do his intellectual best, he will train his mind as inadequately as the athlete trains his body when he practices irregularly and never does his best.
"I don't see why George failed in college," I heard a mother say not long ago. "He never studied in high school, and yet he managed to get fine grades."
She did not realize that she had herself given the explanation. The high school boy who is so clever that he never has to "crack" a book, as they say, who has never submitted even for a brief time to mental drudgery, who doesn't pretty frequently settle down and dig his level best, is going to have trouble later with his brain, for sometime when he will want it to work, it will rebel like a balky ill-trained horse. It will run away from him as he ran away from his duties at home. The high school boy in many cases knows little about concentration and less about hard, consistent study. That is why he fails sometimes when he goes to college, and quite as often as not it is the clever boy in high school who fails when he gets to college.
Regular study hours, the doing of difficult things well, the holding of oneself to accuracy and rapidity of thinking, concentration of attention upon a definite problem or piece of work for a reasonable time—these are some of the methods which any boy may employ for training himself to think.
A boy's body ought to be trained as well as his mind. It is, of course, possible to find illustrations of men distinguished for their intellectual achievments who have had frail, ill-developed bodies, but this is the exception and not the rule. The muscles that are developed and trained early are more easily trained and more permanently as well, for the physical skill learned in youth is soon recovered in old age, even, if apparently forgotten.
I watched a man, nearly sixty years of age, not long ago play a tennis match with a young fellow. The older man had played little in thirty years, and he seemed rather slow and awkward at first. Gradually, however, his muscles responded to the impulse of his brain; his old tricks came back to him, he recovered his serve, he placed his balls with surprising accuracy. He was winded a little, perhaps, when the set was ended, but he had won against a very worthy opponent.
The high school boy growing as quickly as he does is awkward. He will remain in that condition unless he trains his body rigidly and regularly. He should learn to swim and to row a boat and to ride a horse; to run and climb and jump. He should develop skill in as many outof-door games as possible such as golf and baseball and tennis. If he can learn to wrestle and box and dance so much the better. So far as he has control over his body he will find it easier to exercise control over his emotions.
The ability to stand on one's feet and speak is almost as much a matter of the body as of the mind. If a boy knows how to manage his feet and what to do with his hands and how to stand erect, he will find usually, that he has enough in his head out of which to make a pretty fair speech. Every boy in high school ought to practice sufficiently to be able to speak without having his hands shake or his knees tremble, and once he has learned, he is quite unlikely ever to forget.
I asked a very effective public speaker not long ago if his ability to speak well was natural or acquired.
"I was the shyest sort of boy," was his reply, "I stammered and hesitated and turned cold with fright whenever I got on my feet to speak. I determined, even while I was in high school, to learn to talk extemporaneously, and I forced myself to do so whenever I had a chance, and to speak as correctly and as much to the point as I could. Every boy can learn if he tries."
In addition to controlling his mind and his body, one of the most important things that a boy just entering upon youth should learn is the discipline and control of his desires and his emotions. All sorts of new emotions and desires and passions rush upon the fourteen-year-old boy, and in so far as he subdues and controls and directs these, he will become a strong man. It is his failure to do this that causes him to run away from home, or to learn to smoke and to swear and to develop habits of mind and of body that are unclean and immoral. It is as often as not first from ignorance that he does these things, ignorance of the fact that it is he and not his environment that is changing. He often blames his parents or the conditions under which he lives for his discontent and unhappiness, while the truth is that all these new feelings and desires which are striving to get control of him are the result of sexual changes which are going on in his body, and which are causing him to look at life from an altogether different angle. A most important thing for him now and for the future is that he learn to control these desires and not that he let them control or subdue him.
All sorts of temptations will come to him at this time. If he can be made to understand that his body with all its parts is a sacred thing which his creator has given into his care to keep clean and strong and undefiled, if he can turn aside vulgar suggestions, if he will refrain from impure words and impure thoughts, and impure acts of all sorts, he will learn self-control of immeasurable value to him not only as a boy but as a man. For all these things sap a growing boy's strength, they reduce his vitality, they undermine his character, they make him less able to think and, worst of all, they make him far less a man.
Bad sexual habits in the developing boy are the greatest evil of which he can be guilty. They take away his initiative, they increase his self-consciousness, they rob him of his physical strength, and they weaken his mind. It is only by living a clean, self-controlled sexual life that a boy can make the most of his physical and mental powers.
The boy of fourteen begins usually to take his first real interest in society when he enters high school. He is making his first real friends, and he is coming to realize for the first time the basis upon which friendship is formed. Here again self-control and discipline are necessary. A boy's friendships determine his character as much as any influence which operates in his life. Very few of us have formed alone the habits that possess us, but on the contrary we have done so in connection with one or more of our friends. When a high school boy cuts class or learns to smoke or stays out late at night or falls into any sort of irregularity, no one who has any sane knowledge of human nature ever supposes that he was alone when he did so. The fourteen-year-old forms into groups, he organizes little exclusive societies, he has his particular pals with whom he consorts and schemes and under whose influence he develops character and leadership.
In all these close relationships which grow up between boys of high school age there is invariably a leader. All make suggestions and present plans, but in every group of boys there is some one whose opinion is paramount, whose word and whose decision is law. Now at—the outset any boy may determine, negatively at least, with whom he will associate; after relationships are strongly formed, however, it is not so easy, for it is always a much more simple matter to evade or to decline an association than it is to break it after it has been made. Before he enters high school a boy's friends have not always been entirely of his own choosing. They have been determined by his parents, by his immediate neighbors, by the friendships which his father and mother had made for him and with him. To a certain extent, until he shall himself go away from home, this will continue to be true, but, far more than he has ever been at liberty to do so before, he will, when he enters high school, be left very much to his own devices in the choice of his friends. It is most important that he choose wisely, for upon his choice depend his habits, his ideals, his character. If his friends develop into a fast lot, and smoke and swear and waste their time, he will be more than likely to follow; if they are quiet and studious and clean minded, he is pretty sure to adopt the same conservative tactics. A boy, as well as a man, is known by the friends he keeps, and can with the greatest difficulty follow a line of conduct different from that which these same friends follow.
"I don't have to do what they do," a boy often says when warned against certain careless or evil companions, but the facts usually prove quite the contrary, and whether he wills it or not, he soon takes up the practices that his friends set for him.
It is a great opportunity which is offered a boy who goes to high school. In these days, however, when in most communities it is the rule rather than the exception for boys to go, the privilege is not infrequently valued rather lightly. The boy goes, not from any serious purpose on his own part or any special desire for training, but because it is the custom, because his parents have desired it, and because all the other boys in his class are going. Possibly it is better to go for these reasons than not to go at all, but if added to these there is also the eagerness on his part to train his mind, to add to his store of information, to prepare himself better for the work which he must take up later in life, and especially if there is for him some interest, some line of study which he very much desires to carry on, his chances of getting somewhere will be materially increased. No one can get far in any line of work without interest. The work we do without joy in the doing is pretty sure to be badly done.
Intellectual work is not unlike physical. A group of laborers is engaged upon a piece of work near my office. I can look out of my window and see them as they gather in the morning. Some of them come early and sit on the curb and smoke or talk to each other; others come up at the last minute. When the whistle sounds announcing the hour to begin, few of them go to their work with any enthusiasm or apparent pleasure. They drag themselves to their feet with reluctance, they take up their tasks with indifference, and when the twelve o'clock whistle announces quitting time, they throw down their tools with a rapidity that is disheartening. It is hardly necessary to say that they accomplish little, their progress in their trade is slow. They are discontented, dissatisfied, inefficient and unhappy.
If a boy is going to high school, he should go with a spirit different from this. He is having a rare chance to develop his mind, to strengthen his character, to widen his chances of usefulness and success. This chance should inspire him to do his best, to meet and to solve his problems with courage and manliness.