The Play Spirit in America
Those who have lost the play spirit are beginning to die. These were the words of Dr. Cabot of the Massachusetts General Hospital of Boston at the recent Congress of the Playground and Recreation Association of America, held at Richmond, Va. True recreation is re-creation—to be made anew from day to day, mind and body. The old saying that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy is true of adults as well as children. It is more important that adults emphasize recreation for themselves than for the child. It is so much easier for grown people to forget to play.
The serious person is only half awake. Seriousness often excludes humor and thus shuts out the play spirit in life. The serious person is not always thoroughly in earnest. He who excludes humor and play cannot be in earnest because he does not use all the resources at his command. Young people are always earnest; play and humor are part of their program.
The calculating business man sitting in his close office or the hard taskmaster sitting at a teacher’s desk may be making a living and yet not living but prematurely dying. Compare such a one with a group of young people who shout and laugh in joyous play or work outside and ask yourself which is preferable, which is life? The business man once had the play spirit but he has lost it, and with it life and its joy. When he went to school years ago he was not taught to live but to calculate; not to think but to imitate and accumulate a living, not a life. He has been true to his teaching. He might be rescued even now if he could be made to see the necessity for play and feel the rejuvenating effect of rhythmic games. He must get rid of the idea that it is undignified for a grown man or woman to play, to join hands in a circle, to shout and laugh and sing and play games on the green.
The American people must be taught recreation, not only in public playgrounds but the necessity of using home, lawn and yard for play for child and adult as well. We must get rid of the idea that people are made for parks and substitute the idea, parks are made for people.
A one-time city superintendent of schools in a large city and for a number of years a college president recently spent a year on his farm and says that as a result his whole feeling and view toward life has been changed by the year of recreation. To have normal feelings is more important than abnormal knowledge. Knowledge is sometimes weakness rather than power.
A child without a playground is the father of a man without a job, says one of our playground officials, and we might add that a man without play will soon be a man without a job and without health. It is high time that school faculties realize their sin in failing themselves to play. Enthusiastic teachers often study and teach all the winter, then go to a summer school and pile on more of the same kind of work. We recognize the evil of this, yet few are brave enough to stop in the midst of work and play and teach play. Summer schools should send their students back home rejuvenated, with renewed health and enthusiasm and with a new feeling for life rather than book-burdened, tired and nervous.
We have in America a wealth of folk-games, folk-dances, folk-songs, folk-stories brought hither by the various races of Europe, that would give us wholesome recreation,—a folk-culture, yet we stand idly by and let an ignorant commercial schemer run a dance hall and give our young people dissipation instead of recreation. Churches and homes make a great mistake when they say “Don’t do this” or that and stop there. We must be positive and say “Do this, these are the games to play, these are the songs to sing, these are the stories to tell, come and join us.” If good people do not give us good recreation, bad people will give us bad recreation and make us pay for it. A machine can add a column of figures for us, another person can spell a word for us, but no one else can recreate or have health, personality and enthusiasm for us.
R. T. W.
Invocation
Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones
Father, make us glad that we are here, glad in the dear fellowships of the past, glad in the strong ties that bind us to our tasks, glad of the tasks. O Thou Burden Giver, lift us above the selfishness of the ease-seeker.
¶ Father, we come to listen to Thy commissions. Grant us power to go into the dark places of human lives, the sad places of human hearts, and in Thy name speak the word that may bring strength, peace, consolation. Father, help us to realize the opportunities that await us; gird us anew for the high and holy warfare wherein the weapons are the instruments of love, the counters of kindness. Help us to forget the things that hurt, to rise above all discouragements, to dwell with Thee in deathless places; to rejoice with Thee in the boundless realms where the petty lines of caste, class and sect, of race and prejudice, do not obtain, but where Thy children, conscious of Thy Fatherhood, rejoice in the largeness of the love that includes all races, all climes, and all ages.
¶ Father, take our hands and touch them with usefulness. Take our feet that they may be shod with willingness. Take our hearts that they may glow with kindness. Take our minds and tutor them in the way of truth. Take our voices and tune them to the universal harmonies, that in finite time we may sound some notes of thy never-ending song. Amen