To turn to the public schools with the expectation that they can immediately, or at length, make good the injury done the home by industrial usurpation is to expect more than is fair or possible. They are doing valiantly and well, they are becoming social centers and in due time they will have more adequately in hand both the vocational and recreational interests of youth. With this accession of educational territory will come a proportionate increase in the number of male teachers, and a further diminution of the fallacy that the only kind of order is silence and the prime condition of mental concentration inaction. The system will become less and the boy more important.
But the whole community is the master educator; the best home is not exempt from its influence nor the best school greatly superior to its morality. In fact the school, even as the place of amusement and all places of congregation, serves to diffuse the moral problems of boyhood throughout the whole mass. Moral sanitation is more difficult than physical sanitation, and the spoiled boy is a good conductor of various forms of moral virus. The moral training involved in the ordinary working of the public school is considerable and is none the less valuable because it is indirect. With more attention to physical condition, corrective exercise, and organized play, and with the motivating of a larger area of school work, the moral value of the institution will be still further enhanced.
The church addresses itself to the problem in ways both general and specific, positive and negative. In its stimulation of public conscience, in its inspiration of those who work directly for improved conditions, and in Sunday schools and young people's societies, a contribution of no small value is continually made. A rather negative, or at best, concessive attitude toward recreation and a disposition to rest satisfied with the denunciation of harmful institutions and activities militates against her greatest usefulness. She must rather compensate for home shortages and compete with the doubtful allurements of the city. This she may do in part within her own plant and in part by encouraging and supporting all wholesome outlets for the athletic zest, social adventure, worthy ambition, and vocational quest of youth. Those segments of the church which believe in bringing every legitimate human interest within the scope and sanction of religion will in the nature of things offer a more immediate and telling competition to the harmful devices of the city.
But with the exception of a few boys' clubs and scout patrols, for whose direction there is always a shameful shortage of willing and able lay leadership, the church has not as yet grasped the problem; and this remains true when one grants further the value of organized boys' classes in the Sunday school and of the "socials" and parties of young people's societies. To be sure, the Protestant church, expressing itself through the Young Men's Christian Association, has laid hold of the more respectable edge of the problem. But with few exceptions this work is not as yet missionary, militant, or diffused to the communities of greatest need. A few experiments are now being made, but probably the Y.M.C.A., more than the individual church, is under the necessity of treating the underlying economic evils with a very safe degree of caution; and in both there is the ever-recurrent need of an unsparing analysis of motive for the purpose of ascertaining which, after all, is paramount--human welfare or institutional glory.
The tendency ever is to cultivate profitable and self-supporting fields and sound business policies. But the case of thousands upon thousands of boys living in localities that are socially impoverished, unfortunate, and debasing constitutes a call to the missionary spirit and method. If the impulse which is so ready and generous in the exportation of religion and so wise in adaptation to the interests and abilities of the foreign group could but lay hold of our most difficult communities with like devotion and with scientific care there would be developed in due time advanced and adequate methods, which in turn would take their rightful place as a part of civic or educational administration.
As is illustrated in both education and philanthropy, the function of the church in social development has been of this order, and the mistake of short-sighted religious leaders has been to desert these children when once they have found an abode within the civil structure. The pastoral spirit of the new era claims again the entire parish, however organized, and guards its children still. The pioneer is needed at home just as he is needed abroad, and the pioneering agency must have the same zeal and freedom in order to mark out the way of salvation for hordes of wild city boys who are the menacing product of blind economic haste.
The church should see this big problem and accept the challenge. Society should awaken to the fact that in our large cities there is growing up a generation of boys who morally "cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand"--this through no fault of theirs, for they are but a product. If they are unlovely, "smart," sophisticated, ungrateful, and predatory, what has made them so? Who has inverted the prophetic promise and given them ashes for beauty and the spirit of heaviness for the garment of praise? As matters now stand it is not the ninety and nine who are safe and the one in peril. That ratio tends to be reversed, and will be unless right-minded people accept individually and in their organized relations a just responsibility for the new life that is committed for shaping and destiny to the evolving modern city.