What signals are there in your school? Discuss their usefulness.
What are some of the "rules" of your school? Are they good rules? Why? Are they an advantage or a disadvantage to yourself? If they did not exist, would your own conduct be different? Why?
What are some of the rules of good manners that are supposed to control conduct in your school? in your home? in the street? Discuss their reasonableness. Do they enlarge or restrict freedom?
Do the rules of football, or other games, increase or decrease the freedom of play?
What are some of the laws that control conduct in your community? Would most people observe the laws you mention even if they were not written laws, and if there were no penalty for failing to observe them? Why?
THE ORIGIN OF LAW
The following story illustrates the difference between law and custom, or "manners," and how the former may develop out of the latter. [Footnote: "Rudimentary Society among Boys," by John Johnson, in Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, vol. ii (1884). The story as here given is reproduced from Lessons in Community and National Life, Series C, p. 145, U. S. Bureau of Education (Lesson C-18, "Cooperation through Law," by Arthur W. Dunn). ] There was once a boys' school located in an 800-acre tract of land, in the fields and woods of which the boys, when free from their studies, gathered nuts, trapped small animals, and otherwise lived much like primitive hunters.
Just after midnight some morning early in October, when the first frosts of the season loosened the grasp of the nuts upon the limbs, parties of two or three boys might be seen rushing at full speed over the wet fields. When the swiftest party reached a walnut tree, one of the number climbed up rapidly, shook off half a bushel of nuts and scrambled down again. Then off the boys went to the next tree, where the process was repeated unless the tree was occupied by other boys doing likewise. Nut hunters coming to the tree after the first party had been there, and wishing to shake the tree some more, were required by custom to pile up all the nuts that lay under the tree. Until this was done, the unwritten law did not permit their shaking any more nuts on the ground.
So far this was a CUSTOM accepted by the boys because of its reasonableness. But after a while, some members of this boy community thought to get ahead of the other members. One night before frost came they secretly went to the woods and took possession of most of the nut trees by shaking them according to custom. When this was discovered, some of the leaders of the community CALLED A MEETING of all the boys. After discussing the matter thoroughly, they provided against a repetition of the trick by MAKING A RULE (passing a law) that thereafter the harvesting of nuts should not begin before A FIXED DATE in October.
These boys acted very much as men have often acted under simple conditions of community life. The New England "town meeting," for example, is precisely the same thing as the boys' meeting.