The Boy and His Gang

by Joseph Adams Puffer

Of the gang and the Sunday School, as apart from the church, little need be added to what has already been said. The common mistake is to pick out the proper number of boys, of about the proper age, but with small regard to their other qualities, and out of these to form a class. The result is, that unless the teacher possesses most uncommon gifts, the class never has any coherence. It is not a natural group, and it never develops the internal structure of a real gang. There may be too many natural leaders. There may be too few. Or the class may combine fragments of rival gangs that are “licking” one another on sight, six days in the week. More commonly, the class contains a considerable fragment of one gang, with one or two individuals out of several others, and perhaps an occasional out-lier who belongs to none. The remainders of the broken gangs are in other Sunday Schools. Thus the class remains always at cross purposes with the boys’ native impulses; and rarely, therefore, wins their instinctive loyalty.

The remedy is the method of the Boy Scouts. Organize your Sunday School classes on the basis of natural affiliations. Found each on some spontaneous group. Add, if you think it wise, some boys whose ganginess is less developed. But don’t put fragments of well defined gangs together. Then, if some of your own boys follow their gangs to other schools, you can trust that, in the end, enough others come to you to even up. The essential matter at the gang age is the boys, not the denominational interests of their parents.

The Gang and the Home

There are three primary social groups in a modern state,—the family, the neighborhood, and the play group, which is, for our purposes, the gang. The second of these has become pretty much extinct in our cities, in spite of the efforts of settlement workers to preserve or revive it. The typical city dweller does not know the people in the next house by name, and views with instinctive hostility the family in the neighboring flat.

This really leaves only the home and the gang for the boy’s informal training in citizenship, so that these two need more than ever to stand together; and although in essence, this entire book is a discussion of the ways in which the home may utilize the gang, there still remain one or two points that are worthy of special emphasis.

A thoroughly “good” gang, to do its best work, ought to have a meeting place, a shop, a man leader, a playground, and a stretch of wild country for its members to roam about in. All these, in some form or other, the home ought to furnish. Allowing for two or three pairs of brothers in the same gang, each group will commonly represent at least a half-dozen households; and these, among them, ought to be able to provide the gang with the essentials of its profitable existence. Somewhere in those families, there should be at least one spare room, one large back yard, and one father, uncle, cousin or big brother who likes boys. Somewhere in those families, there ought to be country relatives or the owner of some sort of a camping-ground.

The only thing, then, for a group of households related to one another through a boys’ gang to do is to recognize frankly this relationship, and to live up to it. The father who has no room for a shop can put up the money for bats and balls; the mother who cannot stand the boys’ racket can provide grub for the summer trip. Somehow or other, six reasonably well-to-do households, if only they will stand together, can always manage to give the gang about all it needs for its best efficiency.

What I especially urge, then, is that the good home shall recognize the good gang as among the most efficient of its allies. As the careful parent keeps an eye on school and church and social set, so ought he to keep his eye on the gang. He should make it his business to know, not only that his boy gets into the right gang, but that he enters it at the right age, neither too early nor too late, and that he graduates at the right time, after the gang has done its perfect work and more would be too much. He should see to it also—as I shall point out at some length in another volume—that the boy, being in the right gang, has also the right place in it, so that he gets his due training in the great art of making his will count in actions of other men. Most especially, as I have all along been pointing out, he should see that the gang as an organization gets its chance and lives its life, with its fitting environment and its proper tools.

The Gang and the Boys’ Club

Unfortunately, however, taking the mass of boys as they come, about one boy in every two, either because of lack of room in his home, or because of sickness or death or poverty, cannot look to his parents for any aid in his group life. For him there remains the boys’ club. The best of these are those which recognize themselves as mere adjuncts to the gang, which furnish a chance for wholesome exercise and play under the direction of a man who knows when to be blind and deaf, and for the rest lets the boys a good deal alone.