The playground, however, is vastly the more important of the two. Our artificial city life fails, more than anywhere else, in its handling of boys. We have parks and boulevards and speedways, public baths and golf courses and wading-pools and sand piles, free museums and art galleries and libraries, not, to be sure, in any profusion, but often in number fairly adequate to the demand. The one thing our cities commonly lack is enough places where growing boys can indulge in a wholesome game of ball without getting themselves into some sort of trouble.
To be of any use to boys, a playground must be large. A small ground, with swings and teeters and sand piles, is for children. But the gang needs room to play the specialized group games against its rivals. How the city gang is to get this is another question, and one worthy of very careful consideration by those having the welfare of boys at heart.
The Gang and the Summer Camp
It might be inferred from what I have already written in praise of camp life for boys that I place the boys’ summer camp high on the list of favorable environments for youth. This is by no means the fact. The typical summer camp, such as is advertised by the score in every magazine, is altogether too much an affair de luxe to be of much real value. It is too apt to be merely a school under canvas, or worse still, a summer hotel. So much is done for the boys that they lose all the training in skill of hand, in woodcraft, in self-reliance, in gumption, which a proper camp ought to give. Worst of all, they have little chance to “endure hardness.” Life is nearly as soft as in the city; and for all the primitive manliness that the camp puts into them, they might as well have stayed at home.
Summer camps, also, for business reasons, are likely to be too large. The ideal arrangement is six or eight, or at most ten, boys who have already made themselves into a gang, with a man leader. A natural group, in short, with a natural man added on, is far superior to a selection on any other basis. If for any reason, the group must be larger, then there should be two or more men leaders, and provision for the group to break up into several natural gangs.
The best time to camp is late in the summer. Boys when left to their own impulses build their camps in the fall, urged thereto by as blind an instinct as that which sets the birds to building nests in the spring. Late summer is as near the natural building-time as the school system of civilization permits us to get; and besides this, the camping trip at the end of the vacation serves as the climax to be looked forward to all through the hot weather.
The two months’ camp in the summer is based rather on custom than on experience or sound theory. Four short periods, during four different seasons, are far better than a single long stretch during one. Boys at the gang age desire ardently experience. That they get in fourfold measure, when to the common sports of summer are added hunting and trapping and nutting, expeditions on skates and snowshoes, fishing through the ice in the winter or in the first open water of the spring, and all the other rich and varied doings of the yearly round. It is any season but summer, also, for the touch of hardship which for every true boy is the salt of camp life.
As for formal instruction in camp, the less of books the better. Natural history, of course, there is, and the simpler handicrafts, and the various outdoor arts, from boat-building to camp cookery. Practical surveying may sometimes be conveniently managed, together with some of its attendant mathematics. There is often a chance, too, for a limited amount of physics, especially on the practical and the observational sides, and in the region between block and tackle on the one hand and the theory of the weather on the other.
But the one subject above all others for camp study is hygiene. Here is illustrated, practically and on a convenient scale, the entire subject of communal hygiene, from the obtaining and storage and preparation of food, to the disposal of waste, and the necessity of order and system in any sort of group housekeeping. As for personal hygiene, the white light that beats about a camp, where every act has to be done in public, reveals many a need for instruction on this side; while the frankness and naturalness of camp life make such lessons easy to give. Example, too, counts here as it rarely can where existence is more private. For public hygiene, therefore, and for private, a well-managed camp is an ideal school.
Most especially is a camp an ideal spot for instruction concerning sex. The candor and wholesomeness of camp life, the busy days and the solemn nights, the absence, one must confess, of one half the human race, all make for purity of heart. At no time, probably, can a high-minded man do so much toward setting a boy’s feet along the narrow way.