Farm Boys and Girls

by William A. McKeever

It can be proved that the country boy matures more slowly than the city boy. For example, at the age of sixteen, he is behind the latter in height, weight, school training, and sociability. But while the city boy matures more rapidly, the country boy makes up for the loss by a longer period of development. It is the author’s firm belief that this fact of slow growth proves a tremendous advantage to the country youth in that it allows for greater stability of character, and especially for a greater amount of courage and aggressiveness in form of permanent life habits.

But one might well wish that all rural parents could realize the evil consequences of being impatient with the son in respect to his choice of a life work. Many a good boy yet in his teens is hounded and driven about by the continuous nagging of his parents, who ignorantly believe that he should have his future destiny all planned and ready for its realization. As a result, this same good boy is often driven to desperation and to the point of leaving the home place—of breaking away from the affectionate ties that bind him to parents, and of seeking the position wherein he might earn a living. As a matter of fact, few young men have any very clear or reliable vision of their future life at the age of eighteen, or even twenty. Many of the best men in the world are faltering and uncertain even as late as twenty-five. However, if the relatives and friends would only exercise all due patience, offering only such helps and suggestions as can be given, and trusting the future finally to throw upon the problem a light from within the youth himself—then, we may be assured, practically every man will finally come to some line of effort that will bring him a comfortable living.

What of predestination?

The old-fashioned idea of a boy’s being marked by the hand of destiny, “cut out for” some particular calling in life, still has a place in the minds of the masses. The kindred belief that some men are “natural-born failures” has also wide currency. A third superstition is the very common opinion that others are “just naturally lucky.” All these traditional opinions are the outgrowth of ignorance of human nature such as may be dispelled by means of a course of instruction, or a carefully arranged course of home reading, in modern psychology.

None of the foregoing superstitions would be worthy of our attention were it not for the gross injustice which they entail upon children. Parents everywhere—in both city and country—are dealing with their children upon the assumption that one and all of these fallacies are true. “My oldest boy just naturally has no luck,” said the father of three sons and two daughters. “He changes around from one thing to another and fails every time.” But what of this particular boy’s early training? Was it the same as that of the others? Did he enjoy equal advantages? Did his parents when married really know anything about rearing children? or, did they really mistreat their first-born through ignorance and use him as a sort of practice material from which they learned how to do better by the succeeding ones?

Until the foregoing inquiries about the “unlucky” son’s boyhood life be fully answered, we cannot reasonably permit ourselves to condemn him. There is nothing more in predestination than this; namely, it can be shown that the child is born with not a few latent abilities—aptitudes for doing and learning this and that—and that one of these aptitudes is likely to have correlated with it more than the average amount of nerve development in the corresponding brain center. As a result, that particular aptitude will require less training than the others and will tend to predominate over them as maturity is approached.

The reply of the psychologist to the statement that some men are “natural-born failures,” is this: Few if any of those possessed of ordinary physical and mental qualities at birth are necessarily so. Excepting the feeble-minded and the like,—whose marks of degeneracy are usually apparent to all,—it may be asserted on the highest authority that none are “natural-born failures” to any greater extent than they are “natural-born successes”; but that they have within the inherited nerve mechanisms many possibilities of both success and failure.

Three methods of vocational training

We should be willing to overlook almost any other interest in this discussion for the sake of inducing in the farm father the belief that his young boy is a potential success—the belief that this boy is furnished by nature with the latent ability to shine somewhere in the broad field of human endeavor—provided he be rightly trained and disciplined during his growing years. Here, then, is probably the greatest of all the human-training problems; namely, the vocational one.

Roughly speaking, there have been three methods of vocational training.