Some of the most successful clubs for boys and girls are those in which every activity is made a part of a play-world, in which the members live during, and, to some extent, between, the sessions of the club. In the Boy Scouts, for example, the lad thinks of himself as a pioneer and enacts through a skillful variety of exercises many of the resourceful habits of the early explorers. The imaginative element is conspicuous also in Mr. Thompson-Seton’s organization, The Wood-Craft Indians. The program of the Camp Fire Girls likewise makes a strong appeal to the imaginative and the play spirit.
In the Order of the Knights of King Arthur the boys pretend that they are members of the ancient Round Table; they bear the names of knights and heroes; they carry their initiates from one rank to another; they engage in quests and tournaments, and the influence upon an individual is distinctly in the direction of absorbing ideals of chivalric manhood. In a sister organization, The Queens of Avalon, the girls think of themselves as the queens who in the King Arthur legend dwelt upon the magic isle of Avalon for the healing of mankind.
In an organization for younger boys, called The Brotherhood of David, lads between eight and twelve regard themselves as future kings, in exile, dwelling, like David, in caves and fields and preparing for sovereignty. The Wolf Cubs—an English organization for pre-adolescent boys—holds before its members the ideal of a pack of wolves.
Dramatic Self-Government
This idea was carried still further in self-governing communities of boys and girls, such as the George Junior Republic. In these villages for delinquent children and orphans the young people all the time realize a civic situation through officials elected by themselves, by legislative enactments which they passed and amended, through a complete financial and commercial system, by which, under as few restrictions as possible, they solved the problems of the state and of individual prosperity. A similar method has been worked out in the “school city” in some of our public schools.
Dramatics in the Church
In all Christian worship the dramatic element survives. It finds its most elaborate expression in the Roman Catholic mass, but even the simple order of service in the church of Puritan lineage has certain dramatic elements. The sacraments of baptism and of the Lord’s Supper in those communions are intensely impressive to children simply because of their dramatic elements.
In liturgical churches, where the entrance of the clergy and the choristers in processional is followed by a variety of consecutive and historic ceremonies, performed by rising, sitting, kneeling and going to the altar in turn, and concluding with the recessional of the celebrants, children who have been trained in churchly ways find a keen and lifelong delight. Surely, nothing but the dramatic character of such services can explain the joy which little children take in going to church where the sermon and much of the service are incomprehensible.
The festival, even more than the ordinary service of worship, makes its dramatic appeal to children. No one could have been present in an Italian city on some high feast day, when the main street of the village was decorated for the great procession, when all the treasures of the church were exposed to view, and when the band, the crowd of venders, the best clothes of everybody, and, most of all, the dramatic services themselves, both in the church and on the street, were heightening the impression, without realizing that here is the secret of much of the power of the church in the lives of these imaginative people. To be in such a village at Christmas time and to go into the lighted church and see before the high altar the Christmas crèche, with its cardboard scenery and its toy images of Joseph, Mary, and the Christ-child, the shepherds and the Wise Men, thronged, as it is, with wide-eyed children, is to appreciate the wisdom of the Roman Church in visualizing for the children the drama of the incarnation.
Those who have been brought up in a colder atmosphere can hardly fail to remember the thrill which they felt when they witnessed or participated as children in the dialogues, exercises, and choruses of Sunday school concerts. There has been of late the beginning of a revival, even in Protestant churches, of the miracle play, in which boys as well as girls have been delighted to take part, and in which the spiritual impression of the enacting of Scripture stories without scenery has been profound upon both actors and audience.