The main point, then, in dealing with school-boys at the gang age is to utilize to the full their natural groups. The little boy is an individualist, and we train him as an individual. But when later at the age of ten or twelve, the gregarious instincts begin to appear, the significant thing, the interesting thing, the unit with which, oftentimes, we have to work, is not the individual but the gang. For certain purposes, at this stage, we may ignore the boy and attend to the boy group. After sixteen the group dissolves, and once more we may take up the education of the individual. The problem of the school is to utilize, to the full, the great moving passions of boyhood,--its loyalty, its self-sacrifice, its desire for coöperation, its thoroughgoing gregariousness. We do that best, in school and home and everywhere, when we learn to think of each boy in his gang relations, and to utilize these natural groupings as the basis of our artificial assemblages, and our guide in forming them. Good citizens are sometimes quite as much the product of good gangs, as of good schools or good homes. Transcriber’s Notes Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed. Simple typographical errors were corrected. Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained; occurrences of inconsistent hyphenation have not been changed. A sequence error in the List of Illustrations was corrected. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Boy and His Gang, by J. Adams Puffer