The Spirit of Youth and the City StreetsAddams, Jane
General
The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets
Addams, Jane
Child rearing; Urban youth
The young people are overborne by their own undirected and misguided
energies. A mere temperamental outbreak in a brief period of
obstreperousness exposes a promising boy to arrest and imprisonment,
an accidental combination of circumstances too complicated and
overwhelming to be coped with by an immature mind, condemns a growing
lad to a criminal career. These impulsive misdeeds may be thought of
as dividing into two great trends somewhat obscurely analogous to the
two historic divisions of man's motive power, for we are told that all
the activities of primitive man and even those of his more civilized
successors may be broadly traced to the impulsion of two elemental
appetites. The first drove him to the search for food, the hunt
developing into war with neighboring tribes and finally broadening
into barter and modern commerce; the second urged him to secure and
protect a mate, developing into domestic life, widening into the
building of homes and cities, into the cultivation of the arts and a
care for beauty.
In the life of each boy there comes a time when these primitive
instincts urge him to action, when he is himself frightened by their
undefined power. He is faced by the necessity of taming them, of
reducing them to manageable impulses just at the moment when "a boy's
will is the wind's will," or, in the words of a veteran educator, at
the time when "it is almost impossible for an adult to realize the
boy's irresponsibility and even moral neurasthenia." That the boy
often fails may be traced in those pitiful figures which show that
between two and three times as much incorrigibility occurs between the
ages of thirteen and sixteen as at any other period of life.
The second division of motive power has been treated in the preceding
chapter. The present chapter is an effort to point out the necessity
for an understanding of the first trend of motives if we would
minimize the temptations of the struggle and free the boy from the
constant sense of the stupidity and savagery of life. To set his feet
in the worn path of civilization is not an easy task, but it may give
us a clue for the undertaking to trace his misdeeds to the
unrecognized and primitive spirit of adventure corresponding to the
old activity of the hunt, of warfare, and of discovery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account