The Spirit of Youth and the City StreetsAddams, Jane
General
The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets
Addams, Jane
Child rearing; Urban youth
Is not this an argument that the drinking, the late hours, the lack of
decorum, are directly traceable to the commercial enterprise which
ministers to pleasure in order to drag it into excess because excess
is more profitable? To thus commercialize pleasure is as monstrous as
it is to commercialize art. It is intolerable that the city does not
take over this function of making provision for pleasure, as wise
communities in Sweden and South Carolina have taken the sale of
alcohol out of the hands of enterprising publicans.
We are only beginning to understand what might be done through the
festival, the street procession, the band of marching musicians,
orchestral music in public squares or parks, with the magic power they
all possess to formulate the sense of companionship and solidarity.
The experiments which are being made in public schools to celebrate
the national holidays, the changing seasons, the birthdays of heroes,
the planting of trees, are slowly developing little ceremonials which
may in time work out into pageants of genuine beauty and significance.
No other nation has so unparalleled an opportunity to do this through
its schools as we have, for no other nation has so wide-spreading a
school system, while the enthusiasm of children and their natural
ability to express their emotions through symbols, gives the securest
possible foundation to this growing effort.
The city schools of New York have effected the organization of high
school girls into groups for folk dancing. These old forms of dancing
which have been worked out in many lands and through long experiences,
safeguard unwary and dangerous expression and yet afford a vehicle
through which the gaiety of youth may flow. Their forms are indeed
those which lie at the basis of all good breeding, forms which at once
express and restrain, urge forward and set limits.
One may also see another center of growth for public recreation and
the beginning of a pageantry for the people in the many small parks
and athletic fields which almost every American city is hastening to
provide for its young. These small parks have innumerable athletic
teams, each with its distinctive uniform, with track meets and match
games arranged with the teams from other parks and from the public
schools; choruses of trade unionists or of patriotic societies fill
the park halls with eager listeners. Labor Day processions are yearly
becoming more carefully planned and more picturesque in character, as
the desire to make an overwhelming impression with mere size gives way
to a growing ambition to set forth the significance of the craft and
the skill of the workman. At moments they almost rival the dignified
showing of the processions of the German Turn Vereins which are also
often seen in our city streets.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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