The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets — John Shaqi
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 revolt of youth against uniformity and the necessity of following
careful directions laid down by some one else, many times results in
such nervous irritability that the youth, in spite of all sorts of
prudential reasons, "throws up his job," if only to get outside the
factory walls into the freer street, just as the narrowness of the
school inclosure induces many a boy to jump the fence.
When the boy is on the street, however, and is "standing around on the
corner" with the gang to which he mysteriously attaches himself, he
finds the difficulties of direct untrammeled action almost as great
there as they were in the factory, but for an entirely different set
of reasons. The necessity so strongly felt in the factory for an
outlet to his sudden and furious bursts of energy, his overmastering
desire to prove that he could do things "without being bossed all the
time," finds little chance for expression, for he discovers that in
whatever really active pursuit he tries to engage, he is promptly
suppressed by the police. After several futile attempts at
self-expression, he returns to his street corner subdued and so far
discouraged that when he has the next impulse to vigorous action he
concludes that it is of no use, and sullenly settles back into
inactivity. He thus learns to persuade himself that it is better to do
nothing, or, as the psychologist would say, "to inhibit his motor
impulses."
When the same boy, as an adult workman, finds himself confronted with
an unusual or an untoward condition in his work, he will fall back
into this habit of inhibition, of making no effort toward independent
action. When "slack times" come, he will be the workman of least
value, and the first to be dismissed, calmly accepting his position in
the ranks of the unemployed because it will not be so unlike the many
hours of idleness and vacuity to which he was accustomed as a boy. No
help having been extended to him in the moment of his first irritable
revolt against industry, his whole life has been given a twist toward
idleness and futility. He has not had the chance of recovery which the
school system gives a like rebellious boy in a truant school.
The unjustifiable lack of educational supervision during the first
years of factory work makes it quite impossible for the modern
educator to offer any real assistance to young people during that
trying transitional period between school and industry. The young
people themselves who fail to conform can do little but rebel against
the entire situation, and the expressions of revolt roughly divide
themselves into three classes. The first, resulting in idleness, may
be illustrated from many a sad story of a boy or a girl who has spent
in the first spurt of premature and uninteresting work, all the energy
which should have carried them through years of steady endeavor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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