Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and HygieneHall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Science
Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene
Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Adolescence; Children -- Health and hygiene; Educational psychology
Sheldon's interesting statistics show that among the institutional
activities of American children,[12] predatory organizations culminate
from eleven to fifteen, and are chiefly among boys. These include
bands of robbers, clubs for hunting and fishing, play armies,
organized fighting bands between separate districts, associations for
building forts, etc. This form of association is the typical one for
boys of twelve. After this age their interests are gradually
transferred to less loosely organized athletic clubs. Sheldon's
statistics are as follows:
Age 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Total
No. of
predatory 4 5 3 0 7 1 1 3 1 0 25 = Girls
societies 4 2 17 31 18 22 (11) 7 1 0 111 = Boys
Innocent though these predatory habits may be in small boys, if they
are not naturally and normally reduced at the beginning of the teens
and their energy worked off into athletic societies, they become
dangerous. "The robber knight, the pirate chief, and the marauder
become the real models." The stealing clubs gather edibles and even
useless things, the loss of which causes mischief, into some den,
cellar, or camp in the woods, where the plunder of their raids is
collected. An organized gang of boy pilferers for the purpose of
entering stores had a cache, where the stolen goods were brought
together. Some of these bands have specialized on electric bells and
connections, or golf sticks and balls. Jacob Riis says that on the
East Side of New York, every corner has its gang with a program of
defiance of law and order, where the young tough who is a coward alone
becomes dangerous when he hunts with the pack. He is ambitious to get
"pinched" or arrested and to pose as a hero. His vanity may obliterate
common fear and custom as his mind becomes inflamed with flash
literature and "penny dreadfuls." Sometimes whole neighborhoods are
terrorized so that no one dares to testify against the atrocities they
commit. Riis even goes so far as to say that "a bare enumeration of
the names of the best-known gangs would occupy the pages of this
book."[13] The names are sufficiently suggestive--hell's kitchen gang,
stable gang, dead men, floaters, rock, pay, hock gang, the soup-house
gang, plug uglies, back-alley men, dead beats, cop beaters, and
roasters, hell benders, chain gang, sheeny skinners, street cleaners,
tough kids, sluggers, wild Indians, cave and cellar men, moonlight
howlers, junk club, crook gang, being some I have heard of. Some of
the members of these gangs never knew a home, were found perhaps as
babies wrapped in newspapers, survivors of the seventy-two dead
infants Riis says were picked up on the streets in New York in 1889,
or of baby farming. They grow up street arabs, slum waifs, the
driftwood of society, its flotsam and jetsam, or plankton, fighting
for a warn corner in their resorts or living in crowded
tenement-houses that rent for more than a house on Fifth Avenue.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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