The problem of the school, so far as the gang is concerned, is not so much to use actual gangs for the furtherance of its objects, as it is to use the underlying instincts of boyhood, which lead to the formation of gangs. These instincts normally lead the boy to associate himself with other boys in a gang and in this gang to pursue certain lines of activity. It is quite possible, in addition, to turn these gang instincts in the direction of the activities of the school. The emotional reaction of the boy toward his gang and its doings, can be extended, in part, to the school and its life.

For this purpose, the teacher must first of all understand the gang spirit. She is too apt, being herself a woman, to treat the boy as only a rougher and more troublesome sort of girl. She tends to interpret178 his acts as if they were those of a girl, and to forget how different in the two cases may be the inner meaning of the same overt deed. She errs, in short, by thinking of the boy in terms of her own woman’s nature, when she should be studying him objectively as the quite different sort of creature that he actually is.

Take, for example, a rough-and-tumble fight. It is a rare woman who can see that as a boy sees it. She feels the brutality of the contest with something of the disgust with which she would view a case of fisticuffs between two women. She sees the dirt and blood, and she feels sympathetically the blows. What she does not feel is the “hour of glorious conflict, when the blood leaps, and the muscles rally for the mastery,” the “joy of battle,” the “seeing red,” the decent, manly pride in taking one’s punishment and “fighting it out as long as one can stand and see.” The same teacher, because she is a woman, will face with steady courage an experience more dreadful than twenty fist fights rolled into one; and yet,179 because she is a woman, she may fail to see how long a step some bruised and disheveled youngster has taken toward manhood.

There are many acts of boyhood which, like fighting, seem brutal or depraved or absurd, until one makes out their instinctive basis, and realizes their inner meaning. Take, by way of another illustration, this case which fell under my own eye. A boy whose gang was “playing Indians” happened upon a flat piece of some dark red, hard-grained stone, and after days of labor fashioned from it a very respectable stone knife of the Neolithic period. As a tool, naturally, this stone knife was nearly worthless. As a piece of boyish handicraft, it was by no means without merit; and the maker had wrought it lovingly, with some vague instinctive feeling, I am sure, for the far-away times when a stone knife was an article of value to be handed down from father to son.

The boy carried this primitive tool in his pocket along with his other treasures, and showed it proudly to his companions, who, being themselves boys, admired and180 understood. One day, however, he left it on his desk, and returned to search for it, just in time to see his teacher pick it up and toss it contemptuously into the waste-basket. There it remained; for the owner was too grieved and hurt to take it out again.

So that teacher made an enemy where she ought to have made a friend. The trouble with her was that she did not know her business. Even if she could not understand all that the strange treasures of boyhood mean to a boy, that stone knife ought to have fairly shouted at her—Indians! Look out! To the seeing eye that fragment of stone bristled with meaning—the wild instincts of boyhood, its strange acquisitiveness, its joy in creation. To any reasonably sympathetic adult, it ought to have meant the opportunity to get a little nearer to one bewildered little soul.

The woman teacher, then, must learn to get outside herself and to see the boy as he is. She must study him as she would study any other wild creature. He has his own habits, his own instincts, and his own emotional181 reactions toward experience. These are to be studied in the spirit of a naturalist. Then, being understood, they are to be used.

Now, the boy, for our present purposes, differs from the girl in two respects. In the first place, he is vastly more active and motor-minded; and in the second, he is intensely and spontaneously loyal to a small but highly organized group of his fellows, in which his own individual will tends to become more or less merged.

The treatment of the first of these qualities of boyhood is perhaps a problem for superintendents and school boards rather than for individual teachers. One rejoices to see that, more and more every year, attention is being given to this aspect of boy nature. Manual training, industrial education, practical work of all sorts are relieving boys from the unnatural burden of acquisition and offering them instead their proper chance to do. Why is it, when we can all see so clearly the general superiority of the color sense in girls, we are so blind to the boy’s pre?minence in the muscular sense!

182 Much of this, I say, is not the problem of the individual teacher, who must, for the most part, conform to the school programme. Even here, however, an insight into boy character will help her in smaller matters, here and there, to handle the boy with the grain instead of across it. Outside school hours, there is sometimes opportunity for the teacher to enter into many of the activities dear to boyhood which I have already discussed. The excursions to interesting and historic spots, the nature walks, the visits to industrial plants, and the like, the value of which I have already emphasized, are for the most part quite within the range of most teachers. A few women of my acquaintance have even gone camping with their boys, and done it successfully.

The most important thing, however, is that the teacher, while she appeals at every turn to the natural activities of boys, shall always, so far as she possibly can, organize these activities on the basis of the boy’s own spontaneous groups. When she cannot manage this, as ............