The High School Boy and His Problems/The Leisure Hour
Every boy has leisure—much more, often, than he thinks. There are the hours during the day when no tasks are set, the weeks of the summer vacation when there is frequently nothing definite regularly to occupy his time, and there are the long winter evenings when even study will not suffice to take up all his available time. More often than otherwise he is left to himself during these hours and days of leisure, and what he does to occupy the time affects materially both his present and future happiness and his character.
One of our most respected Southern colleges has, among other customs, an unwritten tradition that the young fellow just out of high school and entering college should not be found loafing around the "Corner," a well-known place with its own particular attractions and allurements as well as its own particular dangers. The reason for this restriction, if a reason were necessary, is, no doubt, that it is not thought good for a young boy to begin his college career by cultivating the habit of loafing on street corners and picking up the uncertain acquaintances wont to congregate in such places; it is even worse for a high school boy so to occupy his time.
If any one in our town wanted to find Bert, if he were not in school or at home, he was as certain to be located at the pool hall as his father on Sunday morning was sure to be found at church. Bert knew no other recreation; it was his particular indoor sport, and though he developed no skill in pool to speak of, he was quite content to spend his money and waste his time in shooting the balls into a pocket. He has no other recreation today. He is not unique in any way. If, out of his working hours, you are looking for any boy with whom you are acquainted there is quite likely to be some particular corner where he leans against the wall, some definite place which draws him, some sport which makes for him a regular and an irresistible appeal, a mandolin, or a golf club, or a billiard cue that drops readily into his hand. As I go down town every day after my work is done, I can usually run in to the same old loafers talking politics or whittling the store boxes that cumber the sidewalk, the same young boys doing nothing in the same places or kidding the girls that pass by on the street.
A certain amount of leisure is necessary for everyone, man or boy. All work and no play not only makes Jack a dull boy, but it retards his development, it sours his disposition, and it very likely turns him into a pretty irritable and unpleasant companion. No one can work all the time without reducing his efficiency, and without wearing out his nervous system. A little vacation, even if it is only an hour or two in the woods or a half day fishing at the river, sends one back to his work rested and with more vim and more interest and enthusiasm. I have no doubt that a good part of the purpose of the creator when he inaugurated the custom of working six days and resting the seventh was to forestall some fool man who would probably start the custom of working all the time and so eliminate vacations and reduce the general efficiency of mankind. Asa class, we Americans have too few leisure hours.
Of course growing boys need more leisure time than do other people. They are only beginning to develop concentration, their bodies tire, and they grow weary very soon of doing one thing, and so need a change; their high-strung nervous systems need relaxation, and they are helped in the development of self-reliance by being left for a considerable time to do as they please. One has only to see the pinched, white, tired faces of the children who are ground down by long hours of toil to realize how it dwarfs and stunts and discourages a child to have no recreation, to have no time in which he may do as he pleases. The boy with no leisure is robbed of his youth; and youth at best is all too short.
It is really astonishing, however, if one has never before done so, to discover just how many hours in a day or a week or a month one has at his own disposal—in fact just how much time one wastes, or idles away, or uses for one's own pleasure or recreation; and boys have far more than other and older people. A boy came to see me not long ago who was complaining because he had so much work to do and so little time in which to do it, so much drudgery and so little leisure in which to enjoy himself. His was the common complaint of young boys.
"I haven't a minute," was his assertion.
"Won't you keep a record for the next week," I asked him, "of exactly how you spend the twenty-four hours of the day, and bring it back to me?"
I gave him directions as to how the time should be divided: so much for meals, so much for sleeping, so much for school work and study, and so on, and required him to account specifically for the entire twenty-four hours of the day.
"I guess I'm not working as much as I thought," he said when, at the end of the specified time, he came back again. "I'm a good deal more of a loafer than I should have been willing to admit."
His record showed, as yours will quite likely if you will take the trouble to investigate, that nearly one-third of the twenty-four hours of each working day, and much more than that on Saturdays and Sundays was taken up either with doing very trifling things or in actually doing nothing. He had considerable leisure, but he was wasting it. If the boy who thinks he has little or no leisure time will make a similar experiment, he may have his eyes opened. The undeniable fact is that most of us waste our leisure; we get out of it neither pleasure nor profit.
There are few things which more accurately reveal your character than the use that you make of your leisure time or would make of it if you could follow your own desires. If for the next twenty-four hours you could do as you please, go where you want to, and be asked no questions, what would you do? Some boys would go fishing, some would read a book or build something. I know boys who would stay in bed sleeping most of the time and others who would not go to bed at all; some would play a game or take a trip, and some would do things about which they would not care to speak. It might be very interesting for every boy to think the question out for himself and to answer it.
Many people, boys and men, are quite at a loss to know what to do with leisure time and quite upset if unexpectedly they are confronted with an hour or two of leisure and are separated from their ordinary entertainment. Many are like the old citizen in an isolated New England village, who being asked what he did in the winter when the summer tourists with whom he employed his time had gone, replied.
"Wal, mostly I set and think; and sometimes I jest set."
Those who have not trained themselves to think, who have no resourcefulness when left to their own devices, are sometimes forced merely to "set," and to find little pleasure in leisure time and no incentive to thought.
Coming into Atlanta one Sunday morning not long ago, I had as a seatmate an intelligent looking man of middle age who was bemoaning the fact that he was to have an unoccupied day in a city with which he was not familiar. Only two possible solutions of the problem as how best to spend a tiresome day suggested themselves to him—the Sunday newspaper and sleep. Church, music, books, the woods, a quiet walk—none of these made any appeal to him. He only yawned, bored at the mere thought that here was a whole day at his disposal and positively nothing to do. It was really sad to realize that here was a man whose life was more than half gone and who, when left to himself, was helpless to enjoy it. Some time I intend to write an article on how to spend one's time enjoyably in railroad stations.
One of the most unhappy men I know has an attractive home, a comfortable income, and much leisure. He is not harassed by hard toil or the fear of poverty; but he does not know how to spend his leisure. He has not cultivated any special friendships with people, or interest in them, he does not find enjoyment in reading, he takes no pleasure in the beautiful birds, and flowers, and trees with which he is surrounded. He plays no games, finds no comfort in exercise, and is at his wits end when he has read the Breeders' Gazette and the village newspaper. Like the New England farmer the most that he does is just to "set." A boy should cultivate as many interests as possible, should find a hundred interesting and profitable ways to employ his leisure time. In doing so he will be happier and wiser now, and more useful and happy later in life.
A boy's greatest danger and his greatest temptation comes not while he is at work, not while he is busy with something that keeps his brain and his hands employed but when he is free to do as he pleases, when his time is his own and when he does not know quite what to do with it, when he is out from under any direction but his own personal desires. It is only another illustration of Satan finding work for idle hands to do. Practically every bad habit that a boy develops, every moral misstep that he makes, may be traced to the misuse of leisure time. Any boy who has learned to smoke or to swear or to drink or to gamble or to be dishonest or to associate with vulgar or lewd women will admit, if he will recall his first offense, that in nine cases out of ten, he slipped at some vacation time, or at some time when he was free from the regular obligations of his daily work and with other fellows was left to his own devices. It is a story generally of "nothing to do" and "out for a time."
That was Tom Brown's experience as told in the story with which every high school boy is familiar. He was saved, fortunately, from the great temptation, but it was more through good luck than good management. If Arthur Donnithorne had had more to do, if his leisure time had been spent in something besides idleness and the pursuit of selfish pleasure, the tragedy of Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede might very easily have been averted.
There is a good reason for this condition of affairs. A boy relaxes at vacation time, he lets down, he is somewhat off his guard, and he therefore is more open to suggestion. It is at week ends, and Christmas time, and summer vacations, it is on the night when he is allowed to stay out after his regular bed time that the temptation comes. He wants to be a "good fellow," he can not bear to be thought a quitter; when something a little daring or risque is proposed, he often lacks the courage to stand out against it, and the inevitable happens. Disease and drunkenness and irregularities of all sorts are far more imminent at vacations than at any other time. The most dangerous times are when he is excited by victory or depressed by defeat or when he has so much leisure on his hands that he grows bored with it and must break loose into the irregular in order to relieve his pent-up feelings. I believe in athletics, but it must be confessed that the athletic contest is responsible for a good many boyish derelictions, because the excitement of victory or the despondency of defeat throws the boy out of himself for the time being and makes him an easy victim to the temptations which are always lying in wait.
It is nearly always an unfortunate thing for a boy to have no regular duties or responsibilities aside from his school work. The most unhappy and the most discontented boys I know, the laziest and the most dissipated, are those whose time before and after school is at their own disposal. They are likely to develop habits of extravagance, to become spendthrifts and loafers, and the loafer is generally ready for any sort of proposition that may come up that will give him a new sensation or a novel experience, immoral or otherwise. Even if the boy with unlimited leisure develops the habit of reading, which in itself is a very creditable one, his tendency will be to become something of a recluse, to shut himself in, and to grow pale and round shouldered and out of touch with other fellows of his age. Every growing boy is better off for having some regular work to do, something physical, if possible, that will harden his muscles and develop his strength and teach him to assume responsibility. Boys usually have to learn to like work as they learn to like olives, by keeping at it until their taste is developed. I know too many boys who would feel humiliated to be caught washing the car, or mowing the lawn, or taking care of the furnace, but any boy, no matter what the financial standing of his father may be, is made stronger and more manly and more dependable and happier, if he has a steady regular job to take up a part of his leisure time, and to teach him the dignity of labor and the value of money. I have never known anyone, boy or man, who lost caste by working, or who on the other hand was not helped by doing so.
In conjunction with too much leisure or leisure that is largely without occupation, too much spending money is a bad thing for a boy. When a boy has so much money at his disposal that he needs to give little thought to his expenditures, he is likely to grow selfish, to fall into extravagances, if not to drift into worse things. It is an uncomfortable situation for a boy to have too little money or less than the fellows with whom he regularly associates; it is a dangerous one for him to have so much that he can daily gratify his appetites or satisfy his desires for pleasure. If he does not learn while he is young to make some sort of sacrifice and to deny himself, he will not find it easy later in life.
Granted that there is danger to the young boy who has a considerable amount of leisure, there is, also, to the one who will use it wisely, a great opportunity. Most men who have come up from poverty and ignorance to positions of financial responsibility and intellectual attainment have done so through the regular and wise utilization of their leisure time. One of the best French scholars I know got all his preliminary knowledge during his leisure hours in the army when he was only a young boy. The biographies of well-known men furnish innumerable illustrations of boys who, with little encouragement and less opportunity, by using their leisure hours wisely made themselves ready for positions which would not otherwise have been open to them.
There are various ways in which the high school boy may utilize his leisure time. He may use it, as too many boys do, in the pursuit of so-called pleasures that are actually injurious to his health and to his character. It is not necessary to specify all of the things which are a real injury to a young fellow; one may be pretty well assured, however, that when the high school boy is out every night of the week until long after he should be in bed, whatever he may be doing, he is not attending Sunday school. When boys are found nightly hanging about street corners or talking to careless silly girls, they are not picking up information that will be of any particular service to them or developing habits that will better fit them for citizenship. Few boys develop vicious or immoral habits with the idea of continuing them. It is the fling of the moment, they say, and they promise themselves and their friends, often, that their derelictions are to be short lived. Experience shows, however, that the high school boy who even for a brief period falls into questionable habits finds it no easy matter to separate himself from them. Experiences of all sorts, at his age, sink deep into his consciousness and are hard to eradicate—psychologists tell us that such impressions are eradicated with far more difficulty than are those which come later in life. Fortunately, the larger percentage of boys are saved from such experiences.
Most of the young boys whom I know do not spend their time viciously but foolishly. They are not during their leisure developing useful knowledge or physical strength, or cultivating habits or tasks that yield them much present gratification or insure future happiness or usefulness, most of their activities being only momentary gratification.
"What did you do yesterday, before and after school?" I asked Frank a few days ago. Frank is aged seventeen and is making a feeble attempt to get through the junior year in high school. His father is a well-to-do citizen who has established himself in his present business by long and consistent hard work. He usually looks after his own furnace and occasionally mows his own lawn. I have even caught him washing his car or putting up the screens to his house. Frank has unlimited leisure and doesn't know a lawn mower from a cream separator. He knows how to drive a car but is ignorant of even the crudest methods of washing it. He is always well dressed and spends money freely. He is, in fact, a very pleasant and a very popular boy. He spends his leisure time as most boys in his class do.
"I slept so late in the morning," was his reply, "that by missing my breakfast I barely had time to get to school for my first recitation. At lunch time Paul and I went down to Harris' and had an egg malted milk. After our last recitation for the day we had another drink and then went to the movies. We fooled round until dinner time and took a ride in the car until bed time. In fact, I guess it was a little after bed time, for as nearly as I remember it was about one a m. when I rolled in."
And this is not unusual; it is his regular program. He seldom if ever studies; he has no interest in athletics; he does not look into a newspaper; he never reads a book. The car and sentimental girls and ice cream parlors and moving picture shows take up practically all of his leisure time which is not given over to lying in bed, or strumming a ukelele. It is a gay and carefree life he lives!
There is little harm, possibly, in racing a motor car about town, but it is, in the long run, an expensive pastime if it is not sometimes a dangerous one. It is the young boy, usually, who exceeds the speed limit. I can see little real profit or permanent good in most of the vaudeville or moving picture shows. The plays which appear regularly on the screen are frequently full of questionable suggestions if they are not actually vulgar, and at best they are unlikely often to aid in the development of either good taste or good morals; and yet there are many young boys in almost every town who would be unhappy and discontented if they did not attend at least one show a day, and I know many who during the summer time go twice a day. There are far better ways of spending leisure time, and ways which will bring more satisfactory returns both to the young boy and to the man that he will later become.
I was visiting not long ago in a part of the United States with whose trees and birds and flowers I had previously not been familiar. These things were to me both curious and interesting, and I asked a good many direct questions about them. Only one of the six or eight boys with whom I was walking about could give me any satisfactory information as to the names of the trees or the birds or the flowers with which I was not familiar though they were all intelligent in general matters, were graduates of good high schools, and had lived in the community all their lives.
Some of them ventured a guess, but in every case, as I remember, they guessed incorrectly. They were a little annoyed finally at their apparent ignorance, and one of them determined to show me that he was not wholly unfamiliar with the flora of his region. As we were passing through a park, he pointed out a bed of flowers saying, "Well, I know what those flowers are, anyway: they're phlox." He was really mistaken, though I did not have the courage to tell him so, for they were petunias.
Now, a boy who is fifteen years of age and who has spent any considerable time out of doors ought to have had interest and curiosity enough to learn the names of the plants which he has seen growing about him every day, he ought to be as familiar with common trees and shrubs as he is with the people whom he meets daily on the street. If he had such knowledge, it would enliven every quiet walk which he might take, it would give interest to every journey and help to dispel lonesomeness and gloom; for every bird in the hedges, every vine and shrub and flower which he would see from the car window, would seem like meeting an old friend on the streets of a strange city. The reasons why boys find so little pleasure in long walks into the country or in quiet strolls in the woods when there is no girl along, is because they meet little or nothing that is interesting or familiar; they lack the information and the training necessary to bring them pleasure, though it is information which might very easily be obtained.
There is no method of occupying one's leisure time that will bring more present and permanent pleasure to a boy than reading. Few boys read the newspapers "and those who do generally confine themselves to the cartoons and the sporting page. I shall have more in in detail to say about this subject in another article, so that I shall simply content myself with saying here, that part, at least, of a boy's leisure every day should be devoted to general reading that will stimulate his imagination, keep him informed on what is going on in the world today and what was going on centuries ago.
The boy or the man who reads is always safer and happier and has a great advantage over his companion who does not do so. He has a possibility of general intelligence not open to other boys.
Men who have not learned to take regular exercise while they are boys are little likely to do so later in life, and the adult man who engages in no regular exercise or who does not play with some sort of skill an athletic out-of-door game will grow old and ineffective earlier in life than would otherwise be the case, will grow wide of girth or slow on his feet even if he does not actually break down. There is nothing like exercise for keeping one young and active. The youngest old man that I know, in some ways a boy still at eighty, has played every day for many years, and is still playing, a vigorous athletic game.
Few people will keep up an interest in any athletic game in which they do not show some skill. Everybody who is normal likes to beat rather than to be beaten, and skill in almost any game which requires physical alertness, unless it be golf, is seldom developed unless one begins in youth. Further than this, if one waits until he is out of high school or college before he takes up any athletic recreation he is likely to argue and to prove the point to himself, that he has not time for such foolishness; his business is too exacting, his responsibilities are too great, things generally would go to the bow-wows if he took the time to learn what his better judgment tells him would be the best thing in the world for him. The high school boy has no such excuse. He has plenty of time, he would be immeasurably benefited by such exercise both now and later in life, and the development of skill is for him so much more possible than for an older man. There are few boys, no matter how thin or fat, heavy or light, tall or short, who could not by persistence develop skill beyond the commonplace in some sort of healthy athletic activity, and who would not from such development derive the greatest pleasure and profit from the mere joy of contest; from physical strength developed, from friendships formed, from self-reliance gained through the defeat of some opponent. Leisure time spent in the development of a strong healthy body will pay as high an interest on the time invested as anything which a high school boy can engage in. It will develop in him moral stamina and control; it will often bring him the respect and the admiration of his fellows and a physical reserve which will be to him a godsend when he needs to call upon it in the emergencies which come sooner or later to all men.
I have a neighbor, a man of education and of ordinary intelligence, who is constantly in mechanical difficulties. If a faucet leaks, he is quite at sea as to what ought to be done to adjust it; if his car gets out of order, he is as much at a loss to know how to fix it as is his ten-year-old son—more at a loss, perhaps, for the boy is learning to use his hands; he can not drive a nail or stoke a furnace, or make anything run that is out of order. If anything mechanical gets out of fix, he stands around as helpless as an infant. He did not when a boy learn to use his hands or to cultivate any mechanical skill.
Every boy of high school age should learn to make things and should develop curiosity enough to want to know how mechanical things are put together and how they run. Tools should not have an awkward feeling in his hands; he should be able to bore a straight hole, to put in a screw correctly, to saw a board evenly, and so to adjust a lawn mower that it will give the lawn a smooth, even hair cut. If he has access to a motor car he ought to figure out its mechanism intelligently enough to understand how to keep it in order and what to do for it when it refuses to work properly. I know boys who have had cars for years who are as confused and helpless when they look under the hood as they would be if they were asked to translate a language with which they were unfamiliar; they have not used their leisure time to advantage; and yet these are the things which any intelligent boy could learn, and the knowledge of which would be a great asset to him both in pleasure and in usefulness.
There is the opportunity, also, which every boy has during his leisure time for the cultivation of friendships, for the understanding of other boys, for the development of relationships which will continue throughout his whole life. I do not undervalue the good effects which come from a boy's association with girls; in another place I shall speak of these somewhat more at length. I believe, however, that the value of a boy's healthy association with other boys is much greater to him during his high school days than any other association he may have. Time spent in acquiring friends and in learning to know and to understand them is usually well spent. As I go back now over a period of forty years I find no greater satisfaction than in the recollection that I came to know a few boys well, that our friendships deepened as time went on, and if I could choose today whom of all of my friends from whom I am now separated by time and distance I should most like to see, and with whom I should soonest drop into the old time relationship, it would be a boy whom I knew first in district school, with whom I later prepared for college, and who was for two years in college my closest friend. I see him now only at rare intervals, for we are separated by a thousand miles or more, but I am sure that the leisure time in childhood and youth and early manhood I spent with him was well spent and brought me happiness then and leaves me a pleasant memory today. The experience I had so long ago, any other boy can have if he gives himself to it.
For most of us, boys or men, there are set tasks which occupy definite portions of time. During these periods we are largely the creatures of routine; lessons or routine duties, or business of one sort or another come to us regularly throughout the day, and we have little or no choice but to do them and to ask no questions. We may each of us exercise a certain amount of discretion or individuality in the doing of this work, but in the main it is put before us without our asking, and it is done today in much the same way as it was yesterday. It is only when it comes to our leisure time that the choice of how it may be employed is ours. We are never so much our real selves as during our leisure hours. Eliminating the leisure time which falls to every high school boy during the five working days of the week, there is always Saturday and Sunday in which he is pretty free to follow his own tactics. He can spend his time in things that are trifling or useless or even harmful. He can sleep, or, what is equally bad if not worse, he can sit around doing absolutely nothing but chatter and gossip and loaf. But life is too short even to waste it in youth; there are too many pleasant and profitable things to do, and it is some of these that in these paragraphs I have attempted to suggest. Every boy must have pleasure, but it should be healthful and stimulating; it should send him back to the regular work which is his to do, stronger, healthier, cleaner, with greater energy and greater ambition. If from your leisure hours you come to your regular work listless and yawning and without ambition or pleasure at the thought of work, if your pleasure has left you tired and irritable, if your recreation, however you spend it, has not in some way made you a better boy and better prepared you for your work, then it has not been spent as it should have been. You should work it out some other way.