Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/328

310 and sleeping chamber are all within the same four walls, they have no space in which their natural activity may spend itself. It is "Johnny, don't do this," and "Johnny, don't do that," until in sheer despair Johnny must flee to the street for such diversion as he would have. The dust and dirt are better than the "don'ts" dinning in his ears. Toys he has none; even the garbage box or ash pile may furnish a temporary plaything. His greatest danger, however, lies in the enforced idleness and the company in which it is apt to push him. That this is no idle fear for our children is sufficiently attested by the history of our street gangs, with their boys from nine years up, and the number of juvenile arrests. An investigation of one district in Chicago proved that juvenile arrests increased 60 per cent, in July and August, and the inference seems justified that the closing of school and the enforced idle street life of the boys were its cause.

The recognition of the necessity of doing something to overcome the evil of these conditions has led to what may now, since it has become so widespread, be called the vacation-school movement and the movement for playgrounds, both having as motive the desire to take the children from the streets, the latter wishing to provide place in which the children may work at their pleasures, the former wishing to provide and prove work itself pleasure.

The vacation school seeks to teach resourcefulness, that element in which our common schools seem lacking, by giving the hands something to do. Many toys are given to children for which they care little; but who ever heard of any child that would not be interested in a tool box? And tools, in one way and another, are the sources of attraction in vacation schools.

So long ago as 1872 the school committee of Cambridge, Mass., urged "the need of providing occupation for those children whose natural guardians are unable to do so. For two months in the summer the schools are closed … the scholars who can be taken into the country profit by the vacation. But it is a time of idleness, often of crime, with many who are left to roam the streets, with no friendly hand to guide them, save