Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/478

474 in regard to the offices of the play attitude is conveniently given in the Proceedings of the Third Annual Congress of the Playground Association of America:

1. Playgrounds to be effective must have supervisors, directors and teachers who have had such training that they understand the child and can direct his activities so as to bring about the best results mentally, morally, physically and socially.

2. Play, being the chief activity of children during infancy, contains the beginnings of all subsequent development and culture. Its function is educative, and its forms are derived from hereditary adaptations and coordinations pleasurable to us from their usefulness in the distant past of the race. We consider the chief purposes of the playground to be: (a) the promotion of robust health through the encouragement of a free and enjoyable life in the open air; (b) the development of nervous coordinations and the normal functions, especially of the vital organs, through the vigorous activity of play; (c) the arousing of deeper interests, emotions and enthusiasms through those activities by which the central nervous system was developed in the past of the race and to which alone it responds with full effectiveness; thus determining the energy of nervous discharge and consequent vigor of all after life; (d) the training in courtesy and good fellowship through those social relations of play in which friendships are chiefly formed; (e) the establishment of a moral trend to life through the cultivation of right habits and those loyalties on which social morality and good citizenship chiefly depend; (f) the cultivation of a sense of the joy of life, by which the soul is harmonized and unified and a play spirit for life's work is acquired.

As to the specific qualities generated in the play group, we may repeat the conclusions of all who have looked into the matter—that the playground is a field of discipline in the elementary virtues of a democracy: loyalty, sensitivity to fair dealing, and the capacity to lead and to follow under the control of standards applicable to every one in the group. How the boy, in playing a game, puts himself in the other's place and enlarges his range of sympathy and imagery is acutely described by Joseph Lee:

The team and the plays that it executes are present in a very vivid form to his consciousness. His conscious individuality is more thoroughly lost in the sense of membership than perhaps it ever becomes in any other way. So that the sheer experience of citizenship in the simplest and essential form—of a sharing in a public consciousness, of having the social organization present as a controlling ideal in your heart—is very intense. . ..

Along with the sense of the team as a mechanical instrument, and unseparated from it in the boy 's mind, is the consciousness of it as the embodiment of a common purpose. There is in team play a very intimate experience of the ways in which such a purpose is built up and made effective. You feel, though without analysis, the subtle ways in which a single strong character breaks out the road ahead and gives confidence to the rest to follow; how the creative power of one ardent imagination, bravely sustained, makes possible the putting through of the play as he conceives it. You feel to the marrow of your bones how each loyal member contributes to the salvation of all the others by holding the conception