Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/481

Rh community is not that of creation out of nothing, but of extending and correlating social tendencies already operating; that the problem of assimilating the non-social factions in the school is not one of mechanical adjustment and stricter discipline. If the school as a group is to compete with the narrower loyalties aroused by clique and fraternity it must stand in the minds of teachers, parents and students, for intense, live and big purposes—racial, occupational and civic. It must supply on a large scale the values which exist in small compass in the fraternity. Otherwise the school itself may become an ingrown institution, and its student-government devices, its festivals and athletics for all, its swimming pools and dancing, its football fields and club houses, may become agencies of personal enjoyment outside the correctives of the moral and civic needs of the environing society.

The problem of the fraternity, consequently, is not to be settled by repression or arbitrary enactment. Its solution involves a progressive extension of the play attitude from gang to school and beyond—a play attitude which recognizes responsibility for more and more remote ends and abolishes the time-honored dualism of work and play. For the spirit of the creative artist is not confined to the fields of music, painting and the drama. In the professions, in industry and in politics, the men and women who have caught the contagion of play in their youth make their ideal enterprises enthusiastic, daring games, guided, however, by the standards of execution which they have learned on the playground.