two. Arm work is relatively too prominent a feature in gymnasia. Those who
lead excessively sedentary lives are prone to be turbulent and extreme in both
passion and opinion, as witness the oft-adduced revolutionary disposition of
cobblers.
The play problem is now fairly open and is vast in its relation to many other
things. Roof playgrounds, recreation piers, schoolyards and even school-
buildings, open before and after school hours; excursions and outings of many
kinds and with many purposes, which seem to distinctly augment growth;
occupation during the long vacation when, beginning with spring, most juvenile
crime is committed; theatricals, which according to some police testimony lessen
the number of juvenile delinquents; boys' clubs with more or less self-
government of the George Junior Republic and other types, treated in another
chapter; nature-study; the distinctly different needs and propensities of both
good and evil in different nationalities; the advantages of playground fences and
exclusion, their disciplinary worth, and their value as resting places; the liability
that "the boy without a playground will become the father without a job"; the
relation of play and its slow transition to manual and industrial education at the
savage age when a boy abhors all regular occupation; the necessity of exciting
interest, not by what is done for boys, but by what they do; the adjustment of
play to sex; the determination of the proper average age of maximal zest in and
good from sandbox, ring-toss, bean-bag, shuffle-board, peg top, charity, funeral
play, prisoner's base, hill-dill; the value and right use of apparatus, and of
rabbits, pigeons, bees, and a small menagerie in the playground; tan-bark, clay,
the proper alternation of excessive freedom, that often turns boys stale through
the summer, with regulated activities; the disciplined "work of play" and
sedentary games; the value of the washboard rubbing and of the hand and knee
exercise of scrubbing, which a late writer would restore for all girls with clever
and Greek-named play apparatus; as well as digging, shoveling, tamping, pick-
chopping, and hod-carrying exercises in the form of games for boys; the
relations of women's clubs, parents' clubs, citizens' leagues and unions, etc., to
all this work—such are the practical problems.
The playground movement encounters its chief obstacles in the most crowded
and slum districts, where its greatest value and success was expected for boys in
the early teens, who without supervision are prone to commit abuses upon
property and upon younger children,[17] and are so disorderly as to make the
place a nuisance, and who resent the "fathering" of the police, without, at least,
the minimum control of a system of permits and exclusions. If hoodlums play at