474 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ment 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 be- 

 ginnings of all subsequent development and culture. Its function is educative, 

 and its forms are derived from hereditary adaptations and coordinations pleas- 

 urable 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; (&) the 

 development of nervous coordinations and the normal functions, especially of the 

 vital organs, through the vigorous activity of play; (o) 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; (/) 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 de- 

 scribed 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 unsepa- 

 rated 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 



2 Proceedings of the Third Annual Congress of the Playground Association 

 of America, pp. 92-93. 



