THE PLAY ATTITUDE 477 



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 mechan- 

 ical 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 frater- 

 nity. 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. 



