1. Play 



The greatest asset of a nation is its children and the most 

 important problem of a nation is preparing its children for 

 the responsibilities and duties of later life. Now it is only 

 within the last few years that these two facts have become 

 assertive in the collective consciousness of the American 

 people, and hence the work of providing adequate opportuni- 

 ties for the normal development of childhood into adulthood 

 is yet in its incipiency. The child in its life " repeats the age- 

 long struggle of mankind upward from savagery to civiliza- 

 tion," x and unless all the stages of the struggle are experienced 

 normal growth is not enjoyed and the adult is handicapped. 



During the first centuries following the fall of Rome, 

 savagery, barbarity, robbery, murder, license, wanderlust, in- 

 stability and turbulence were very much in evidence. Finally, 

 however, the seething mass of humanity of Europe gradually 

 began to take on a more or less permanent form and some 

 semblance of order manifested itself. The individual stepped 

 out from the crowd and Feudalism resulted, during the ascend- 

 ancy of which Europe produced an aristocracy of leadership. 

 A few more centuries and the Crusades came and welded 

 Europe into a unit under the stimulus of the religious impulse. 

 Then followed the German Reformation, which gave Europe 

 religious liberty, and the French Revolution, which gave 

 Europe political liberty. Today the battle cry of mankind is 

 economic liberty, the right of each individual " to a place in 

 the sun." 



How beautifully the development of modern civilization 

 parallels the growth of the child into the adult! First, the 

 turbulent years of youth, the years of savagery, barbarity, the 

 days of a superabundance of vitality and energy, the days of 

 the "wild joy of living," the days of foundation-laying and 



1 G. Walter Fiske, " Boy Life," p. 49. 

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