Globusz^® Publishing 

The Nature of the Boy

Members of the Scouting family: Cub, Scout and Senior Scout

The first step towards success in training your boy is to know something about boys in general and then about this boy in particular.

Dr. Saleeby, in an address to the Ethical Society in London, said:

"The first requisite for a successful teacher is knowledge of the nature of the boy. The boy or girl is not a small edition of a man or woman, not a piece of blank paper on which the teacher should write, but every child has his own peculiar curiosity, his inexperience, a normal mysteri- ous frame of mind which needs to be tactfully helped, encouraged and moulded or modified or even suppressed."

It is well to recall, so far as possible, what your ideas were when a boy yourself, and you can then much better understand his feelings and desires.

The following qualities in the boy have to be taken into consideration:

Humour. - It must be remembered that a boy is naturally full of humour; it may be on the shallow side, but he can always appreciate a joke and see the funny side of things. And this at once gives the worker with boys a pleasant and bright side to his work and enables him to become the cheery companion, instead of the taskmaster, if he only joins in the fun of it.

Courage. - The average boy generally manages to have pluck as well. He is not by nature a grumbler, though later on he may become one, when his self-respect has died out of him and when he has been much in the company of "grousers." Confidence. - A boy is generally supremely confident in his own powers. There- fore, he dislikes being treated as a child and being told to do things or how to do them. He would much rather try for himself, even though it may lead him into blunders, but it is just by making mistakes that a boy gains experience and makes his character.

Sharpness. - A boy is generally as sharp as a needle. It is easy to train him in matters appertaining to observation and noticing things and deducing their meaning.

Love of Excitement. - The town boy is generally more unsettled than his country brothers by the excitements of the town, whether they are "a passing fire engine, or a good fight between two of his neighbours." He cannot stick at a job for more than a month or two because he wants change.

Responsiveness. - When a boy finds somebody who takes an interest in him he responds and follows where he is led, and it is here that hero-worship comes in as a great force for helping the Scoutmaster.

Loyalty. - This is a feature in a boy's character that must inspire boundless hope. Boys are usually loyal friends to each other, and thus friendliness comes almost naturally to a boy. It is the one duty that he understands. He may appear selfish outwardly, but, as a general rule, he is very willing under the surface to be helpful to others, and that is where our Scout training finds good soil to work upon.

If one considers and studies these different attributes in the boy one is in a far better position for adapting the training to suit his different propensities. Such study is the first step to making a success of the training. I had the pleasure, during one single week, of coming across three boys in different centres who were pointed out to me as having been incorrigible young blackguards and hooligans until they came under the influence of Scouting. Their respective Scoutmasters had, in each case, found out the good points which underlay the bad ones in them, and having seized upon these had put the boys on to jobs which suited their peculiar temperaments; and there are now these three, fine hulking lads, each of them doing splendid work, entirely transformed in character from their old selves. It was worth the trouble of having organised the Troops just to have had these single successes.

Remember that the boy, on joining, wants to begin scouting right away; so don't dull his keenness by too much preliminary explanation at first. Meet his wants by games and Scouting practices, and instill elementary details bit by bit afterwards as you go along.

Mr. Casson, writing in the magazine Teachers' World, thus describes that com- plicated work of Nature the boy:

"Judging from my own experience, I would say that boys have a world of their own - a world that they make for themselves; and neither the teacher nor the lessons are admitted to this world. A boy's world has its own events and standards and code and gossip and public opinion.

"In spite of teachers and parents, boys remain loyal to their own world. They obey their own code, although it is quite a different code to the one that is taught to them at home and in the schoolroom. They gladly suffer martyrdom at the hands of uncomprehending adults, rather than be false to their own code.

"The code of the teacher, for instance, is in favour of silence and safety and decorum. The code of the boys is diametrically opposite. It is in favour of noise and risk and excitement.

"Fun, fighting, and feeding! These are the three indispensable elements of the boy's world. These are basic. They are what boys are in earnest about; and they are not associated with teachers nor schoolbooks.

"According to public opinion in Boydom, to sit for four hours a day at a desk indoors is a wretched waste of time and daylight. Did anyone ever know a boy - a normal healthy boy, who begged his father to buy him a desk? Or did anyone ever know a boy, who was running about outdoors, go and plead with his mother to be allowed to sit down in the drawing room?

"Certainly not. A boy is not a desk animal. He is not a sitting-down animal. Neither is he a pacifist nor a believer in safety first; nor a book-worm, nor a philosopher.

"He is a boy - God bless him - full to the brim of fun and fight and hunger and daring mischief and noise and observation and excitement. If he is not, he is abnormal.

"Let the battle go on between the code of the teachers and the code of the boys. The boys will win in the future as they have in the past. A few will surrender and win the scholarships, but the vast majority will persist in rebellion and grow up to be the ablest and noblest men in the nation.

"Is it not true, as a matter of history, that Edison, the inventor of a thousand patents, was sent home by his school teacher with a note saying he was `too stupid to be taught'?

"Is it not true that both Newton and Darwin, founders of the scientific method, were both regarded as blockheads by their school teachers?

"Are there not hundreds of such instances, in which the duffer of the classroom became useful and eminent in later life? And doesn't this prove that our present methods fail in developing the aptitudes of boys?

"Is it not possible to treat boys as boys? Can we not adapt grammar and history and geography and arithmetic to the requirements of the boy's world? Can we not interpret our adult wisdom into the language of boyhood?

"Is not the boy right, after all, in maintaining his own code of justice and achievement and adventure?

"Is he not putting action before learning, as he ought to do? Is he not really an amazing little worker, doing things on his own, for lack of intelligent leadership?

"Would it not be vastly more to the point if the teachers were, for a time, to become the students and to study the marvelous boy-life which they are at present trying vainly to curb and repress?

"Why push against the stream, when the stream, after all, is running in the right direction?

"Is it not time for us to adapt our futile methods and to bring them into harmony with the facts? Why should we persist in saying dolefully, `boys will be boys,' instead of rejoicing in the marvelous energy and courage and initiative of boyhood? And what task can be nobler and more congenial to a true teacher than to guide the wild forces of boy nature cheerily along into paths of social service?"