It is to be doubted whether the average pastor or parent has an adequate conception of the tremendous odds against which the moral forces contend for the conservation of the city’s childhood and youth, and whether we have as yet begun to solve the problems that arise from the city’s sinister treatment of the home.  Public parks, field-houses, libraries, and social settlements graciously mitigate the evil, but are far from curing it.

To turn to the public schools with the expectation that they can immediately, or at length, make good the injury done the home by industrial usurpation is to expect more than is fair or possible.  They are doing valiantly and well, they are becoming social centers and in due time they will have more adequately in hand both the vocational and recreational interests of youth.  With this accession of educational territory will come a proportionate increase in the number of male teachers, and a further diminution of the fallacy that the only kind of order is silence and the prime condition of mental concentration inaction.  The system will become less and the boy more important.

But the whole community is the master educator; the best home is not exempt from its influence nor the best school greatly superior to its morality.  In fact the school, even as the place of amusement and all places of congregation, serves to diffuse the moral problems of boyhood throughout the whole mass.  Moral sanitation is more difficult than physical sanitation, and the spoiled boy is a good conductor of various forms of moral virus.  The moral training involved in the ordinary working of the public school is considerable and is none the less valuable because it is indirect.  With more attention to physical condition, corrective exercise, and organized play, and with the motivating of a larger area of school work, the moral value of the institution will be still further enhanced.

The church addresses itself to the problem in ways both general and specific, positive and negative.  In its stimulation of public conscience, in its inspiration of those who work directly for improved conditions, and in Sunday schools and young people’s societies, a contribution of no small value is continually made.  A rather negative, or at best, concessive attitude toward recreation and a disposition to rest satisfied with the denunciation of harmful institutions and activities militates against her greatest usefulness.  She must rather compensate for home shortages and compete with the doubtful allurements of the city.  This she may do in part within her own plant and in part by encouraging and supporting all wholesome outlets for the athletic zest, social adventure, worthy ambition, and vocational quest of youth.  Those segments of the church which believe in bringing every legitimate human interest within the scope and sanction of religion will in the nature of things offer a more immediate and telling competition to the harmful devices of the city.