CHAPTER III

PUBLIC PROVISION FOR RECREATION

INTRODUCTORY LESSON PLAN

What game do you like best? Analyze the game in order to see why it especially appeals to you.

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a. In what way does it make your body stronger, more manageable, more graceful?

b. How does it help your mental development?

c. To what extent does it develop good sportsmanship?

d. Does it develop team work or individual play, or both?

e. Is there provision in your school grounds for this game? f. Is it a game which you can continue when you are graduated from school?

g. What provision is there for it in the playgrounds and parks of your community?

h. Suggest some practical means of extending the benefits of your favorite game to older people.

1. WHY EVERY ONE SHOULD PLAN FOR RECREATION

The old adage, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" is just as true of grown people as it is of children. In order to do our work well, whether in school, in business, in the factory, or in the home, we must all spend some time in recreation. When our working hours are spent indoors plenty of out-door exercise is especially necessary to health. Out-door recreation is available both in winter and in summer in the form of skating, hockey, walking, swimming, base-ball, football, tennis, golf, rowing, gardening, and many other sports. Besides physical recreation we also need mental recreation in concerts, lectures, motion pictures, and dramatics. These forms of recreation we can enjoy in two ways. We may either look on and be entertained, or we may be active participants. Although we may enjoy both, the latter is better for us in

every way.

It is for each individual to choose the form of recreation that

best suits his particular needs. If he prefers to spend his leisure time loafing in city streets, or in hanging about pool rooms, his work will probably suffer for it. Indeed, his effi

Conditions such as here shown are not likely to produce good citizens.

ciency and success depend to a surprising degree on what he does with his spare time.

In these days of specialization in industry, when workers perform the same operation minute after minute, and hour after hour, their work becomes mechanical, and in it they have far less opportunity for self-expression than had workers in the days before the factories came. To-day a man often becomes part of a machine. It is only in his leisure hours that his personality has a chance to expand. He needs some form of active recreation, not entertainment, that will help him keep alive in himself the initiative and ideals that have little place in his work.

Many healthful forms of recreation are now offered to us by our city government. There is a growing conviction that it is the city's business to give its citizens opportunity for recreation during their leisure hours. People have begun to believe that the children of a city have a right to play in safety and under good influences, and that adults should be afforded forms of recreation that will help them do better work in their working hours. The playgrounds, the parks, the athletic fields, and the bathing beaches of our cities are planned and directed to fill this great need for proper recreation.

2. PLAYGROUNDS

In country communities and small towns children have plenty of room to play. The fields, the woods, the brooks are open to them. Cities grew so rapidly and the population increased so enormously within a few years that little attention was given to the physical needs of growing children. Their homes being often back rooms in crowded tenements, they had no place to play except in the alleys and streets. There they played ball and ran about at their games, dodging horses and trucks, and were

often the girls, of the district. There was always a leader whose word was law, and whose leadership had usually been won by

physical combat. The gang rejoiced in vacant lot bonfires, window smashing, and petty thieving. Good habits taught in school were broken up by bad habits acquired after school or during the summer vacation. The gangs were really outlaws, carrying on a kind of warfare against the rest of the community. Such law-breaking sports and street loafing led to juvenile delinquency. In the end such conditions were far more likely to produce criminals than good citizens.

Boys and girls who are physically weak through inheritance or under-nourishment have no chance to develop under the gang system. There the law of the survival of the fittest is supreme. The weak children either do not grow up, or if they do they are seldom able to take care of themselves, and eventually they become a burden on the community. In either case the city's loss in money alone is incalculable. And when we consider that a democracy is just as good as the citizens that make it up, we see that the whole moral and physical tone of

Courtesy of Citizens' Committee, Pittsburgh, Pa. THE WADING POOL, LAWRENCE PARK, PITTSBURGH

street pools.

the community is low

ered when such conditions exist.

The movement toward playgrounds and organized play was started in Boston in 1886. In that year the first supervised out-door playground was opened. In the thirty-odd years since then our cities have come to realize the tremendous waste that results from allowing

their junior citizens to grow up under bad influences. To change the gang spirit into the game spirit, and the gang leader into the team captain, cities are spending millions

of dollars in developing and maintaining playgrounds. Vacant lots have been fenced in and equipped with swings, slides, coasters, sand-pits, wading pools, running tracks, and gymnastic apparatus. Men and women trained in games, athletic sports, and play leadership have been employed to take charge of the playgrounds and teach the boys and girls how to play.

It might be remarked that all children seem to know how to play, so why should they be taught? But children are not born with a knowledge of games any more than they are born with the ability to read and write. Somebody must teach them. If that function is left to chance, they may be taught crapshooting and law-breaking as well as baseball or gymnastics. The play leaders teach our great games, using especial care to see that the weaker children have a chance, to instill the principle of fair play, and to build up the idea of team work. When a child learns to play for the team, and not for personal glory, he has learned the first principle of citizenship.

In the ideal playground system there should be a playground within a quarter of a mile of every home, and a larger park or playground within a five-cent fare of every part of the city. Very few communities as yet measure up to this standard. Chicago's "neighborhood parks" are planned with this end in view. New York City has established playgrounds in vacant lots and in parks, and has even developed yard spaces in the centre of blocks for playgrounds. To supplement these, a number of streets in congested districts are roped off and closed to traffic during certain hours of the day, so that children can play there out of danger of passing vehicles.

Many cities have extended recreation privileges to older citizens as well as to the younger ones. School buildings have been thrown open at night for social centre activities—dancing, dramatics, gymnasium drill, motion pictures, lectures, public forums, and mothers' clubs. Some cities have erected buildings designed and used only for recreation. Municipal golf courses and tennis courts have been established, and community