choir director will succeed best in keeping his boys
in the choir and in getting them to do good work, who, other things
being equal, keeps on the best terms with them personally. Our advice
is, therefore, that the prospective director of a choir of boys find
out just as much as possible about the likes and dislikes, the
predilections and the prejudices of pre-adolescent boys, and
especially that he investigate ways and means of getting on good terms
with them. He will find that most boys are intensely active at this
stage, for their bodies are not growing very much, and there is
therefore a large amount of superfluous energy. This activity on their
part is perfectly natural and indeed wholly commendable; and yet it
will be very likely to get the boy into trouble unless some one is at
hand to guide his energy into useful channels. This does not
necessarily mean making him do things that he does not like to do; on
the contrary, it frequently involves helping him to do better,
something that he already has a taste for doing. Space does not permit
details; but if the reader will investigate the Boy Scout movement,
the supervised playground idea, and the development of school
athletics, as well as the introduction of manual training of various
sorts, trips to museums of natural history, zooelogical and botanical
gardens, _et cetera_, school "hikes" and other excursions, and similar
activities that now constitute a part of the regular school work in
many of our modern educational institutions, he will find innumerable
applications of the idea that we are presenting; and he will perhaps
be surprised to discover that the boy of today _likes_ to go to
school; that he applies at home many of the things that he learns
there, and that he frequently regards some teacher as his best friend
instead of as an arch enemy, as formerly. These desirable changes have
not taken place in all schools by any means, but the results of their
introduction have been so significant that a constantly increasing
number of schools are adopting them; and public school education is to
mean infinitely more in the future than it has in the past because we
are seeing the necessity of looking at things through the eyes of the
pupil, and especially from the standpoint of his life outside of and
after leaving the school. Let the choir trainer learn a lesson from
the public school teacher, and let him not consider the boy to be
vicious just because he is lively