Problem of Bad Boys Closely Studied

Problem of Bad Boys Closely Studied By Thomas R. Henry, Written for the Washington, D. C, Star [This article, and others from the same source which are to follow, will be of especial interest to Era readers, for the reason that Harold D. Fife, whose name appears so prominently, is a "Mormon" boy. He was born in Salt Lake City, January 17, 1906, the son of John D. and Eliza Stewart Fife. His maternal grandfather was Bishop Isaac N. Stewart, of Draper. This young man is devoted to the faith of his fathers, having been trained in a good home and in the quorums and organizations of the Church. He is a teacher in the Sunday School in Washington and is married to a good "Mormon" girl. — The Editors.'] THE problem of the bad boy is as old as creation. The adolescent male hu- man is a hard animal to tame — and the taming process, unless it is care- fully considered, is likely to do more hurt than good. An experiment has been in pro- gress in the District of Columbia schools for the past three years, some of the results of which have just come to light. It is not concerned with ordinary bad boys, but with the pathologically bad — the obvi- ously criminal — who are found in the school system of the National Capital. Some of these children are so abnormal as to be material for the psychiatrist. They all are misfits in the schoolrooms — boys who will not or cannot learn and who seem to have an inborn drive toward criminal careers. If anything is to be done with them, they must be handled as individuals and not as members of a class. They are anti-social and apparently can't be made to conform to the requirements of any group. So long as one of them is a member of a class he makes the orderly conduct of that class impossible. Old Ideas Out of Style REFORM SCHOOLS are filled with such children. They gradu- ate from the reform schools to the jails, from the jails to the Harold D. Fife, Boy Saver

Aug., 1929 PROBLEM OF BAD BOYS CLOSELY STUDIED 805 penitentiaries and from the penitentiaries to the electric chair. They used to be considered congenital criminals, a concept which now has gone out of style. They arise from all sorts of homes, social con- ditions and ancestry. Different schools of pedagogy advocate different methods for dealing with bad boys. None of the methods seem to apply to these children, as a class. They may be tried under teachers who are strict disciplinarians. Corporal punishment, of course, is prohibited by law in the District schools, but an almost military strictness is possible. Teachers of this class demand absolute obedience, good manners and punctuality, and work with an adequate machinery of rewards and punishments. These children don't respond to discipline. Instead of inciting them to make good, it results only in hatred of a teacher — usually a sullen, vindictive hatred. Boys of this type don't hesitate to strike a woman. Advisers in Contempt THEN there is the gentle, motherly soul — the sentimentalist, who pats the boys on the back, cries over them, tries to inspire them to be great and good men. This system doesn't work, either. It only nurtures contempt. What's the use of appealing to the better natures of boys who, it seems, have no better natures to appeal to? The motherly counsel goes into one ear and out the other. The children may promise to be good but promises mean nothing. They'll be promising the kindly judge the same thing later on — and picking his pocket when he leaves the courtroom if he doesn't watch out. Another method is to put them in a typical school where they are segregated from other children until they seem fit to be returned to regular classes. Only indifferent success attends this method. It may be the worst possible procedure with children of this type, as is shown by efforts to analyze their personalities. They can't be trusted, they are a bad influence on other chil- dren, and some of them are dangerous. The way to deal with them is to put them in reform schools. This simply gets them out of the way. It doesn't cure them. The problem of the bad boy — the mean, sullen, dull, unscrupu- lous boy with criminal tendencies — was giving Supt. of Schools Ballou and Assistant Supt. Kramer some bad hours three years ago. There seemed to have been an increase of them with the social ner- vousness which followed the war. Experiment is Started T this time a young graduate student at George Washington University applied to Mr. Kramer for a job in the District A

806 IMPROVEMENT ERA Aug.. 1929 schools. Harold D. Fife wanted a teaching appointment in one of the high schools, but he was tired of waiting for a vacancy. Mr. Kramer told him of this bad-boy problem. Something must be done and the school officials didn't know exactly what to do or how to do it. Fife didn't know either, but he jumped at the opportunity to find out. It was an experiment from the first — and an experiment it remains. He was given a vacant room in the Gales school and put on his own responsibility for the redemption of the possibly criminal ele- ment among the D. C. school children. Fife took the job to heart and in the past three years he has brought about some remarkable transformations of character. He has not worked with any definite psychological system, but has applied various systems, in accordance with his judgment of the individual case. Everything is individual. There is no set of rules which can be applied to any two bad boys with any reasonable ex- pectation of success. One Principle in Mind THE one principle he has kept in mind he expresses: "There is no such thing as an inherently bad boy. The bad boy is a misunderstood boy. The essential thing is understanding of the forces responsible for the individual personality." Some of the cases, he finds, have a physical basis, some organic inferiority which has escaped attention before. This is not an im- portant element, however, among children sent to the Gales special school, for usually they have been examined rather carefully by school physicians. More often he finds a psychic inferiority begotten of social con- ditions, which results in what might be called a "dual personality," the term being divested of any mystical significance. It turns out that the anti-social behavior of the child is only a mask to cover up something else and that strict discipline or mothering were equally ineffective, because they treated only the surface symptoms without uncovering the thing the child was trying subconsciously to hide. Cases of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" in real life are quite com- mon, he finds, among children. But, as in Stevenson's story, the tendency almost always is toward the increasing dominance of the Mr. Hyde personality unless the case is taken in hand in time. When the individual has become a confirmed adult criminal, there is little to be done about it. These inferiority complexes seem to be about the most fruitful causes of adolescent "dual personalities." The child seeks to "get even" with somebody — playmate, teacher, parent or neighbor. Then the process works in two ways.

Aug., 1929 PROBLEM OF BAD BOYS CLOSELY STUDIED 807 In some cases it proves impossible to "get even." The intended victim is too secure to be injured. In that case a process of sub- conscious transference is set up. Consciously the child may forget his hate for the individual, but transfer it to other individuals or to society as a whole. Suppose the child is unjustly punished by a teacher. He deter- mines to get even with that teacher. He can't. He transfers his hate to other teachers. Teachers represent authority. His hate broadens to include all in authority. His life becomes a continual striving to "get even" with the world. After the first forgetting he can't tell, as a rule, what the world has done to him for which he seeks revenge. Thrill in "Getting Even" ANOTHER child may succeed in "getting even." The success gives him so exhilarating a sensation of self-satisfaction — a thrill — that he desires to repeat it. He repeats it over and over again, gradually forgetting the original cause and remembering only the satisfaction that results. In either case, the outcome may be the confirmed criminal or the murderer. On the other hand — this is a highly disputable point which was stressed by Dr. Adler of Vienna, the father of this school of psy- chology— under certain circumstances the outcome may be genius — a Napoleon or a Shakespeare. The only reason for mentioning Adler' s debatable theory is that Fife's work seems to have brought out some remarkable confirmations of it. Fife, however, holds no particular brief for the inferiority com- plex school of psychoanalysis. His classroom varies in some essential aspects from the school clinics which Adler set up all over Germany. The facts remain that most of his cases seem to have originated in an inferiority complex. Seeks Something Wholesome MIS actual method of treating these cases of dual personality is purely a pragmatic one, combining Adlerism with behaviorism in a way which has brought results. He seeks, by observation and by conversation, to discover something wholesome in which the boy is interested. Usually this discovery comes simultaneously with the discovery of the complex that dominates the child's personality. Sometimes, however, it results purely from an off-hand observation and has no direct reference to the underlying causes. He has found, for example, that the great majority of these "dual personality" children are idol worshipers — that is, they have set up some figure in history as an ideal and are intensely interested in

808 IMPROVEMENT ERA Aug.. \9i9 everything pertaining to that figure. It might, for example, be Napoleon. Upon this Napoleon complex he tries to graft other interests. Take arithmetic. Almost every boy sent to the Gates special school hates arithmetic and has failed in this subject. A great deal of arithmetic can be grouped around the career of Napoleon. He had to know arithmetic to be an artillery officer, the foundation of his career. Once the interest in arithmetic has been aroused, Fife tries to give the child instruction in the fundamentals of the subject with some hopes of success. Also Dislikes Grammar ANOTHER subject which almost every boy in the school hates and has failed in is English grammar. It always is perplexing to devise some way to arouse a child's interest in grammar. This is particularly the case, Fife says, with children from foreign-speak- ing homes where English is not spoken. Again the child may be "hand-minded." The interest around which everything can be grouped then is the opportunity for making things and the use of tools. Once the interest or the complex has been uncovered, Fife's work is purely a process of conditioning according to the behavior- istic philosophy. The District school system has a pragmatic system for testing intelligence and classifying children according to their mental age The theory behind this practice is somewhat obscure, but the fact remains that it works very well in practice with the great majority of children. What is Intelligence? NOBODY is agreed on a definition of intelligence. It may be one thing or another, or it may be nothing at all. There does, however, appear to be a factor in most persons which determines their ability to cope with a new situation — that is, learn — and which remains fairly constant throughout life. This is what is tested. School officials don't claim infallibility for the method. Now one school of psychology, into whose findings Fife's results seem to fit, would say that "intelligence" is a myth — that there is no such thing. It would do away with the problem of feeble-mindedness by the statement, with certain reservations for congenital atrophy of brain cells, that there is no such thing as feeble-mindedness — or rather that the difference between the moron and the genius is not intelligence, but something else. It holds that ability is a matter of complexes, just as thinking

Aug.. 1929 PROBLEM OF BAD BOYS CLOSELY STUDIED 809 is admittedly a matter of complexes. It would hold that children who do well with intelligence tests do so simply because the tests happen to fit into their complexes. There is a small percentage of children in the District schools with I. Q.'s (Intelligence Quotient) of 150 or above. For the most part they are fairly well behaved children with healthy bodies. They do extremely well in their classes. They are classified as geniuses. Obviously the word is used here in a special sense. It merely means high-class all-round ability. It hardly can be held to mean ability in any special sense. Such children can be expected to do well in the world if the luck isn't all against them, and stand well in business and the professions. At the other extreme are the children with I. Q.'s below 100 — not defectives, but barely up to the average. Gets Intelligent Ratings WHEN boys come to Fife, he is furnished with their intelligence ratings, but he finds that in many instances special conditions obtain which throw grave doubts on the validity of these ratings. The children simply have not fitted into the rating system, yet some of them appear to be geniuses in the popularly accepted meaning of the term. When a 15 -year-old boy with an I. Q. which would indicate that he was a high-grade moron draws a pen-and-ink sketch of Lindbergh which an art critic at first sight mistakes for a photograph and which is exhibited as a special evidence of child genius in the art gallery of a large American city, it is clear that there has been a mistake of some kind. There is something about the lad which tests have failed to touch. Once Fife tried an intelligence test of his own on a boy who came to him with a very low I. Q. — and a normal record that was lower still. The teacher is interested in mechanics and likes to fool with watches. He never has been able, however, to take a watch apart and put it together again without marking the pieces. This boy, from a very poor home, knew nothing about the insides of watches. Fife brought him an old watch and told him to take it apart and put it together again. "You'd better mark the pieces or you'll never get them back in the right place," he said. "What do I want to mark 'em for? There's only one place for each piece to go, ain't there?" said the boy. He took the watch apart and put it together so that it ran

810 IMPROVEMENT ERA Aug.. 1929 perfectly. He seemed to sense the relations between parts. Yet the boy was a dunce, officially. Personality Split THE personality split in childhood is sharp. There is little mixing of good qualities and bad. The bad boy of the type Fife gets usually appears almost all bad. If there had been much apparent good, regular teachers would not have given the boy up as hopeless. The angel in the boy is left to wander, a fleshless ghost, in the darkness of the subconscious. Yet, Fife holds from observation, the bond never is completely severed. There is a bridge — it may be hard to find it — which the waters of hate have not washed away. There is a similar phenomenon which has been observed in the adolescent period, the results of which are exactly opposite. This is the phenomenon of conversion, when a normally bad boy, under the influence of intense religious emotions, has a personality split and shows to the world a personality which appears all good, for a time. The end effects of this split sometimes are as devastating as those of the opposite type. Fife has been developing a technique for dealing with the bad type of dual personality which requires two qualities — infinite pa- tience and the ability to sense quickly when one has probed the controlling complex, whether it be one of inferiority or a sexual complex of some sort which usually can be found only by a trained psychiatrist. It may require months or years of observation before the mechanism of the personality split is recognized. These boys, certainly, have not analyzed themselves. They don't know why they are bad. They are nearly all proficient and shameless liars. They are almost sure to lie about the things which they feel most vitally. They generally are immune to the pat on the shoulder, the fatherly advice, the assurance of love and kindness, the stories of how good little boys got along in the world. They have words for that kind of stuff which are not fit to print. Hunts Root of Trouble FIFE frequently must go into the homes to find the root of the trouble. That is not always an easy thing to do. If the home has conditions which automatically create a bad boy, it is likely to be a hard home to penetrate.

Aug.. 1929 PROBLEM OF BAD BOYS CLOSELY STUDIED 811 The teacher doesn't always find the trouble. He admits there is a good deal he doesn't know about this most complex of all subjects, the creation of personality. He is trying to learn more from actual experience and points to his few startling successes as evidence of the enormous opportunity offered by this field for those who know more than he does. The boys are not always transformed and redeemed. There is always the danger of giving a false impression of any work of this kind — of giving the public the impression that here is a cure-all for criminality. It is merely a pioneering effort which has struck gold in some places. Boys Are Not Stigmatized THE Gales special school consists of a single room with some desks, blackboards and carpenter tools. The boys are not segregated. They are not stigmatized. They merely are students in a division of one of the regular elementary schools of the District. It is not a typical school. They are not sent there to be reformed and then sent back to regular classes. They remain there through their elementary school careers. It is possible to give them a year, at least, of junior high school work there. Once they enter that room I. Q. records are a thing of the past. They have a fresh start, away from everything that has gone before. Many of them, especially the "hand-minded" ones, enter the trades. Fife keeps in touch with employers throughout the city. Those who show academic trends are sent ahead into the high schools. It is no eight-hour job to deal with boys in this way. It is a 24-hour job. One must live their lives with them. Fife checked his own observations last summer by a 14,000- mile trip through the United States, Mexico and Canada, interview- ing boys in reformatories and penitentiaries. He found hundreds of verifications of his observations of the inferiority complex and the determination to get even. Among the boys he talked with was William Edward Hick- man, the fiend-murderer, then awaiting execution in San Quentin. Hickman, he says, told him a story which he did not tell in court — that he first declared war on society as the result of being unjustly punished for the act of another boy in snapping a spitball at a teacher. "It hurt me terribly," he says Hickman told him. "I made up my mind to get even with that teacher. I did get even with her.

812 IMPROVEMENT ERA Aug., 1929 I liked getting even so much that I've been getting even ever since. Now they are going to get even with me." This fits exactly into the observations of bad boys which Fife has made in Washington. Canadian Scout at Jamboree THIS will introduce Scout Kenneth Russell of Leth- bridge, Canada. A dis- tinctive honor has come to Kenneth, as he will represent the city of Lethbridge at the Inter- national Boy Scout Jamboree in England this year. There was a large field of candidates for the honor, but Kenneth was selected. He is a typical Latter-day Saint boy — strong in limb, alert of mind and clean in his habits. He has a brilliant Scout record, being a King Scout, with a whole string of merit badges, although "Ken" would be the last to tell you about them. A King Scout corresponds to the Eagle Scout in the United States. "Ken" belongs to Troop No. 1, Lethbridge, and his Scout- master is Dr. C. M. Fletcher, Lethbridge stake Boy Scout Com- missioner and first counselor to the stake superintendent. He is the son of Mr. and Mrs. William R. Russell of Lethbridge, formerly of Ogden, Utah, and he will likely be the only "Mormon" scout from Canada at the Jamboree — C. F. Steele, Stake Superintendent. Kenneth Russell, Canadian Scout The Dixie Quail In early morn, when the night had fled, And the Pioneer rose from his weary bed, The musical call of the quail to his mate Brought cheer as he grappled the problems of fate. A. w. ivins