GROWING WEAKER?

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 135, 4 December 1929, Page 13

GROWING WEAKER?

BOYS OF TO-DAY

WAR TIME CHILDREN

(From "The Post's" Representative.) SYDNEY, 28th November. Can .the fainting of two separate groups of 15 and 25 boys be taken as an indication that the rugged boys of "Tom Brown's School Boys" are disappearing, and that their places are being taken by weaker ilads -who swoon away in numbers? At iCroydon Central School, in Adelaide, on i Saturday last, 25 boya fainted, one after another, while they were standing on an asphalt yard listening to speeches on Visiting Day, and at Brighton (Melbourne) ou Armistice Day, 15 boys faulted. Does it mean that the schoolboys to-day are more temperamental, more highly strung, and not so strong as they were? lhese questions have naturally arisen in Australia, and of course there are many who are only too willing to say that the boy of to-day is.not the boy oE yesterday —that he is coddled aud kept in cotton wool, and tied to his mother's apron strings, and so on.

5 acts-prove that there are boys to-day who are just as healthy as the" boys of the past. But there are certain reservations, as was explained by a doctor who has made a keen study of child psychology. ' And then he went straight on to the interesting topic of children who were born during the strenuous war period Possibly," he said, "some of tl jse boys who collapßed were born while the war was at its height, and if so they would possess neuropathic strain, for the nerves condition of. the mothers might be relleeted jn the disposition of the children. Fainting by suggestion is due to muss hysteria, and to psychic influences A young boy sees his neighbour faint, and a mental disturbance is created in him. He is seized with the fear that he too will faint, and, if he is suggestionable, he does so.

Quite probably these boys are a perfectly normal lot. Ido think, however, that the harsher, sterner methods o£ school jhfe, and general upbringing that ruled in earlier days, made boys more self-reliant and stoical than they are to-day." A headmaster of a big boys' school was inclined to the theory of suggestion. He has charge of 600 boys, and he said that the fainting was communicative. The sight of a boy fainting would produce the same suggestions in another bey. Boys were more temperamental to-day, he thought, than they used to be, but it was not a matter of weakness. A great percentage of the boys of to-day thought for themselves, and relied on themselves, but there was a higher percentage of boys who wore rather hopeless.