Boys Who Faint

Shannon News, 31 December 1929, Page 1

Boys Who Faint

THEORY OF SUGGESTION.

Sydney, ftov. 28.

Oan 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 Days" are disappearing and that their places are being taken by weaker lads, who swoon away "in l numbors?" At Croydon Central .school in Adelaide on Saturday last 25 boys fainted, one after another, while they were standing on an asphalt yard listening to "speeches on visiting days. At Brighton, Melbourne, on Armistice Day, 15 boys fainted. Does this mean that schoolboys today are more temperamental? More highly-strung and not so strong as they were? These questions have naturally arisen in Australia, and of course there are many who are only too willing to say that the boy of today is not the boy of yesterday —that he is coddled and kept in cotton wool, and tied to his mother's apron sitrings and so on.

Pacts prove that there are boys today who are juat as healthy as the boys of the past. But there are cerItain reservations, as was explained by a doctor who has made a keen study of child psychology. And he went straight on to the interesting topic of children who were born during the strenuous war period. "Possibly," he said, '' some of these boys who collapsed were born while the war was at its height, and if so they would possess neuropathic strain, for the nervous condition of the mothers might be reflected in the nervous disposition of the children. Fainting by suggestion is due to mass 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 possibly these boys are a perfectly normal lot. I do think, however, that the harsher, sterner methods of school life 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 suggestion in another boy. Boys were more temporalis en tal to-day, he thought, than they used to be, but it was not a matter ot weakness. A great percentage of the boys of to-dav thought for themselves and relied on themselves, but •„here was a higher percentage of boy? who were rather hopeless.