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189 As the previous chapter suggests, where the young were concerned, leisure was a veritable no-man’s land, to employ the Great War imagery that saturated the contemporary media. The youthful desire for excitement could be explained biologically as a “natural” inclination in light of Stanley Hall’s theories, but the enticements of modern popular culture appeared to be intensifying both the natural urge and its unnatural, if not altogether deviant and dangerous, implications . Adult vigilance was required to guide youth through the maelstrom of new temptations, although it would have to be carried out cautiously: the young were “sensitive” to any “interference” from the adults in their lives.1 Nonetheless, with emerging cultural alternatives contributing so much to interpretations of the youth problem, Canadians needed reminding that “the indices we need to consult most carefully are moral indices.”2 This chapter considers the development, objectives, and activities of a selection of the myriad organizations for youth that flourished during the years from the Great War to 1950. The sorting of young Canadians into approved clubs and activities, by capitalizing on the supposed “gang instinct” as well as on theories about the importance of certain forms of peer-group socialization, was just as At the Club Youth Organizations No citizen of the town is over 19 and each citizen is unique in that he is not a citizen of today but a citizen of tomorrow. Every day Teen Town bubbles with activity.... This club has filled an important place in their lives..., making its members more self-reliant and better citizens. — W. Hicks, Toronto Star, 1946 7 vital to ensuring their cultivation as productive citizens as were schooling and training for work. A prime objective of the period’s campaign for solutions to the youth problem and its wider issue, that of social order, was to get young people off the streets, out of the gangs, cinemas, and dance halls, and into adult-supervised , community-based, Christian-influenced, and often church-affiliated organizations that offered up “character training” and lessons in citizenship by means of wholesome recreational activities. The first half of the twentieth century saw the elaboration of an everextended roster of planned, structured, and supervised recreation for youth. Organizations founded before the Great War, such as the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations, the Boy Scouts, and the Girl Guides, expanded internationally, establishing a firm base in Canada by the 1920s. The immediate postwar years also witnessed new and flourishing indigenous groups, such as the Tuxis Boys and the Canadian Girls in Training. Affiliated with the Protestant churches, especially the United Church, these groups were premised on a fourfold standard derived from Christian principles and emphasizing the relationship between an activist Christianity and democratic citizenship. Moreover, as noted, the King government attempted to bring youth into the fold of postwar planning by establishing the Canadian Youth Commission in 1940. By 1950, the American-inaugurated “Teen Town” movement, with its municipal government structure that also resembled the Tuxis’s “Boys’ Parliament,” would lend support to the joint character- and citizenship-training objectives of the earlier youth organizations. More significant than the actual activities of all these groups, which combined community voluntarism with adult-approved, structured, peer-based recreation, was their purpose. What their adult leaders meant by “recreation” was intended literally to re-create traditional social conventions and relations, transmitting them generationally, to those most in need of being “re-created”: the problematic young.3 Supporters of “group work” emphasized the capacity of a planned and supervised leisure, braced by scientific study and professional direction, to prevent social problems stemming from the misdirection of youthful energy. The experts would steer young people into creative, fulfilling, productive , Christian pastimes, because, as we have seen, adults were preoccupied with the idea that “if no wholesome satisfaction is at hand to supply the need, something will be found that serves the purpose, but which may later lead to mental and moral indigestion.”4 In their trained hands, the result would be a “pedagogy of vigilance,” a sort of newly formalized apprenticeship for citizenship under the guise of good, clean, “productive” fun, with all the inherent contradictions that this objective implies.5 The idea—ideal, in effect—of community was central to these plans to organize and regulate youth recreation. The community needed to formulate “constructive principles for social education” in the interests of “reaching out toward the social vision of the normal,” with “normalization” meaning the same 190...

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