BOYS WHO FAINT

Hokitika Guardian, 7 December 1929, Page 2

BOYS WHO FAINT

AUSTRALLAN EXPERIENCE. WAR TIME CHILDREN. SYDNEY, November 28. Can the fainting of two separate groups of 18 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 numbers? 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 v>n Visiting Day, and at Brighton (Melbourne; on Armistice Day 15 boys fainted. Does it mean that the schoolboys to-day 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-strings, and so on.

Facts prove that there are boys today who are just as healthy as the boys of the past. But there arc 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 these hoys who collapsed were born while the war was at its height, and if so they would possess neuropathic strain, lor the nervous condition of the mothers might bo reflected in the disposition of the children. Fainting by suggestion is due to mass hysteria, and to psychic influences. A young boy sees his neighbour faint, and a mental disturbance is created in him. He is seized with {•he fear that he too will faint, and, if lie is suggest deniable, be does so. “ Quite probably 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-.dav.”

A headmaster of a big boys’ school was inclined to the theory of suggestion. He lias charge of COO boys, and lie said that the fainting was communicative. The sight of a boy fainting would produce tlie same suggestions in another boy. Boys were more temperamental to-day, he thought, than they used to lie. but it was not a matter of weakness. A great percentage of the hoys of to-day thought for thorn-

selves niul relied on themselves, hut there was a higher percentage of hoys who wore rather hopeless.