“Delinquents Products Of A Naughty Civilisation”

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29273, 3 August 1960, Page 12

“Delinquents Products Of A Naughty Civilisation”

(New Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, August 2. Ejight hundred mothers listened intently as the Governor-General (Lord Cobham) — “the father of a large family”—declared in the Wellington Town Hall today that naughty children were the products of a naughty civilisation and that their misdeeds constituted only a youthful manifestation of a widespread evil.

Addressing the biennial conference of the country women’s institutes, Lord Cobham said: “I am going to venture into dangerous waters, waters that have already been so stirred by selfstyled experts that the bottom is no longer visible through the mud. I am, in short, going to say something about what is odiously called ‘juvenile delinquency,’ for it concerns every one of us.”

He said honest dealing, good manners and a sane and healthy regard for one’s fellows spread downwards not upwards. “And when so few citizens really know where they are going, and so many are, anyway, trying to get there without a ticket, how should we complain when our children spend their spare time in aimless and expensive pranks.?” There was a fatal tendency to shrug one’s shoulders and think, if not say, "Oh well, little Tommy or Mary will soon be off to school—the teachers will soon put matters right.” The “They” Complex

People suffered from a “they” complex, Lord Cobham said. If things went wrong, it was always somebody else’s fault and somebody else’s duty to put them right. “But don’t forget that <from the moment little Tommy or Map' are born, they are watching their parents like lynxes.” ■ A young person was essentially a reasonable creature and a child was almost wholly influenced by his parents during his formative years.

To children or adolescents with their fresh, questing minds, religion could seem to be a wholly unnecessary adjunct to the business of getting on with life. It was up to parents to keep widening their horizons. Lord Cobham said today children grew up far more quickly than they did even 40 years ago. “Generally speaking there was during my own school days, enough left of the old world, in spite of the Great War, to enable us to mature slowly—the greatest boon for' childhood. The world had not yet developed the ghastly habit of talking at the top of its voice, the cinema was only in its infancy, and there were no great events to hurry us into adulthood." Childhood needed leisure—“but we must all recognise, and make provision for, the increased tempo of living which is here to stay whether we like it or not.” Of education today. Lord Cobham said .it resembed nothing so much as a steeplechase run at

break-neck speed, wherein the horses, carefully weighted so that all may pass the winning-post together, barely had time to recover from the last jump before gathering themselves for the next. . Only Bad Parente”

Children, he continued, were today fiercely and, he believed, unjustifiably criticised. “It may be an over-simplification to assert that there are no bad children, only bad parents, but there is more than a grain of truth in the aphorism.” It was difficult. Lord Cobham admitted, to get to the root-cause of the present trouble. “We are told that it is because youth feels insecure—but why on earth should it feel insecure in a modern welfare state? Is not perhaps the very reverse nearer the truth: that with nothing to fear and money to spend, born into an age which ranks success in terms of cash and not virtue, and possessing no standards other than those of Hollywood with its tough guys and gun molls, many young people simply do not know what to do with their new-found leisured “Error of Education”

“I believe that the great thumping error of this century is the belief that all our problems can be solved by education. They might be in a few more centuries. But time is being ripped backwards by the remorseless oaxs of events, and only one man in nine has any idea of where he is going, if that isn’t putting the proportion much too high,” Young people were expected to be able to live in a crowd before they had learned to live with themselves, and it was, therefore, small wonder that many of them fell an easy prey to the strongest character in their particular group. If a child was once set on the right path, if it was disciplined, not by harshness, but by the desire to please those it respected, then its instruction would almost look after itself. “Education alone can merely make a child cunning and give it more capacity for evil. Without education it is hard for a man to be very wicked,” Lord Ccbham said. “I have posed many problems and offered no solutions. The attainment of wisdom is a slow process, and without wisdom the world as we know it will perish. Like all other attainments, wisdom cannot be achieved without two qualities—humility and iategrity in work, and both are at a discount in the Western worli today."