'Today's Youth Is Better Than Ever’

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31206, 2 November 1966, Page 2

'Today's Youth Is Better Than Ever’

Whenever Miss Jess Hastings, of Edinburgh, sees adults throw up their hands in despair about the waywardness of today’s youth, she brings out a clipping from an overseas education magazine.

It reads: “The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are foolish and immodest and unwomanly in speech, behaviour and dress.” These words were written in 1274 by Peter the Monk. “I think young people today are better than ever, in spite of the tremendous difficulties they are facing,” said Miss Hastings, the organising secretary of the Scottish Association of Youth Clubs for 19 years. They lived in an affluent society with a world-wide slackening of moral standards and lack of parental guidance. They earned high wages and had plenty of money to spend. They could afford to drink too much. In striving to “run with the crowd” they had the relatively new temptation to face of trying out narcotics. Such pressures were unknown to the young of even 20 years ago. “I have great sympathy with a mother of teen-age daughters in deciding whether to give them information about contraceptives or whether to say nothing about them and hope that the home standards she has set will have given her girls enough moral stiffening to see them through,” she said. One of Britain’s first Churchill Fellows, Miss Hastings, chose New Zealand in which to study new trends in youth work for two reasons.

“New Zealand has close Scottish links, and because it is a small country I felt I would have a chance of getting to know it reasonably well in four months,” she said. But she wanted to have a look at youth work in Hong Kong, Sydney, Canberra, and

Melbourne and had to cut her time in New Zealand. She will visit Fiji, Honolulu, San Francisco and New York on her way back to Scotland.

After four weeks in New Zealand, Miss Hastings has already found some ideas. She has found that New Zealand youth work has a much stronger bias towards sport, played mainly during the week-ends.

“Our youth activities are held mostly mid-week in Scotland and it is high time we were doing more at the weekends by arranging adventure outings such as walking, climbing and canoeing,” she said. She has found sport much more highly organised in New Zealand than in Scotland.

“But our general youth work is much more highly organised than it is here,” she said.

Youth programmes in Scotland have a bias towards social education to meet local needs and traditional practices. “And tradition dies hard in Scotland,” Miss Hastings said.