The Growing Pains of Youth

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 80, 28 December 1935, Page 18

The Growing Pains of Youth

4 t yi M'" HE growing pains of youth are constantly mistaken for new ideas. | It is not easy to understand why it is that each generation should j appear to have to live over again in its earliest years just the JIL same experience as those which have gone before” (says Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia University). “One would think that experience and habit might leave their mark upon ambitious and eager youth, and that it would be able to begin at a point near that at which the older generation had left off; but such is not the case. “ Over and over again, the human race, in its successive generations, goes through the same impatience, the same restlessness, the same resistance to authority, and the same vague hankering after untested novelties and discredited antiquities which have been characteristic of youth from the beginning. “ The amazing waves of unreasoning emotion which sweep over vast masses of the population, and the utter selfishness and self-centredness of so many, furnish cumulative evidence that education has not done and is not doing the work expected of it. It must be constantly repeated that there can be nothing worthy to be called education which is not based upon moral and intellectual discipline, by which is meant that habit-forming process which provides the oncoming generation with some measure of the lessons taught by the experience of all mankind.

“ It is in highest degree unfair, indeed cruel, to turn the rising generation loose in the world as if no one had ever been there before it and as if nothing had been taught by ages of experience and accomplishment.

“Outstanding achievements in literature, in the fine arts, in science, in the art of governing men, and in the expression of personality in any one of the many ways in which it makes itself felt, should quickly be made familiar to the youth of to-day in order that they may be provided with standards Of judgment before themselves beginning to judge.

“ Unless, and until, men begin to look over the high fence of selfishness and self-centredness which now so often surrounds them and see mankind as his life now is. they cannot hope cither to know what is really going on in the world or to take any helpful part in it.

“The old notion is abroad, and more or less popular, that one may hope to understand the happenings of the moment and to pass wise judgment upon them without any comprehension whatever of the forces and tendencies which have brought those happenings into being and which have made them what they are. What is known as genetics ought not to be confined to zoology; there is a genetics of the social, the economic and the political order as well, and also a genetics of morality and of intellectual expression and achievement.”