NONSENSE ABOUT YOUTH

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 76, 25 October 1941, Page 2

NONSENSE ABOUT YOUTH

"I sometimes despair when I hear people, often highly placed and highly educated, but otherwise quite intelligent, talking about Youth (spelt with a capital ‘Y’), attributing to it a whole catalogue of virtues, powers and potentialities of a superlative character, and then contrasting this figment of imagination with elderly dullness and inefficiency,” said Sir Frederick Mander in a recent address to teachers. “Is there really any point or advantage in for ever asserting Youth’s shining vigour, its noble determination, its prodigious earnestness, its perspicacious confidence, its altogether vicarious unselfishness. and then turning to the rest of humanity bleakly portrayed as a lot of fossilised old ‘stiffs’ who spend most of their time preventing Youth from coming into its own? Young folk in their teens are neither more nor less wonderful than the children whom they once were, or the fully-grown folk they will ultimately become. Like the rest of us, they are a mixed lot.”