YOUTH PROBLEM

Taranaki Daily News, 21 December 1935, Page 14

YOUTH PROBLEM

PERPETUAL QUESTION ARISES. DR. NICHOLAS BUTLER’S ANSWER. Principal, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, in an address delivered at the opening of the 182nd year of the Columbia University* reports the Inquirer, said:-— “The growing pains of youth are con•xtantly mistaken for new ideas. It is not easy to understand why it is that each generation should appear to have to live over again in its earliest years just the same experiences as those which have gone before. “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 vague hankering after untested novelties and discredited antiquities which have been characteristic of youth from the beginning. “The chief educational instrumentality should always be the family. If parents do not themselves instruct, guide, shape, and discipline their children, education in any true sense becomes almost impossible. The school itself, however important, is and always should be a subordinate and cooperating educational agency. If it supports and strengthens the influence of the family, well and good. If it combats that influence, disaster waits just around the corner. NO SUBSTITUTE. “If there be no family education, the school, do what it will, can never take the family’s place. The school, without the family, may easily become almost an obstacle to education, particularly when accompanied by the silent influence upon youthful mind and feeling of the sensational happenings of the moment as recorded in the Press from day to day. “The school becomes an obstacle to education when it subordinates or neglects discipline, when it endeavours to substitute elaborate paraphernalia for the very simple instrumentalities of true education .... “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 dv ing 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, irr 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. WITHOUT HOPE. “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 either to know what is really gbing on in the world or to take any helful part in it. ; “The odd notion is abroad* and more or les/ 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. “Unless genetics in these various fields is made an important part of the instruction given to youth, the younger generation must fail almost completely in any capacity to understand the world in which it ought quickly to be able to take a comprehending and a shaping part. This fact explains the floundering which goes on all over the world in the face of tendencies and problems which a knowledge of their origin and history would enable one fully to understand. “Living without life leaves man on the plane of the lower animals. Living, a true' life means for the human being the achievement of rich and comforting spiritual adjustment to the intangibles and imponderables which rule and always have ruled the world. “From the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel to the mass emotion and the mass action which are spurred and guided by Kemal and Stalin, by. Mussolini and Hitler, there is a vast amount to be learned and understood by youth before attempting to pass final judgment on the happenings of the day.”