YOUTH AND ALL THAT
By D. E. ESTCOURT
THE other day I heard an intelligent small boy accosted on a 'but, by a well-meaning but fatuous passenger: "And how old are you?" "I'm four." "I wish I were four." The child, turning a candid and rather surprised gaze upon the speaker, replied with calm practicality, "But you were four once."
Some such cool and astringent dose, I thought, might be an excellent thing for the contemporary obsession with youth, youth training, youth movements, youth rallies, and all the rest of it. Our generation is perhaps becoming a trifle neurotic on the subject of Youth, and needs a reminder that youth is, after all, a universal —and fleeting—stage of human development, not something just discovered ; and that the young are a normal and necessary com- ponent of every society, not a chosen race. We were all four once.
The homogeneity of "the young" is largely a fiction of elderly imaginations. There may be more fundamental diversity between two boys of sixteen than between one of them and a man of thirty. Youth, as such, is not a suitable basis for association at all except within a very limited field ; yet on every side we encounter this new passion for massing the young, segregating them, organising them, and generally regarding them—and causing them to regard them- selves—as a special breed with common tastes and aptitudes, uniform needs. and identical aspirations. The truth is that youth, maturity and age all have something to contribute to most of the activities and associations of human life. As they function together and reciprocally in the normal family group, so they should function together and reciprocally in the community. There is danger to both youth and age in segregation.
Along with this segregating and specialising of Youth goes the insidious idea—expressed or implicit in many recent reports and manifestoes—that "service to the community" is something that can be rendered only in mass-formation, and must be taught to " Youth " as a special subject. A boy, therefore, who may be work- ing hard and long at music, chemistry or painting, must be detached from such activities some time in his middle or late 'teens, and sent for six months or a year to .a vast camp, where he will haul logs about, hoe turnips, and engage in a large number of group activities that may have nothing to do with his personal tastes or special gifts. This is grandiosely described as "Community Service" or "National Service "—as though a conscientious carpenter or a talented musician devotedly exercising his sifts was not serving the community. One is tempted to ask whether Cobbett, Elizabeth Fry, Shakespeare, Pasteur, Mozart or Josephine Butler learned service to the community in a Youth Camp. It depends on what the community really wants from its citizens. In the totalitarian countries this has been clearly defined, and Youth Camps and Youth Movements are the logical answer.
The "gang" stage in the normal child is usually worked out between nine and fourteen. This is the true age of gangs, Red Indian bands, secret societies, and all the rest of it, and the age par excellence for most of the activities organised by the Scouts. Personal gifts and tastes are seldom determining factors in these early groups, and friendships and feuds are of brief duration and superficial significance. With the middle 'teens all this is changed. The normal boy is becoming individualised at adolescence, and gradually begins to prefer work and expeditions with one or two chosen friends, and clubs of a specialised kind, to any organised group activities of the " Youth " variety. Unfortunately, under our present defective educational system, only a small percentage of children are at school at this stage. Voluntary organisations and clubs do adniirable work for the under-educated children; but the Youth-Movement ideas, aiming at an indefinite and compulsory prolongation of the gang stage, are a remedy worse than the disease they claim to cure.
A normal boy who has outgrown the gang-for-the-gang's-sake will join freely with groups for some specific purpose such as a game, a debate, a play or• a job, but if he has freedom of choice and variety of opportunity it will be his individual interests, not his age, which increasingly determine his group activities. The essence of these activities is that they are spontaneous, controlled not by the gang-impulse or by officialdom, but by personal tastes and gifts.
As the boy approaches maturity his need of a kind of rhythm between personal and communal life, solitude and sociability, defi- nitely establishes itself. In short, he is becoming adult. If he has been properly educated—and here we must remember once more that very few are—his impulse to serve the community will be well developed. It may lead him into large-scale communal activity of some kind, or it may impel him to intenser exercise of certain individual gifts. He will probably join societies or movements, but these will almost certainly contain young, old and middle-aged if they are true spontaneous associations of like-minded people.
Groups organised from outside merely on a basis of age have no valuable function to perform in an intelligent community. The super-imposing of the " Youth " idea upon young people who are, or should be, developed towards adult-hood entirely falsifies their natural evolution as well as their place in society. Youth, in any case, is a relative term. What is youth? Five? Fifteen? Twenty- five? And what is there in common between these ages that we should think of them collectively as "Youth," and plan mass activi- ties for them?
In human activity " youth " is no more an absolute than " large " or "small." Thirty is young for a Cabinet Minister, but old for an airman. Seventeen is young for an actor, but old for a newspaper boy. The gradations, variations, and transience of age, the con- stantly evolving needs and capacities of the human spirit, are such that " youth " as a collective term is meaningless, and youth move- ments an absurdity. In the totalitarian countries their purpose is obvious and sinister. Should we not analyse the significance of our own obsession with them, and particularly the purpose of those who wish to make them official and compulsory?
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