Publishing Information Our Jobless Youth: a Warning John Chamberlain
Thus argued Joe Cairns for a few months after he had ceased to be an office boy. He was despairful at the time of ever making the grade as a magazine writer, although his education had been sufficient to arouse his sustained curiosity about a great number of things. But slowly the despair ebbed. Joe's new-found confidence did not alter his beliefs, but you could sense change of emphasis in his daily living. "You know," he said one day, "I've never known a big personality on the communist Left. They're all too wrapped up in the class war; they haven't time to become broad human beings." Joe had left the Communist Party; its demands on time and energy were getting in the way of both education and vocation. But he still retained all his old interest in the Newspaper Guild. The other evening I heard Phil La Follette, former governor of Wisconsin, say that a definite fault-line of character divides youth from age in the United States. Phil implied that our out-of-school youth is unstable, apathetic (but maybe preparing to move in a hurry), and unable to derive much comfort from slow parliamentary attempts at meliorism. Sidney Hillman made light of Phil's fears that a psychic "explosion," a crise des nerfs But suppose our economic system rocks along, with production picking up. In that case, out-of-school youth does offer a real current challenge to educators. There must be educational opportunities to take up the slack of a temporary period of unemployment; there must be education in vocational skills. Above all, there must be education to sharpen youth's faculty to see a job where no job has ever existed before. Such education does not necessarily mean putting youth back into high school or college. But it does involve the creation or expansion of night schools, vocational schools, and alert vocational guidance. And dead end jobs must be accompanied with training on the side for other jobs. | |
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