Embers of Youth

Last week U. S. school superintendents spoke sharply not to but for Youth. After spending two years studying the plight of the 20,000,000 U. S. youngsters between 15 and 24, a commission* found Youth more sinned against than sinning. Their report, in Youth Education Today, the superintendents' yearbook, tried to tell the U. S. what it ought to do about Youth's troubles.

Chief trouble is getting a job. Each year U. S. schools send forth over 2,000,000 youngsters to go to work. Less than half of them find it. Moreover, some three-quarters of them are not trained for anything better than unskilled labor.

Modern Youth is also deeply troubled about how to get along with people--their parents, their teachers, their friends, their sweethearts. Delayed marriage--the result of prolonged schooling and joblessness--"aggravates the problem of sex adjustment for youth . . . with a corresponding increase in masturbation, clandestine relations, prostitution and homosexuality.

The adjustment of complete continence, approved by families, schools, churches and social opinion, is practiced in fact by only a minority of youth."

The superintendents boldly proposed that Youth be instructed in school in sex relations, not by physicians but by psychologists and sociologists. Said the commission: "There is an increasing sentiment among persons familiar with the facts . . . for a return to earlier marriage with economic subsidy. . . ."

As revolutionary as its sex program was the commission's proposal for changing the curriculum. The graduate of the traditional, classical high school, it said, "knows the story of the geese that saved Rome" but is generally ignorant of the French Revolution, of "Mussolini's and Hitler's use of power." Plumping for a thoroughly progressive program, the commission proposed that highschool studies be built around five cores of human activity--language arts; social relations; home and vocational arts; creative and recreative arts; nature, mathematics and science.

* Appointed by the National Education Association's American Association of School Administrators (formerly the Department of Superintendence). Its members: Nine men and two women, headed by conservative Superintendent E. E. Oberholtzer, of Houston, Tex.

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