Lesson 5
Youth
How does the writer like to treat young people?
People are always talking about 'the problem of youth'.
If there is one -- which I take leave to doubt
-- then it is older people who create it, not the young themselves.
Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are after all human beings
-- people just like their elders.
There is only one difference between an old man and a young one:
the young man has a glorious future before him
and the old one has a splendid future behind him: and maybe that is where the rub is.
When I was a teenager, I felt that I was just young and uncertain --
that I was a new boy in a huge school,
and I would have been very pleased to be regarded as something so interesting as a problem.
For one thing, being a problem gives you a certain identity,
and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking.
I find young people exciting.
They have an air of freedom,
and they have not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort.
They are not anxious social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things.