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YOUTH
From birth to seventeen we are busy growing up. This is a period of
pleasant confusion and tingling mysteries; for the weak and the coddled it is a terribly dangerous period of irresponsibility, during which they
lean on parents and other elders for support and management. These years are not living in any rich sense; they are animality (as an animal, distinct from a spiritual nature as humans).
Nobody under seventeen ever knows anything, ever has a clear thought
on any important subject, ever attains an important skill except perhaps in music, even gains full control of wild emotions, ever converses
interestingly, or ever does anything in the way of living as a mature person. Everything in babe, child, and adolescent changes much too fast to acquire pattern or power.
From seventeen through our early twenties we usually learn the social
life, in business no less than in pleasure; and most of us marry and begin settling down to start making a living; and ninety-five out of a
hundred never turn from this devastating task. Raising children is joined with the long, hard pull of buying a home and pushing up the worn rungs of the success ladder.
The essence of living begins much later in America than elsewhere.
This is partly the result of superior conditions, and partly the result of inferior. But which condition fit being superior and which inferior may
very well be controversial. It could be said we prolong childhood astonishingly, whether it be a wise thing or foolish. Our educational
system does play a major part in keeping us immature far into the years when the rest of the world is grown up. A people held in sweet bondage to babydom.
Our schools of childhood are wonderful; from kindergarten to high
school they are the finest ever. Americans are at their best in handling children-- and worst in dealing with ex-children who ought to be handled as grown ups.
Athletics are socialized and commercialized to the point at which all fun
and benefit to the individual evaporate. False standards of dress, manners, and cosmetics are taught especially in the larger cities.
This crime many times can be traced back to the elders.
What the schools leave undone in the way of intellectual and moral corruption, the home and dear old American prosperity finishes with a
fine flourish of deviltry. Whether pampered at home by parents and nursed along with sugared lies about our country and its leaders or
something other, young people never develop even the normal elemental interests and hungers, which we should expect in good animals.The wantlessness of our educated young people keeps many from even
realizing what all they might become. That which they can have without money or success, which would likely prove a more permanent
investment for them, they have not the slightest interest in: the acquired capacity to be both interested and interesting. Many may talk about
their grades, athletics, and personalities but not even as much as read a newspaper. They usually never discuss the content of their studies...
their families, teachers, and public opinion could do more with teaching them the possibilities of being educated and cultivated-- of being more interesting people. The time wasted is appalling!
Many young people believe that as one grows older a uniform decline
sets in, that by fifty or so only the shell of a man survives. Read the life of the brilliant clergyman and orator Phillips Brooks. He is cited here
primarily to demonstrate the error in the common idea that life in older adults must be really dull, unprofitable, and full of grief.
Though Mr. Brooks is not typical in every respect.
Life is activity, and activity is a series of energy changes--- nothing more and nothing less.
A man's energy is revealed in elemental form by the rate at which his
body gives off heat; for heat means work done, be it in the brain or the stomach or a muscle. Physiologists measure this heat either by skin
radiation or by the amount of oxygen taken from the air by the lungs. The energy transformed to keep the body running is called basal
metabolism, while the excess used for special activities may be called marginal metabolism or free energy. The slower and smaller the basal
metabolism, the less energy will be made over in a given time for special kinds of work or play.
We burn up fastest during our childhood and adolescence years.
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