Youth's Story

If nostrums were riches, U. S. Youth would have plenty of spending money. Almost everybody but the younger generation itself has tried to tell Youth how to cure what ails it. This week Youth had its say about its own problem, and the diagnosis was shocking.

Youth Tell Their Story* is the voice of 13,528 Maryland youngsters (16 to 24) and the American Youth Commission. Director of the commission is broad-shouldered Homer Price Rainey, 42, who was a star halfback and pitcher at Austin College, Texas, became a college president at 31 (Franklin College, Franklin, Ind.) and headed Bucknell University for four years. In 1935 he and the commission set out to get to the bottom of the youth problem.

They sank a sample shaft in Maryland, where 35 trained interviewers bearded the beardless at home, on street corners, in drugstores, in dance halls. Their 13,528 storytellers were a representative cross section of the nation's 20,000,000 youth.

The 255-page report throws brilliant light on many a dark corner of the youth problem. Youth's biggest worries are neatly summed up by one youngster thus: "The problem is how to get married on $15 a week." Some hard facts:

Marriage & Family: Four out of five youngsters (including almost half of the married couples) are living with their parents. Only 3% of the unmarried ones want to leave home. Nearly all want to marry, have a home and children (but not so many as their parents). Youth is still marrying early; median marrying age of the Maryland boys was 21, of the girls, 19, and 13% of the brides had married at 16 or younger.

School: Maryland youngsters leave school, on the average, at the end of the ninth grade. Most thought their education had helped them enjoy life, but three out of ten believed it had not helped them much to earn a living. Yet the fact is that the high-school graduate is paid 50% more than the youngster who did not finish elementary school.

Work: The commission estimated that 3,000,000 U. S. youngsters between 16 and 24 today are unemployed. Three out of ten in Maryland were jobless, and some had been looking as long as seven years for their first full-time job. Median pay of the youngsters with jobs was $12.96 a week.

Play: The commission found even youth's fun depressing. The reason: youth hunts fun mostly alone or in pairs instead of in groups. About one-half the boys and girls drink. One boy in eight spends most of his free time doing nothing.

A large part of U. S. youth today is apathetic, discontented, increasingly prone to look to the Federal Government to do its thinking and planning for it. Three-quarters think the Government should regulate wages and hours, nine out of ten think it should give unemployment relief. Only one in ten is a rugged individualist, one in 25 a radical. The commission offered facts to prove that equality of opportunity is a myth, that there is a "conspiracy of forces that tends to keep certain groups more or less permanently submerged." It found the chances were 3 to i that the son of a laborer will not rise to a job on the white-collar level.

Concluding that youth's story is ominous for the future of democracy, the commission recommended more jobs, more education and guidance, more fun for Youth. Its warning: ''Unpleasant stories are told of operators of coal properties who . . . mine only the richer veins and leave the smaller ones to cave in. This coal, it is said, is forever lost. Somehow this sort of thing reminds us that youth, too, never comes again."

*Howard M. Bell--American Youth Commission, American Council on Education, Washington, D. C.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.