War & Youth

In Washington last week war hung like a thundercloud over the 24th annual meeting of the American Council on Education. Representatives of the 534 schools and teachers' associations were told about the effects of war on youth--as they have been in Britain, as they are developing in the U.S., as they are likely to be when war is over.

The Story in Britain. Harvard's gentle, alert President James Bryant Conant, who tripped to Britain last March for President Roosevelt, told what 19 months of mobilization had done to Britain's universities.

> Male enrollment in universities outside London was down 15% last year, this year dropped another 20 or 25%. By next year British universities will have less than 50% of normal enrollment.

> Britain's pool of trained men in "reserved occupations" includes some 200,000 doctors, architects, physicists, chemists and other university men, is replenished by allowing students in these technical categories to carry on with their studies.

> All private research in physics has come to a halt.

> So badly needed are scientists for war work that students get no more than two or three years' training.

> Britain still hopes to let nonscientific students (social sciences, arts & letters) get a year at college to give them a taste of university life, preserve the liberal foundation of British civilization.

Students v. Draft. Francis J. Brown, the Council's consultant on national defense, reported that in the U.S.:

> If local boards follow the recommendation of Brigadier General Lewis B. Hershey, Deputy Director of Selective Service, they will give blanket deferment to all students above the class of sophomore.

> Certain students in fields essential to national defense may, as in Britain, get occupational deferment.

Planning for Peace. Dr. Floyd Wesley Reeves, small, balding director of the Council's American Youth Commission, director of labor supply and training for the Office of Production Management, raised the question: What will happen to some 4,000,000 young people from 16 to 25 who (as in the past decade) may be neither employed nor in school when the war emergency ends? Many U.S. youths of these ages are now either serving in the Army & Navy or employed in defense industries. The Administration's expected solutions of this post-war idleness:

> Bigger Federal work programs to care for "several hundred thousand" young people leaving school each year.

> Federal agencies to provide technical training for students, supplementing the general education offered by schools.

> In addition to public works and conservation projects, youth may be kept busy producing goods for families on relief, building and operating community clubs and playgrounds for themselves.

Said Dr. Reeves dryly: "It is ridiculous to have youth unemployed while they themselves need goods and services."

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