Cynical Little "Smart Alecs"
Received Friday 8.30 p.m. LONDON, Oct. 21. There is a growing tendency among young parents today to put off having famiiies beeause they feared children would prove an encumbrance said Mr P. H. B. Lyon, former headmaster of Rugby, addressing the National Marriage Guidance Council. "Masses of younger men and women today are contemptuous of what they considered bourgeois virtues," said said Mr Lyon. "Both by exampie and precept parents of this type drive out of their children the natural impulses of trust, faith and generosity. Pathetically seeking to arm themselves against the arrows of fortune with bucklers and selfishness, suspicion and disbelief, and the victims themselves of the world 's cruelty they are determined to put their children 'wise' to the pitfalls which await them. "And worldly wise indeed their children are becoming, often at a horrifyingly early age, cynical little 'Smart Alecs' who worship nothing but ruthlessness and craft. And these are our parents to be." Mr Lyon said except in the greatest of emergencies it was wrong for any Government to coax a married woman into employment. "If she is a mother as well as a wife, then it is criminal that she should be taken away from her natural duties, " he said.
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Chronicle (Levin), 22 October 1949, Page 5
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210Cynical Little "Smart Alecs" Chronicle (Levin), 22 October 1949, Page 5
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