THE RISING GENERATION.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 990, 11 May 1911, Page 4

THE RISING GENERATION.

A lady of the old school, signing herself “Cornelia A. P. Comer,” contributes to the Atlantic Monthly a very plainspoken letter to the Rising Generation of American Youth. Miss Comer attributes the general fecklessness of the rising generation to a system of education which eliminates character and literature from its curriculum. She says : “The rising generation cannot spell, because it learned to read by '.he word-method ; it is hampered in the use of dictionaries, because it never learned the alphabet ; its English is slipshod and commonplace, because it does not know the sources and resources of its own language. “Conceived in uncertainty, brought forth in misgiving—how cau such a generation be nobly militant ? “Character and duty convey absolutely nothing to young people of this type. They have not even,

a fair working conception of what such words mean. “Deprived of the disciplinary alphabet, multiplication table, Latin grammar; dispossessed of the English Bible, most stimulating of literary as well as of ethical inheritances; despoiled of your birthright in the religion that made your ancestors ; destitute of incentives to hardihood and physical exertion ; solicited to indolence by cheap amusements, to self-conceit by cheap philosophies, to greed by cheap wealth—what, then, is left for you ? “Of your chosen pleasures, some are obviously corroding to the taste; to be frank, they are vulgarising. It is a matter of ordinary comment that the children of cultivated fathers and mothers do not, nowadays, grown up the equals of their parents in refinement and cultivation. “Conceptions of conduct that were the very foundations of existence to decent people even fifteen years their seniors were to them simply unintelligible. The word ‘unselfishness,’ for instance, had vanished from their vocabularies. Of altruism, they had heard. They thought it meant giving away money if you had plenty to spare. They approved of altruism, but ‘self-sacrifice’ was literally as Sanscrit to their ears. They demanded ease; they shirked responsibility. They did not seem able to respond to the notion of duty as human nature has always managed to respond to it before. “Young people have always loved pleasure, and always will. Yes, that is true, but this is different from anything we have ever seen in the young before. They are so keen about it—so selfish, and so hard !

“I know of my own knowledge how greatly the face of life in this country has altered since my own childhood. It is neither so simple nor so fine a thing as then. And the type of men of whom every small community then had at least half a dozen, the big-brained, bighearted, ‘old Roman’ men, whose integrity was as unquestioned as their ability, is almost extinct. Their places are cut up and filled by smaller, less able, often much less honest men.”