The Education Corner: "Restraint"

Is it true that the whole tragedy of the juveniles is the work of the freedom that leaves the new generation to grow up as it pleases?!... Here is a view of modern education, believed in — besides the affirming woman of letters Mrs. Asma Tubi — by a number of fathers and mothers. What, then, do our readers say to it?...

Have you ever once loved the word "restraint"...? As for me, yes.

Mr. Basil Henriques, judge of the juvenile court in London — the man before whom scores of juveniles are tried every day, and whose word counts as authority — says:

"The whole tragedy of the juveniles is the work of the new freedom. Fathers and mothers have taken up theories whose substance is: no pressure and no direction... Let the new generation grow up as it pleases, lest a complex form in it or its personality be weakened... And so there has grown up among us a generation that goes its own way... impulsive... reckless... its motto: I see, I want, and I take... with this added: let me enjoy myself all I can, while it is in my power."

And Dr. Fosdick, author of the book The Touchstone of Morals, says: "This generation has been given a freedom the like of which no generation in history ever received... It was given to it while it was young, and it misused it... Young men and young women took to drink with swagger and pride, and their lives began to dance with the winds... The tender plant was left without stakes, and it grew crooked... And what are the stakes but careful watching and gentle guidance... and if these fail, then a rod bearing that beloved severity which springs from hearts that intend good, not vengeance and spite."

People lived for generations under the influence of what is called pressure... The father had his awe and his respect, and the sons took account of him... The mother had her awe and her watchfulness, and the girls walked the straight path... And the schoolmaster — and even the master of a craft, carpenter or blacksmith — had the right to take the flesh and leave the bone.

And amid all this pressure — as some like to call it — scores of great men and great women came forth... Their personalities were not killed... The world did not teem with cowards... nor fill up with madmen... The delinquent juveniles were few... and the world under the influence of the rod was a thousand times cleaner than it is with this freedom given to the young...

We may ask: does what suited the nineteenth century suit the twentieth... suit the generation that has been educated and has come to feel its own being? And I say no... not all of it suits, but some of it does. And it is then for this young generation, which has been educated and has come to feel its own being, itself to set the restraint upon itself and to carry the rod against its own whims...

Fosdick says also... You plant the sapling and set an iron frame around it to guarantee it life... Is this frame to be counted a fetter upon the plant, or an element of protection for it...?

So then, our young people: you stand on the threshold of a life full of corruptions and temptations, so be guards over your own souls... Set a ring of iron — the iron of will power — around yourselves, that your bodies may remain sound and your minds sound with them... Remember the poet's words:

Souls will not turn back from their straying
unless there be within them a rebuker.

This period of your lives is a period of production and building... Do not let it go to waste, only to repeat afterward with the remorseful poet:

I did not say to youth, "Go in God's ease
and in His keeping," the morning it took its leave —

A visitor who came and lingered a season,
blackened the pages with sins, and turned away.