"We have no teen age problems because of our carefully planned
childhoods. I have heard about your places of correction for adolescent
children. To us it seems an indictment of your method of child
training. The parents rather than the children should be punished.
Our visitors from your earth have been telling us many things about
your youth problem. They were much impressed with our lack of such
problems. A Martian cannot visualize adolescents as murderers, robbers,
committers of petty crime. Your habit-forming drugs and stimulants no
doubt help to increase your juvenile delinquency. I was amazed to hear
from one of you that statistics show your seventeen-year-olds come into
trouble with the law more than any other age group.
"We do not coddle our youths; their bodies and strength are developed
with careful and continual exercise and under strict discipline. We
force no square pegs in round holes, nor round pegs in square holes.
After their periods of education our young boys and girls are examined
by experts from the professional and crafts academies, who take great
pains to discover their natural talents and aptitudes so that they can
not only be of great service to us but a satisfaction to themselves.
We help them pass through training necessary to perfect them in their
chosen careers. We try to develop their ingenuity.
"Every profession or craft is controlled by an academy for each race.
The members of these academies are the governing powers and judges of
promotion and demotion. They honestly promote and reward only those
who are justly deserving. No one among us would want to be treated
otherwise. Whereas some of your own best known colleges of learning
will take poor students who are proficient in football or other sports.
"Up until the age of thirty Earth years we are still minors in our
educational period; after that our boys and girls must volunteer into
the general army of service. This service includes menial jobs, such
as working as farm hands, laborers, servants. It also covers all
general labor, such as city cleaning, dishwashing, rubbish assorting,
fertilizer and garbage handling. The girls must do the menial work
in hospitals as nurses' assistants or aides. All boys and girls,
gain their points according to their willingness to excel in their
work during their testing period. Almost all of them are fired with
enthusiasm and have a strong incentive to do good work. After a year
they become first grade degree citizens of Mars; then they go back to
their chosen or original trades or professions as apprentices.
"All of us on Mars go through the same routine. We are supposed to have
graduated from all grade schools, educational, trade, agricultural,
and professional--and colleges of the highest learning; but not from
postgraduate courses, which we continually take after we have already
chosen our future vocations.
"Every grade degree has its honorary emblems, which we wear as a badge
of honor to denote our standing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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