Perhaps it would not be misleading to say inexperienced youth with “the lid off,” and experienced age with “the lid on.” What, then, are the main differences between them in point of motivation? The usual answer is simplicity itself--that is, the answer usually given by experienced age. These youngsters are carried away, we are told, by “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life”--to use an ancient phrase for pleasure-seeking instincts; whereas--so the assumption runs--we oldsters are guided by a rationality that governs our instincts and keeps them in their place. Most persons of maturity are sure that, in the by and large, experience brings wisdom, that the rules and precedents that the mature observe are dictates of practiced reason, and therefore that youths who do not follow substantially in our footsteps act irrationally, and thereby subject themselves to the penalties of rashness. This view of the matter contains a grain of truth, of course, but only a grain. A burnt child does dread the fire, but a child with a stomachache does not dread the unwholesome food that produced it. “Experience” at the dining-room table often results in wrong dietary habits that even maturity regards as right. “Experience” as a parent can fix upon the mind the most futile and injurious conceptions of parental authority--it has done so in multitudes of cases. “Experience” as a teacher fastened upon us a kind of school-teaching that we are now struggling, with enormous effort, to free ourselves from. So, in statecraft, in churchcraft, in industrial and economic relations, in social customs, we oldsters are dragging about with us a terrible weight of unnecessary and injurious habit and precedent. In fact, experience has brought us, along with some wisdom, a lot of unwisdom which it has baptized with the sanctity of our years. Accumulation of experience or of years is not of great inherent significance; neither is the lack of years. What is important is the way in which we deal with experiences as they arise. This is the problem for age and youth alike, and here is the basis for the most useful approach to the youth-question. It is not enough to say that in childhood and adolescence instinctive impulses are more varied and more clamorous; nor have we said enough when we add to this that in our day there is an unusually wide cleft between the ways of the young and the ways of the old. The really important comparison is that between the characteristic technic of the young and of the old in the making and the unmaking of approved precedents.