When we make this comparison, what do we find? On the side of age we find man measuring himself by his own past, mechanizing the wisdom of yesterday so that it cannot grow through today’s experiences, making his own imperfections into virtues. We behold, consequently, accumulations of property, of personal and institutional influence, and even of scientific knowledge bolstering customs and standards after they have become plainly questionable. If we of the older generation had the grit to be historically, psychologically, and ethically realistic towards ourselves, we should see the irony of our position. We have a timid wisdom, a self-restricting wisdom, a pseudo-wisdom, for we have no adequate technic for getting out of new experiences what they could teach us, nor for graduating from precedents whose teaching is already completed. When the Disciples asked, “Who is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven?” Jesus set a small child in the midst, saying, “Except ye become as little children, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” On the other hand--what a paradox! who is more unwilling than an adolescent to become as a little child? Are modern youths very ready to learn? This is the test for them, and when they prove that they are in the attitude of learning, they must next show whether they will take the trouble to acquire a technic for learning. We say that youth is forward-reaching; it thinks in terms of the future. But in what sense is this true? Most commonly in the sense of aspiration to be classified with adults and to enjoy their prerogatives. It does not usually mean a stretching towards any unprecedented good. Youth sheds the precedents of its own childhood only to adopt the precedents of those a little older than itself! The “flapper” of fourteen gets herself up and conducts herself as if she were eighteen at least; the boy of sixteen wants to be “a man of the world” right now; almost any youth of twenty can be relied upon to conform scrupulously to the customs of some group, set, or type that, in his estimation, has “arrived.”