The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets — John Shaqi
The Spirit of Youth and the City StreetsAddams, Jane
General
The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets
Addams, Jane
Child rearing; Urban youth
A Scotch educator who recently visited America considered it very
strange that with a remarkable industrial development all about us,
affording such amazing educational opportunities, our schools should
continually cling to a past which did not fit the American
temperament, was not adapted to our needs, and made no vigorous pull
upon our faculties. He concluded that our educators, overwhelmed by
the size and vigor of American industry, were too timid to seize upon
the industrial situation, and to extract its enormous educational
value. He lamented that this lack of courage and initiative failed not
only to fit the child for an intelligent and conscious participation
in industrial life, but that it was reflected in the industrial
development itself; that industry had fallen back into old habits, and
repeated traditional mistakes until American cities exhibited
stupendous extensions of the medievalisms in the traditional Ghetto,
and of the hideousness in the Black Country of Lancashire.
He contended that this condition is the inevitable result of
separating education from contemporary life. Education becomes unreal
and far fetched, while industry becomes ruthless and materialistic. In
spite of the severity of the indictment, one much more severe and well
deserved might have been brought against us. He might have accused us
not only of wasting, but of misusing and of trampling under foot the
first tender instincts and impulses which are the source of all charm
and beauty and art, because we fail to realize that by premature
factory work, for which the youth is unprepared, society perpetually
extinguishes that variety and promise, that bloom of life, which is
the unique possession of the young. He might have told us that our
cities would continue to be traditionally cramped and dreary until we
comprehend that youth alone has the power to bring to reality the
vision of the "Coming City of Mankind, full of life, full of the
spirit of creation."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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