Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/145

 It is quite clear, then, that youth has a great deal to lose as well as to gain, and it is a consciousness of this that inspired such phrases as "Whom the gods love die young" and "Be true to the dreams of thy youth."

The working-class boy of fourteen who goes to the mill has some difficulty in keeping his dream. He has difficulty in even conceiving the dream of youth at all or embodying it in any form at all. But the lad or girl who receives a merely scrappy and pseudo literary training, or who is taught science from textbooks without applying anything learned, is not in a much better case. Experience comes to him, but it is for the most part experience of people whose growth is arrested like his own, and dealing with them he learns only a kind of worldly wisdom and a contempt for his young dream! Maturity, as well as age, brings thus merely a kind of degeneration.

But for the new technical training we may claim that it favours a movement that is not degenerative in any sense, but progressive. All through the rationalizing process goes on and is not checked.