It is customary nowadays among fashionable ladies and gentlemen to acquire strange and sometimes quaint cloths which are scarcely ever used. Sometimes it may be an approaching festival; sometimes a two hour ceremony and sometimes to honour a dead colleague – something triggers off the modern craze to sew new materials whose use does not outlast the moment of craze. And so, people who just occupy small apartments in their parents’ homes, or have rented one room in a densely – peopled house find that more than two- thirds of their rooms are filled with bongo trousers which they cannot wear, worn out jeans which stinks, or specially made clothes for occasions that are not recurrent.
Although plagued by the problem of school fees for their children, parents have had to swallow their own phlegm and humour their children who need special clothes for important events. Newly employed youths soon find that their comrades getting married, and a new and special attire must be used to grace the occasion. University students see matriculation ceremonies or induction ceremonies into club membership as special reasons to make new attire which – you may be sure they would not wear on another occasion that parallels the one for which these clothes were made.
Medical doctors may soon find another cause for the incidence of high blood pressure among the youth. The desire to acquire new clothes is one strong possible cause, but a more subtle one which haunts like a ghost is the problem of choice of what to wear. The youths have so stuffed their apartments, wardrobes, drawers and trunks with so many clothes that the greatest problem they face is the choice of what to wear.
Delinquency describes actions that would not be crimes if performed by adults. If a young person performs one of such actions then he has committed a crime. Delinquency is one of several status offences- offences that can be committed only by people in particular stations of life as determined by age, profession or a person’s role in society. For young people such offences include drinking, driving and smoking under age usually they are offences only to the extent that they help to preserve some of the good things of life for the exclusive enjoyment of the adult world. Delinquency is therefore a weapon forged in adult pride and intolerance. If the world changed overnight and the responsibility would than certainly refer only to many of the adult actions now freely committed by them.
The preparation which a study of the humanities can provide stems from three observations about education in our world of accelerating social and technological change. First, with the rate of change, we cannot hope to train our student for specific technologies. That kind of vocational education is obsolescent. By the time the specific training will have been completed, the world will have moved on.
If our education consists of narrow training, we will not be prepared to change. Second and paradoxically, what our student desire from their education is preparation for specific careers – business, engineering, medicine, computer programming and the like, but we will not be able to train them for a life-long career. Their confronting the depressed job market gives our students a certain anxiety, but the solution they seek in vocational training is not sufficient. Third, we sense in our students a narrow materialism, with the good life defined in terms of material comforts. Education then means learning to do a job which will make money. I see in this definition a limiting sense of what education and thus life offer, a definition which excludes joy and meaning. Our narrow approach to the study of the humanities responds to these three related problems. In our changing, yet narrow world, the teaching of the humanities finds one powerful justification – it teaches student how to think.
