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.
This book consists of lectures given by me at Cambridge. Though they have been largely rewritten, I have kept a good deal of their original lecture form, as being (I hope) rather less formal and less dogmatic. For to dogmatism, those who write on language seem, for some reason, particularly prone; and I should like to make clear at once that, if at times I have put my view strongly, I do not forget that such matters of taste must remain mere matters of opinion.
In addition, I have included a good many specimen passages from various authors. Perhaps I have quoted too much. But a book on style without abundant examples seems to me as ineffectual as a book on art, or biology without abundant illustrations. Many of these passages are in French. That may be Gallomanian on my part, and I must apologise if they trouble some readers. But some ability to read French prose does seem to me most desirable for anyone who would write well in English. I have tried to choose pieces not too difficult in syntax or vocabulary. And in these days less than ever can we afford to be better insular.
