[00:01.49]Lesson 5
[00:03.31]Youth
[00:10.57]How does the writer like to treat young people?
[00:16.76]People are always talking about 'the problem of youth'.
[00:21.23]If there is one--which I take leave to doubt
[00:24.73]--then it is older people who create it,not the young themselves.
[00:29.87]Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are after all human beings
[00:36.39]--people just like their elders.
[00:38.96]There is only one difference between an old man and a young one:
[00:43.25]the young man has a glorious future before him
[00:46.68]and the old one has a splendid future behind him:and maybe that is where the rub is.
[00:55.19]When I was a teenager,I felt that I was just young and uncertain--
[00:59.90]that I was a new boy in a huge school,
[01:03.34]and I would have been very pleased to be regarded
[01:05.95]as something so interesting as a problem.
[01:09.48]For one thing,being a problem gives you a certain identity,
[01:14.15]and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking.
[01:19.81]I find young people exciting.
[01:22.83]They have an air of freedom,
[01:25.09]and they have not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort.
[01:30.70]They are not anxious social climbers,and they have no devotion to material things.
[01:37.10]All this seems to me to link them with life and the origins of things.
[01:42.36]It's as if they were in some sense cosmic beings in violent and lovely contrast with us suburban creatures.
[01:52.40]All that is in my mind when I meet a young person.
[01:56.15]He may be conceited,ill-mannered, presumptuous or fatuous,
[02:02.55]but I do not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect for elders--
[02:08.28]as if mere age were a reason for respect.
[02:12.00]I accept that we are equals,and I will argue with him,as an equal,if I think he is wrong.