Northampton High School - Nesaki Yearbook (Northampton, MA)

Page 31 text:

,J Y ,M ,,-X ,, , , ,, gorercamessao Q Q5 0 lMIYj'QFJ34HSf 3 The inability of the modern city home to supply worth while amusements has led to the establishment of recreational facilities by city governments, but these provisions are painfully inadequate. Various community organizations are making efforts to relieve this situation, so that it seems reasonable to believe that eventually everyone will have opportunity for the use of public parks and playgrounds. There is another need, however, which is not so generally appreciated: that is, competent supervision of public playgrounds and a program of athletic contests between organized teams in city-wide leagues. A supervised competitive program such as this would make for harder, yet cleaner and more sportsmanlike, play than do the pick-up games which at present are the only ones available. In regard to recreational activities there is room for improvement in another line. To be of any use, an educational amusement must appeal to youth more than his ordinary pursuits, or he will not co-operate. The solution lies in teaching youth to prefer these beneficial amusements to detrimental ones. Such training should be in- cluded in the programs of our public schools. Many individual teachers have at- tempted this by discussions in class of moving pictures, books, and radio programs, but this education should be made a part of the regular school instruction. Although the modern family, not entirely through its own fault, may have failed in some of its functions to such an extent that city and even state and national governments have been forced to take measures calculated to make up these deficiencies, in another respect the family of to-day is far advanced over the family of fifty years ago. I refer to the awakened civic conscience of our people generally. The nation- wide response to the call of the Red Cross at the time of the recent Hood is concrete evidence of the prevailing Do unto others-'T policy of our society. This altruistic spirit is an indication of the progress of America, slow though it may be, toward the ideal state of complete harmony dreamed of throughout the ages. Twenty-:even

Page 30 text:

The Senior Looks at His Environment y , HE high school senior, as he approaches graduation, is at a critical point in his career Realizing this, he stops to look about him in order to see which features of his environment are of help to him and which should be corrected. As he does this, he notices' immediately that the family as an influence over young people no longer holds the place it formerly did. He wonders about this change,-what caused it, and what results it may have. If we consider why these changes have come, we Hnd that contributing to the instability of the modern home are several factors, one of the greatest of which is mobility of our population. Each year millions of our rural residents move to the city, it is true that many city families take up farm life, but it is only very rarely that this balance is favorable to the farming districts. In this way the stable old country home is being constantly changed for the city apartment. Coincidental with this crowding of our population into the cities, has been the development of many modern forms of recreation not harmful in themselves, but tending to disturb family life to such an extent that youth no longer considers sufhcient the recreational diversions provided by the home, in fact, many young people do not stay at home nowadays even when they have no specific place to go. If this is true in homes of moderate comfort, what is the condition in the homes of those poverty-stricken people in the slums of our great cities? The harmful effect of living in crowded, unsanitary tenement houses is now generally recog- nized. In Great Britain the national government has embarked upon an ambitious program of slum clearance, and in this country various private organizations of social workers have long been doing their best to better conditions, but there is still room for improvement. Homes such as these, which are unable to provide decent living conditions, can hardly be expected to provide recreation. One result of this driving of children into the streets to find amusement is the general misuse of leisure and, ultimately, the formation of street gangs engaged in petty crimes. The number of cases now being tried in juvenile courts is testimony to this effect of a lack of useful occupation for leisure hours, occupation once provided by the home. The tendency for the delinquent youth to develop into the hardened criminal is well known. The outlook, then, is darkly menacing, for organized racketeering, the product of the petty crimes of youth, annually costs the citizens of Chicago the appalling sum of SS145,000,000, to say nothing of the greater loss in the lowering of moral standards of the general public. If such conditions prevailed in the majority of cities, as they certainly will if preventive measures are not taken, our country will be overrun with crime. ROLAND S. BRAND Twenty-.fix

Page 32 text:

The Senior Looks at His Country Y Y S we raise our eyes from the scrutiny of problems peculiar to youth as individuals and as members of a community to consider our difficulties on a national scale, we see four burning question-marks. The hrst of these, undoubtedly the first to scorch us, is the unemployment situation. lt is a condition created entirely by another generation, whose mistakes may be visited on us in the form of general economic insecurity, if not in actual suffering. Their business methods, which are necessarily one cause of the depression, we must accept without stint or reservation or be labelled un-Americanf, Meanwhile all remedial legislation , must run the gauntlet of' blind partisanship, demagogy, and big business to have its sharp edges smoothed away before it appears on the statute books. The result is a slow, hard-won progress that lags behind present- day needs. An outgrowth, in part at least, of the years of depression is the fast-mounting public debt. Washington is spending money at a rate comparable to that of war-time, and when we consider that economists blame war-time spending for many of to-day's troubles, we wonder for what further financial distress today's spending may pave the way. Of one thing we may be sure: our generation is to look forward to the re- payment of the largest debt total the United States has ever incurred. A third shadow on the horizon for youth is the possibility of war. True, pessi- mists have predicted war for the past decade, but a multitude of false prophecies by no means precludes the fact of real peril. If one of the several danger spots of the world does flare up, the question arises, Will America be drawn in? We, who have had but a comparatively few years to enjoy normal life, answer with an emphatic No, But will our objections arrest the Yea's of voices far more powerful than ours? Looking at the government, we see another enigma. Governments change with the timesg and with affairs in the United States and the world as unsettled as they are, it is hardly to be expected that ours will be able to pursue approximately the same policy toward business and industry that it has in the years before depression. There- fore it is reasonable to assume that, as time goes on, the government will either strengthen and extend bureaucracy, or swing back toward a lairrez-faire policy. Which shall we favor, and how shall we enforce our decision? WALTER F. GRUzD1s The answer to these and all other questions related to the problems of youth we must seek within ourselves. In a republic such as ours the best means of exercising Twenty-eight