Moral panic about Britain’s juvenile delinquents is nothing new. Nor are suggestions of what should be done to deal with them. Even during the Second World War both the government and the general public were alarmed by what they saw as the growing problem of unruly youth. This New Statesman article argued that the answer must be much more training and education for the young, and that a reoriented national service scheme, even in peacetime, could also help.

The New Statesman

25 July 1942

Very nearly the most depressing of all the social documents of recent years have been those which have set out to describe the situation of adolescents and young adults in the depressed areas or, indeed, in any areas in which poverty is common. These accounts of things as they were presented a picture of boys and girls, but especially boys, flung out of blind alley employments at 17 or 18, or left, by the decay of, the industries in which they would have been absorbed, to kick their heels in useless penury through the most formative years of their lives. It was pointed out again and again that only a tiny fraction of these adolescents were even touched by any sort of club or society, and that when they grew up to be young men and women a still tinier portion of them took any interest at all in politics or public affairs, or knew the first thing about such matters. Everyone agreed that we were pitifully and wickedly misusing a commodity — youth — which was growing scarcer and therefore more precious as the average age of the population rose. Everyone agreed that something ought to be done about it; but nothing was done, right through those dreary decades of misgovernment between the two wars.

Then came war, bringing new problems with it and doing away with some of the old ones. Juvenile unemployment gradually disappeared as labour of all sorts grew scarce, and we ceased to worry about blind-alley occupations in a world in which no one knew up what alleys most occupations were likely to lead. But in place of the old evils came new ones — among them an alarming increase in juvenile delinquency, due partly to educational upsets and evacuations, partly to a relaxation of parental control, and partly, well, just to the toughness which war encourages. In place of juvenile unemployment came the problem of juvenile overwork, where young workers were forced to share the long hours of labour demanded of their elders, and the restrictions on the working hours of young persons recently imposed under the Factory Acts were removed in many thousands of cases under the plea of war necessity. With these abnormal hours of labour

— up to sixty or even seventy a week — came fresh demands on youth’s leisure time. Hundreds of thousands of adolescents joined the pre-military training units, and many others enrolled in the Home Guard, often giving wrong ages in order to secure admission. Such calls, on top of a heavy day of factory labour, must in many cases be imposing very severe strains on juvenile endurance —not the less so because the strain is often voluntarily accepted.

While all this was going on, the Government was waking up to a sense that the needs of youth had been neglected; and throughout the country the local authorities, under stimulus from the centre, were undertaking youth activities and collaborating with the voluntary youth movements on an unprecedented scale. The nature of these activities and the energy with which they have been pursued differ a good deal from area to area; but in most places great difficulties are being encountered because of the long working hours and the increased pace of work which has to be sustained. It is true that, by way of compensation, juvenile earnings have risen sharply, especially in the case of boys, and a fair number of the older boys have found themselves upgraded to men’s work at adult wages. But this, where the work is heavy, as among the builders’ labourers, is by no means a good thing; and the evil is aggravated because, under war conditions, the grown-ups can seldom spare time to teach the young worker how to do his job. Apprenticeship is suffering seriously on this account, above all in the building trades; and boys who ought to be learning to be craftsmen are kept at labouring work instead.

Technical education is also suffering, as much of the space of technical schools and colleges is taken up with special forms of war training, and a good deal of the normal work of adolescent education is thrust aside. The conditions in this sphere were bad enough before the war. The numbers of full-time technical students were small in most trades, and the great majority of those in attendance were trying to pick up the training they needed by attendance at evening courses after a full day’s work. A few employers gave time off for day attendance; but the great majority did not. Consequently, of those who began upon technical evening courses with a view to winning certificates the majority fell by the wayside, and only a small minority went through to the end. War has inevitably worsened these conditions, which were bad enough before.

As against this jeremiad, it may be argued that conditions of military service have changed very much for the better. Many thousands of men in the Air Force, and not a few in the technical units of the Army and Navy, are picking up a valuable training in the handling of tools and the understanding of machines. There is no risk that, at the end of the war, we shall suffer from a shortage of men equipped with the elements of machine-sense and dexterity in the less difficult engineering occupations. It may be that, for those who find their way into the more skilled branches of the armed forces, the training there given will undo the mischief s of earlier neglect. It may even be that serious overwork for a few years is not quite so disastrous for the adolescents as we supposed it was when the Factory Act of 1937 was passed.

But the position is bad enough, and it is not easy to find a remedy while the war lasts. One thing that clearly ought to be done is a much more stringent enforcement of the regular law about the hours of labour of those under 18. It is more than doubtful whether hours as prolonged as those now being worked in many factories are really a source of higher production. The experience of the last war is against long hours; and it might not be at all a bad thing if the result of refusal to sanction excessive hours for juveniles were a reduction in the amount of overtime worked by some of the adults. But, quite apart from that, the hours of the juveniles ought to be shortened — the more so if they are to be expected to take an active part in other forms of national service out of working time. Leisure, up to a point, is not a luxury, but a necessity, above all for the young. Our great-grandfathers no doubt thought differently, and sometimes tried to justify working children for twelve and fourteen hours a day by the plea that there was no other way of keeping them out of mischief. But that argument can hardly come to life again in the twentieth century.

We can, then, do something now to improve the situation, though not a great deal. The less we can accomplish now, the more determined should we be to put matters really right after the war. The raising of the school-leaving age to sixteen, and the prohibition of all “gainful employment” below that age, are highly desirable things; but it is even more important that the boy or girl shall not be allowed to leave school and lose all necessary contact with education on entering industry, whatever the leaving age may be. The institution of part-time education up to eighteen is at least as important as the extension of the period of full-time education beyond fifteen, and may be even more urgent. For it means not only an educational bridge between childhood and manhood, but also a fundamental change in the condition of. juvenile employment.

Of course, this is true only if the right methods are used in the new schools. It would be possible to start a system of continuation schools in which youth would be merely bored, and not prepared for the activities of adult work and leisure. What is needed in this period of part-school, part-factory life is neither mainly trade education for a particular craft nor mainly book-learning of a narrowly “cultural” kind, but a training of hand and mind together that will make the adolescents who pass through it more adaptable and intelligent producers, more skilled consumers of goods and services, and better citizens of the community. They must be free to follow their several bents, cultural or practical — to master the scientific ground work of their several occupations, rather than the technique of a particular trade; to become handier in using their own language in speech or writing; to know more about their own country, and about other countries and peoples; and therewith to use their bodies better, as well as their minds. Their education must be designed, for as many of them as possible, not to end at eighteen, but to implant in them the desire for more, and to lead them in to one or another of the varied forms of adult education, including higher technical education, that ought thereafter to be put within their reach.

This is one side of the problem which we have to face now, if we are to be ready to put the necessary reforms into operation speedily on the return of peace. But the problem has also another side. Most persons in authority seem to expect that conscription in some form will survive the war, and that we must look forward to having for many years to come a great Army and Air Force under arms. If this is to be our fate, it is to be presumed that the boys (and perhaps the girls also) will, on leaving their part-time schools, or not long afterwards, be called up for their quota of national service. If so, it will be our bounden duty to see that the time they spend in this service is not wasted from the human standpoint. The only condition on which compulsory service can be tolerable in the post-war world is that the Army and the Air Force and the Navy shall become truly educational institutions, training their conscripts not merely as cannon fodder, but for the business of living. Army education, above all, will need to be utterly transformed, and the entire spirit of army discipline will need to be altered beyond recognition.

No doubt, some of our readers will be wroth with us for mentioning such possibilities as the conscription of young men and maidens in a world rid of Nazi domination. But is it not best to face the unpleasant possibility, rather than allow it to take us unprepared? For assuredly, if we are not ready for it, we shall be in grave danger of getting it in the worst possible form. A year’s national service, rightly organised, much more on the lines of Mr. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps than on those of existing military training, might be an excellent thing for the group known as “18+”: it could be at any rate very much better than the demoralising conditions which a large proportion of those in this age group were condemned to experience up to 1939. And it would be most likely to be worked in the right way if it were directly linked up with a system of part-time (preferably halftime) education up to eighteen, including a period of school-camping leading on to the period of part-military, part-educational national service.

These things want thinking about, much harder than most educational reformers have thought about them so far. We do not profess to have the complete answer to the conundrum, but clearly the answer needs to be sought and found now, and not left until the war is over and everything has to be improvised in a hurry, probably by just the people who ought to have least to do with it.

Selected by Robert Taylor

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