The Folly Of Youth

A while ago, in an article about the resignation of Peter Hain, Andrew Rawnsley wrote this:

Mr Brown did move quickly to reconfigure his cabinet to fill the Hain-shaped hole. By promoting a trio of thirtysomethings, he evidently hoped that a younger-looking top table will make this look like a government with plenty of tomorrows.

It seems that those at the top in British politics still haven’t learnt the most important lesson from the time of Tony Blair – ‘the folly of youth’. It was – arguably - the inadequate immaturity of Tony Blair, his ignorance of history and the world - in short his ‘youth’ - that led to the many, many mistakes of his premiership, most notably of course his disastrous Iraq adventure.

Rather than learn from this mistake, both the Conservatives and the Liberals have tried to repeat it, going for young men: Cameron and Clegg respectively, in the hope that they too can get some thing out of what seems like society’s unhealthy obsession with youth.

However, the political parties are merely reflecting a trend seen through the rest of society. The media itself seems always to be chasing a more youthful demographic, in part, driven by advertising, which regards the young as the ideal catch as they are seen as protean, still unfixed by habit and familiarity. Consequently, as advertising spending drives so much of the media – the rest of the media has to follow.

At the same time, there has been a loss of confidence in what can be called ‘Western values’, which means that there has also been a loss of confidence within the education system. A system that is no longer sure about what it should be teaching, or even how to go about teaching it. An education system that panders to youth’s immaturity by being ‘relevant’, making uniforms fashionable, even changing the PE kit. I would have thought that one of the defining features of being young – immature - is not knowing what is ‘relevant’ to you, almost by definition. But the real danger here is that children’s already narrow horizons, by dint of them being children, will remain narrow, if not get narrower if they are not constantly allowed to experience things that lie outside what they already know.

It seems fairly obvious to me that the current epidemic of what are called in glib marketing-like terms ‘adulescents’ or ‘kidults’, people like this, are the result of this narrowing down of children’s horizons while they are at school, leaving them unaware that there is a bigger, wider, world out there.