CHAPTER XVIII

THE PERSONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS OF PREPARATION FOR ADULT LIFE

IN early adolescence it was indispensable for the development of character that self should be consciously affirmed. In the crisis the issue was what ideal of character the self should choose. The business of this later organization period is a purposed plan, a "mission." Physical and mental growth have perfected the individual equipment and imparted a boundless store of energy. Experience has given a rich background of ideas and awakened the desire for more. The young woman is ready to cooperate in building her own character with an intelligence and purpose impossible heretofore.

The Problem of Placing the Life. That is the way the philosophical adult friend can look at it. The young woman, emerging from high school or college, making her début in society, or looking eagerly over her typewriter desk, her sales counter, or her power machine, answers the great pulsing life of the world with her own throbbing pulses. Its need and suffering and stupendous tasks call to her conscious power of love and pity, of sacrifice and hard work. She is no child with fragmentary knowledge and naïve hopes, no "mere young girl" with romantic dreams and ideals innocent of reality. She is a woman, ready to do her share, to give her fresh young strength, to live and suffer and enjoy, to "get into the game" and take first

hand experience of the world of her hopes and desires. But she is a very young woman. Do not tell her so! Nothing is more irritating than advice except patroniz ing advice, and the very consciousness of youth and inexperience make the reiteration of it unbearable. Yet back of all the brave assurance that she can be and do and give what is of worth to the world is the wistful, tremulous need to know what the world most vitally needs, and what she can most perfectly do. So many things are still possible, but the necessity of choice is urgent.

Its Demand for Immediate Answer. When she was a child the girl looked forward to herself as a "milliner or a musicker," a sculptor, or a teacher, or the mother of ten children; perhaps all in the same day; perhaps one ideal persisted for a long time. But the fulfillment was an immeasurable distance away. With the entrance to her teens came the joyous realization that young-ladyhood was within a definite and comprehensible number of years, and for a time the plans for her personal activities in that limitless period bounded her thoughts. A few years of growth and study widened her ideals till their concrete boundaries dissolved in the vagueness of the abstract and universal. She was to be the super-woman, whose special talents in literature, art, and music should astonish and enrich the world, whose clear-sighted and efficient administrative ability should organize an admiring and loyal band of social workers to abolish poverty and misery, and who yet should make all these things mere adjuncts to a most perfect home with an adoring and distinguished husband and perfectly educated wonder-children. Just how and when this would come to pass was

not clear, but there was plenty of time.1 Now each day brings a question that must be answered. Can she get a job of any kind? Will the world, not admire and applaud, but pay her ten dollars a week? When one third of the hands are to be laid off, will she have "made good" sufficiently to be kept on? Will she marry Jack-honest, freckled, good-humored, and hardworking, but not knowing a Beethoven sonata from a Burne-Jones etching? Will she accept the sacrifice of the family and go to college, or learn the trade in which she has shown promise and help carry the family burdens?

The disconcerting part of it all is that the choices are so few, and yet so complicated in their results— and that nothing will wait. She has a feeling of the same breathless anxiety with which she watched the two skipping ropes turned by two other little girls. If she made her first jump at exactly the right instant and calculated the time that they writhed above her head so that her feet rose as they fell, she got into the rhythm and felt the intoxication of success. A slip meant tangled feet and perhaps a fall, surely a jeer, and the loss of her "turn." But there was always a chance to try again, to practice until she was sure of success. It seems now as she watches the interlacing ropes of industrial and social life that it is the merest chance that she shall not "get in wrong"; and that so many are waiting their turn that one miss is irrevocable. Yet she knows that self-pity or despair will be as fatal now as was letting herself listen to her rival's paralyzing taunt of "You can't do it, you can't, you can't!" Again the grim "I'll show you!" nerves her 1 Number 48 is a sympathetic sketch of this process.

to win. But will all the unselfish eagerness to serve be crushed out in winning a place from which to serve?

The Clue to the Answer. The relentless immediacy with which the world presents its choices for her answer extends to all the interests of her life. Her work, her pleasures, her friends, her duty, and that Future of possessions and fame and service and heart happiness which must be, and which yet is determined by the far-reaching choices of to-day, all press in an intolerable confusion; they form a maze to which she must find the clue. That clue is in some comprehensive life purpose. By it all things may be judged as to their utility, and rejected, or placed according to their relative worth. What is to determine the plan? What are its essential factors? Is there, after all, law and order which can organize the chaos of life into beauty, symmetry, and success? Where is she to go for the knowledge and help which she must find or fail? Much of the knowledge, it is true, must and can come only from experience; but much of it is more valuable in vicarious form, for personal experience would leave no life to use it. Here, then, is where the older man or woman-parent, friend, teacher, trade-master, special authority-has place as a helper. Not direction but cooperation is the method, not oracle but testimony.

1. Individual Aptitude. All who would help effectively must have a foundation conviction of the unique and permanent value of personality. Even in our mechanical age, when our school systems seek to standardize the knowledge and the skill of boys and girls by a uniform grading, and when the products of industry bear the immediate impress of machine regularity, it is still patent that there are round and square pegs

among the youthful workers, and round and square holes in the machinery. The new science of industrial efficiency is an attempt at a rudimentary sorting of at least the predominating angles and curves of worker and job. The religious educator believes that in a human world every human being has a possible place for perfect development which will contribute something needed for the perfect development of humanity. as a whole. But the fitting of the individual to that unique place comes not by a blind trust in Providence. Somebody has to know the various shaped places and assort the individual material. Educator, social worker, industrial leader-all must cooperate. But just now we have to consider the part in this fitting process which must be taken by the individual concerned.2

A great man said in the friendly intimacy of an alumni reunion that "Success is doing the thing you'd rather do than anything else in the world, and getting well paid for it." Personal inclination is not the only criterion of fitness, but it is an important factor. Whatever work any individual in the world can do must be done with materials and forces existent in the world. There are great divisions in the occupational field made by the "three kingdoms, animal, vegetable, and mineral." One may raise things that grow out of the earth-agriculture, horticulture, floriculture; or one may raise and train animals-dairying, bees, horses, dogs, poultry, pets; or one may manipulate the more permanent materials of the earth itself-in pottery, gold and silver and jewel craft, and wrought metals. Closely allied to this last comes another great See Bibliography, Number 126.