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43
HEALTH EDUCATION AND HOME SAFETY
Health Education and Youth
Adolescence is a mixed state, in which childhood and adult
life overlap, not always with ease. Many of the problems remain
the same whether a boy or girl has left school or not and, in
many respects, the wage-earning adolescent is just like the schoolboy
or schoolgirl of like age; the needs of mind and spirit are
the same, and the processes of learning are not essentially
different.
But, for the young wage-earner, school is over for ever. He
is earning his living in a wider and insecure world, and this tends
to give him an air of apparent maturity which his friends at
school have still to achieve.
He is also understandably suspicious of anything that smacks
too obviously of his own childish past, however happy this may
have been. Two of the symptoms of growing up met by every
youth leader are the desire to smoke and the desire to have a
drink in imitation of those who are already grown up.
Young people must be helped to realise the dangers inherent
in these desires, and the example of youth leaders and in fact of
all adults is of the greatest importance, particularly so with regard
to the misuse of drugs.
Some of these young people take drugs in an attempt to
solve their problems, to give themselves self-confidence, or to help
them to face the realities of life. Others do so because they need
to revolt against teachers and parents and the established order
of society. It might be said that all these people have emotional
problems and that, with drugs, they can create a new, more
tolerable, but false world.
The opportunities for health education among young people
seem to fall into three main groups, according to their sources.
First comes everything which a young worker learns in the course
of employment that may have a bearing on general education in
matters of health. Under the Factory Acts, careful provision is
made for welfare and many firms supplement the legal minimum
in their own way; the actual job and the training needed for it
may also be of real value from the point of view of accident
prevention, hygiene or general physical development. But the
knowledge and practice which are disseminated in this way are
in practice very unevenly distributed; many of those who need
help most, do not get it.
Next comes all that can be provided to the young workers
through further education; the last seven years have seen a
remarkable increase in the numbers of young workers released
part-time for further education. Admittedly, the vocational