Robert Penn Warren:
“...in
the heart’s last kingdom, only the old are young.”
Those words of Robert Penn Warren have often run through my mind during the last year or so of the public discussion of the age of USA presidential candidates.
My conclusion is that, in the end, after all the considerations about some young people being fresh and open, and some old people being destroyed and insane, Warren got it wonderfully right.
I’m eighty-two now, and I look back to when I was only seventy-two, and realize how much I’ve grown since then, how much more I see now, how much more peace and perspective I have now than then.
I applied to take a program in elementary school teacher training in Ontario when I was sixty-two, twenty years ago, with the idea that I would like to teach elementary school in rural Ontario. My references were good, I had over ten years of teaching at the college level, some experience in secondary school teaching, and had experience in many other ways of life, and was acceptable. But I was told that I would be allowed to teach for only two years after I graduated from the program, the age limit then being sixty-five. Such an age restriction seems almost incredible now.
My grandmother, who was highly qualified in history, English, music, Latin, and German language, had to quit teaching in secondary school in Massachusetts in 1912 because she got married. That now seems inconceivable but it was then a widely-accepted, societal, unassailable belief.
Society itself can improve with age!
