Thomas Mott Osborne: “Mr. Speaker, not long ago I read the results of a study that was done on the Fullerton County Public Schools in 1940…”

“Mr. Speaker, not long ago I read the results of a study that was done on the Fullerton County Public Schools in 1940, and in this study the teachers in the Fullerton schools were asked what their main concerns were. The list read like this: Number one concern was talking in class; number two was chewing gum in school; number three was getting out of turn in line when you went from one class to another; and number four was not putting waste in the wastepaper baskets. More recently someone went back to the Fullerton public schools and asked the same question; what was the main concern that the teachers had. The list had changed somewhat. The number one concern was drug and alcohol abuse; secondly was gangs; and then followed weapons, teenage pregnancy, teenage suicide, and violence. I guess this study, as I saw it, Mr. Speaker, resonated with my own experience of 40 years working with young people, because when I first started working with young people in about 1960, the out-of-wedlock birth rate was roughly 5 percent; today it is 33 percent. We have 18 million fatherless young people in our country today. Most of them have not even seen their father or met them. In 1960, a relatively small percent of our young people were living in homes without both biological parents. Today, almost half live in homes without both biological parents. Drug abuse and gangs remained relatively unheard of in 1960.”