Question: Hi Lyn. We had some fun here, with the student meetings. We began this around seven, eight weeks ago, and this is very exciting. So, I wanted to say something about the question of leadership, because I think it's sometimes difficult, you know. I want the young people to take leadership. What does it mean?

LaRouche: It means, essentially, developing one's mind. And, what I try to do, is set the model for it. That's why I do these long, two-hour, four-hour, discussions with groups of youth. And I particularly like--I mean, a hundred in a meeting is sometimes necessary, but it's not the best mechanism for pedagogical work. Actually, about 20, 25 is your optimal level for pedagogical work, in terms of discussion among youth; leadership discussion, scientific discussion. Because, it's not so small, that one or two personalities dominate the entire discussion, and it's not so large, that very few have a chance to intervene actively, into the discussion. So, the usual thing, a class size in a secondary school or a university, should be between 15 and 25, generally; except for general lectures. But most of the class work should be in that 15-25 participant range.

Because, in that, you have this intense kind of Platonic-Socratic dialogue, which is necessary, to bring forth a round of intellectual development among the participants. As a matter of fact, the model to be studied, is to take the set of Plato's Socratic dialogues as a whole, and adding in The Laws, which is another kind of--it's not a dialogue, but it has many of the qualities of dialogue--and take these as an example of pedagogical model. That is, what should happen, in a good classroom, a Classical-humanist classroom, which has not less than, say, 15 pupils, and not more than, say, 25: What kind of experience should that be?

Now, look at the participants in any Platonic dialogue, among the characters in the dialogue. See how it looks. And by studying all of Plato's dialogues from this standpoint, you get a sense of how the discussion, how the pedagogy has to go, to make it work. When people try to teach at people--"learn after me"--that really does not change people. It's only when people go through their own cognitive experience.

Now, you'll find, in the youth work, we're having in the United States--and I pulled much of the youth work away from the older members, away from their control. Because they were killing it! They couldn't help but kill it. You see it in Germany: The predominant tendency among the leadership in Germany, is to kill the youth work. And it's a result of precisely that pathological phenomenon that I referred to in my remarks today: You have a generation, which represents the incumbency of power, by that generation, which causes people in that generation, for reasons that they themselves don't understand, to try to impose what they think are their values, and their prejudgments, upon young people. And they're wrong! And therefore, if you let them get their hands on the youth movement, they will destroy it! Because, everyone says, "The youth must do as we tell them."

I say, "I don't worry about the youth doing what I tell them. That doesn't get you anywhere, because I'm not going to be here forever." So, I'm not going to sit around on a cloud someplace, issuing manifestos, which will tell the youth movement when to blow their noses. That's not the way the world is going to work! I have to develop among young people, the self-starting capability, of doing a better job, than their parents' generation did. And, there's only one way to do that: And that's to bring out their inner potential, which means, an active, dialogue type of  process--a Socratic dialogue type of process--among themselves.

And, at the same time, to take this kind of process, and approach the population in general, that way. The population is sick, mentally ill. They need help! How do you help them? By yelling at them? That's not exactly likely to succeed. How do you do that? You get their attention. What do you do? You're trying to get them in a Socratic dialogue, focussed on the leading issues of the moment; but also, responding on other things that they drag in. Because these are things that have to be resolved in their mind, if they're going to function effectively.

So, you have to go out to recruit people, with a Platonic dialogue, as a method. And, to recruit from various parts of the population. And, what will happen is, if you do a good job, you will find the youth will tend to respond most actively--not all of them, but enough of them. Those who respond to what you're doing, will then see what is happening, and they will say, "Hey! You've got a movement going here." And then, they will respond.

So, if you want to recruit the people who are in the older generation, or the younger part of the older generation, you have to demonstrate to them, that you're able to organize people from the younger generation, that is, the 18- to 25-year-old generation. You can only do that, succeed in both purposes, by using the method of the Socratic dialogue, in which the development of ideas, not the teaching of doctrine, is the basis of the process.

That's why we have--with what I've done in the U.S.--we've had success. Well, yes, we have problems, but you expect problems. That the problems are no reason to quit. The problems are a reason to continue: Because, what you're doing, is, you're trying to solve precisely those problems, and you have to keep working at it.

So, what I did, is, I pulled the youth movement, out from under the influence of the "old fogeys": Old fogeys is almost anybody older than 30 and under 55--that's an old fogey. I pulled the thing out from under their control, and put the leadership under direction of people who are more sensitive to principled Platonic dialogue, who are less "screwed up" (as they say), by this Baby Boomer ideology. And then, let the young people, themselves, develop in their movement, develop an organic leadership around this process of task-oriented, Platonic-Socratic dialogue. I don't know of any other way to do it. And the way I administer and intervene in this process, the way I've been protecting it for the past three years--protecting it from older people--is just that: Is knowing that, if you could create the right environment, that the young people out there, who know that their parents' generation has destroyed society, who know that they have to introduce a change, they're also intelligent enough to know, that they don't know how to make the change, yet. And, they'd run fast, and learn how to do it. And, they know that colleges won't give it to them; they know that textbooks won't give it to them; they know the Internet won't give it them--that is, the so-called "information society."

So, you offer them the one thing that can give them the quality they need: an organized process of Socratic, focussed upon the crucial issues of this time, as Plato, in his dialogues, focussed on the crucial issues of his time. And let people assimilate that method, that idea. And from that, you produce a generation, which knowing that it has no future, under a continuation of the leading generation's policies, will struggle for survival. They have a very strong motive. But, if you bring in garbage, and you start to give the same old garbage as the schools, and the parental generation's into them, you destroy them and demoralize them.

That's the issue. That's the problem.

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