The Education of a Youth Council

In July 2005 I watched a documentary called "The Education of Shelby Knox" that "hit the ball home" about the fallacies of systemic youth involvement. Before I go into that, I want to share a little background:

In October 2000 I joined the ranks of the YES Ambassadors, a group of youth involvement advocates hired by the Points of Light Foundation to work in national nonprofit organizations and state agencies across the US. My job was to promote youth voice and service in Washington state's education agency. In the course of my work there, I found there were dozens of different kinds of youth involvement that didn't fit conveniently on POLF's spectrum of what's acceptable: youth leading protests, youth evaluating programs, and youth researching issues weren't on the okay list; youth forums, youth trainings, and youth councils were.

Those findings led me to work with friends, many of whom were YES Ambassadors, to create The Freechild Project. Freechild was to serve as a connecting point for all those different types of action, and to let the world know that young people were hard at work...

Fast forward 5 years to June 2005. I'm sitting in a theater in Seattle watching a movie about a young woman in Lubbock, Texas. She does everything "right," including going to church, getting good grades, signing the abstinence pledge, and joining the youth council. However, its on the youth council where her convenient complacence falls apart, and she becomes inspired to advocate for something more, something deeper than what is acceptable.

While many other reviews focus on the topic of Knox's activism (here and here) I want to highlight another component that I think is equally as powerful.

I am afraid that the youth council in this movie is indicative of youth councils in most small cities across the nation, which, while it may be good news for Lubbock's coordinator, is bad news for youth councils in everywhere though. In my work as a trainer of these groups, and as a founder of a youth council in my neighborhood when I was a young person, I can honestly say that most youth councils are irresponsive to the needs of the actual youth they are supposed to represent. Worse still, they are often no more than tokens who carry out the will of their adult coordinators and organizational sponsors.

Its dangerous for me to say this: I don't want to bite the hand that feeds. However, any amount of critical analysis can easily identify the faults of an adult-driven, adult-oriented group designed to gather and share youth opinion. This was definitely the case of Lubbock, Texas, where Shelby Knox so deftly gave the youth council an education of their own.

I fully recommend this film to any youth council or youth involvement program with similar aims, as it unrelentingly shows the outcomes of youth-driven action in a rural, middle class community. Thanks, Shelby, for a great story and lesson for all of us.

Public Youth in Private Times

In a time when young people are increasingly viewed solely as consumers of popular culture and commodities for government funding, it is challenging to consider who is responsible for young people today. Corollary to that statement is the reality that we live in times when its difficult to determine who is responsible for the public good today. One of the most exciting observations I've made from my work through The Freechild Project is the emergence of what I will call the "Public Youth."

Public Youth are young people who take history, power, politics, and culture seriously by claim ing responsibility for themselves, their communities, and the society to which they belong. They don't shun responsibility or authority; rather, they search for it and grasp it whenever it comes around. Public Youth aren't driven by personal gain or social prestige; rather, their intuitive sense of ability is finitely connected to their sense of belonging, perspective, and empowerment. Finally, Public Youth are, for many reasons, progressively liberal, suggesting the inherent hope and commitment to their endevours.

My interest in Public Youth extends from my findings with Freechild:

• the depth of analysis and breadth of action led by Public Youth
  
• perceptions of Public Youth by their peers, families, adult allies, and various "enemies"
• the general reception by adults of Public Youth throughout their lives
• the extent to which Public Youth are actively engaged, challenged, mentored, and allied with adults
  
• their effects on the larger communities to which they belong, and
• their life-long commitment to progressive social change due to their role as Public Youth

While there is a growing body of literature supporting youth activism, organizing, service and identify, little of it acknowledges the interconnected nature of the young people who are engaged in those works. The theory of the Public Youth brings these divergent areas together, identifying them as a consolidated body of action that is situated squarely in the present, with its eyes on the future. Despite the continued "generation-ization" of youth (identifying young people as distinguishable generations rather than members of divergent socio-economic, racial, political, and social bodies), Public Youth have a indefinite history that spans time, and is relatively easy to trace at least to the beginning of this country's history.

I've often said that Freechild is a step among many in my life's work; I think you've just read where the next ones may take me. Let me know what you think.

Why I Can't Wait.

"Young people aren't turning away from mainstream media because they don't care about current events but because the media don't know how to connect with them." - Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks.

Cuban made that comment in his blog about is working with Dan Rather to start a new tv show. Interesting, isn't it, that someone who has to keep his finger on the pulse of so-called "youth culture" knows exactly why young people aren't doing what adults want them to. Now let's extend that same logic throughout society...

Young people aren't turning away from youth programs because they don't care about themselves, but because youth workers don't know how to connect with them...

Young people aren't turning away from schools because they don't care about learning, but because educators don't know how to connect with them...

Young people aren't turning away from politics, neighborhood groups, churches, co-ops, colleges, clubs, and communities because they don't care, but because we don't know how to connect with them.

This logic replaces the long-standing trend of blaming youth for "youth problems" by placing responsibility for youth engagement squarely on the shoulders of those who wish youth were engaged - adults.

Anymore, anytime I say "responsibility" to anyone I think of Sasha Rabkin explaining to me the need for young people and adults to "response-able." That's what our society needs - people who are able to respond to the crisis of disengagement, alienation, segregation, and ostracization throughout our communities.

The first step towards becoming response-able is admiting that we aren't current able to respond. Too many adults, youth workers, parents, teachers, and politicians won't acknowledge their personal culpability in youth disengagement. Too many progressive activists have dismissed children and youth before ever letting them honestly fail by simply dismissing their ability. They conveniently fall back on the media's systematic dismissal of youth, alternately labelling young people of color as "dangerous superpredators" and "criminals in training" and saying that white youth are lazy, tech-obsessed, or apathetic.

Young people aren't dangerous because they're predators - they're dangerous because they are effective change agents. Young people aren't apathetic - they're disconnected. Let's focus the powerful capacity of young people for creating change towards progressive social, economic, and environmental justice. Let's transform our own pathos and move from being apathetic about young people to empathetic with young people.

Let's simply acknowledge that the media steadily repulses young people by steadily condeming them.

Let's simply acknowledge that our schools readily disenfranchise young people by steadily compelling them to partake in compulsory mediocrity and failure.

Let's simply acknowledge that we - as a society led by adults for young people - have failed, are failing, and will keep failing ourselves, our families, our communities, and our national ideals if we continue on the same trajectory we have for the past three centuries.

Democracy requires nothing less than this type of commitment, and I want nothing less than democracy for my daughter, nieces and nephews, and the other young people I know and love. That's why I can't wait any longer.

Making Involvement Meaningful

What makes involvement meaningful? The Freechild website insinuates that any activity led by young people inherently makes that activity meaningful for young people. Similarly, we allude to any topic being choosen by young people as being meaningful for young people to address. Are those assumptions true?

I believe that the reality is that anyone can make meaning of any action. Every movement makes simple acts meaningful:

Indian Independence Made Clothing Meaningful Mahatma Gandhi called on his followers to make their own clothes, as this was the surest way to throw off the shackles of the Empire. That simply charge- and massive metaphor- was demeaning to Indians who were successfully dressed in rich Western clothes. However, in wearing simple homemade shirts or pants or whatever, Gandhi believed every Indian could play a role in independence. He made meaning of the simple, humble act of making your own clothes.

Civil Rights Made Transportation Meaningful When Dr. King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he simply asked people to stay off public busing until public busing was integrated. While that came at an expensive cost to working class African Americans throughout the city, the economic crisis nearly crushed the city government there. The whites controlling the buses were forced to recognize African Americans as a powerful economic and human force within their community.

I believe this is similar with young people. Any child or youth can go out and do something that benefits only themselves, whether its crime or business or religion or work. How that happens has to do with engagement, which is the way we feel when we're deeply connected to something. Some schools in Japan have students clean classrooms; getting sprayed with firehoses, sicced on by police dogs and arrested was the most meaningful thing in the lives of some child activists involved in Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s march on Birmingham. 

We must explore what makes involvement meaningful for ourselves, for the young people we work with and for society. Only then should we become concerned about making more young people involved.

Today's Youth Movement

I just read an article online, and I had to respond. Another author feels compelled to admonish young people for not "rebelling" against the war and current administration. This isn't the first time someone has done this, and not the first time Freechild has responded. But I had to say something, so I wrote the author an email. Following is the text from that - I thought you'd appreciate it.

...Yes, Doug, there is a youth "rebellion" underway in the US.

In reality, the current youth movement has been underway for far longer than the current war, and extends in many directions beyond the current war - however, even with the war dead in focus, its absolutely there. Unfortunately, the mainstream media is quick to neither recriminate or admonish this movement, as they did in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, they simply do not acknowledge it.

Worse still, there is an ongoing campaign against young people in general via the mass media. For more than 15 years youth of all ages and colors and regions have been systematically portrayed as alternately ignorant and overinformed, slothish and hyperdriven. Worse still is the reality that young brown, black, and poor youth are routinely demonized and alienated, made out to be hypercriminals and superpredators before they are even 18 years old - or simply because they're not yet 18.

Perhaps still more disturbing is the reality that young people are being provoked as never before to "rebel," as you've put it. The cross-cultural abandonment of public schools, the defunding of health care for children and youth, and the crass commercialization of every young person's evirons indicates that there are a lot of reasons behind these agendas, not the least of which being racism and economic gain.

This shows me that the US is quickly becoming more of a hot-bed for reactionary organizing, particularly for young people. Witness the recent immigration reform protests, many of which were led by youth - another fact not mentioned in mainstream media.

In these times it is vital for adults who regard themselves as progressive and liberal to go beyond the anti-youth agenda in the media, and to learn more about the youth movement. We've got to. Young people need the direct support of adults who are experienced and abled in order to "get the movement moving." I'm sure you are such a person.

My organization offers a program called The Freechild Project. On our website you can learn more about said efforts - http://freechild.org

Thanks again for your article - I hope to see more in the near future.

Let me know what you think - was I "fair and balanced" enough? I think we should start a "media watch" for anti-youth media... that would be tight. Ah, all the big ideas.