Becoming the Problem

For a long time it seemed to me that the problem was aging out: Every youth becomes an adult. At some point after that, adults become voters, workers, and taxpayers. It appeared that in that process most lost touch with their own experiences as children and youth. They develop indifference towards young people today, and even as they become parents, they get more adamant about their righteous discrimination against kids. Those who do take careers as youth workers, teachers, counselors, and in other kid-focused occupations often go even deeper, using their discrimination against children and youth to justify adultism and adultcentrism.

Well, time has afforded me different perspectives, or at least compassion for other adults. Alas, even from that view I can still see that in some ways, all adults are the problem- in much the same way that in some ways, given the right conditions and experiences all domestic animals could transmit rabies to adults.

I have recently been challenged by a few different adults for the perspectives I take on schools and the education system. These types of debates can exhaust me; however, I know they're essential to keeping me in check, and I appreciate them.

My friends, colleagues, and acquaintances do this because I put myself out there. So I want to put this big fat disclaimer out there: I know that I might be the problem- in much the same way that all adults are.

That's me simultaneously taking responsibility AND couching my culpability in the blanket of social ills. I need a paycheck, so sometimes I work for dubious issues; I want published, so sometimes I tone down my rhetoric.

However, there are places I won't back down from. I'll expand on those in my next post. In the meantime, it's important to me to state that my own perspectives are informed by my own experiences as a young person and as an adult; as a learner, a student, a teacher, and as a friend to children and youth; and as a father, an uncle, a cousin, a son, and a brother. Every single person has unique experiences, and you don't know what informs my thinking because of that.

Maybe instead of challenging we can simply accept; maybe instead of negating we can inquire. Let's go together into the brave new days ahead of us.




-- This is Adam Fletcher's blog originally posted at http://www.YoungerWorld.org. For more see http://www.bicyclingfish.com

Antipathy Toward Youth

Antipathy is extreme dislike or hate.

Antipathy toward youth is spreading wider throughout our society than ever before. Often cloaked in cynicism, antipathy is a dangerously current phenomenon. Politicians mocks young people, teachers eschew their jobs, and even parents share a kind of pathetic "buyers remorse" for the people they brought into the world.

There are all kinds of reasons that are expressed and underexpressed for this. Sociologist Mike Males has long contended that the ephebiphobia- extreme fear of youth- that rips up our society is the product of racism, and the reality that America is becoming predominately people of color. I believe antipathy has those exact same roots, with an extension beyond obvious skin color and towards the cultures that young people are influenced by, the education that young people are receiving, and the beliefs that young people express.

There is always a fear of the unknown, especially when they're knocking at your door or living under the same roof. The question is whether we are ready to become familiar with that which we don't know, or if we're going to shun, reject, deny, and punish that which we don't know.

The Chinese Communists apparently have this same struggle. In the face of the aging Party leadership, they are struggling to instill and maintain the interest of young people in Communism, and not simply because they don't know how. Apparently, there is a deep-seeded antipathy toward youth in China, with party leaders long criticizing and demeaning young people. They demanded a kind of social conformity and enforced a rigidity designed to malign the inherently progressive nature of young people while reinforcing the conservativism of their brand of socialism.

The dilemmas of antipathy toward youth are innumerable. Political antipathy toward youth is critically irresponsible, and is echoed across the aisle. During his campaign for president early this year former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich proposed legislated hatred, suggesting that, "It wouldn't be bad to have a test for young Americans before they start voting," making a comparison to the citizenship test new immigrants are required to take. This is a thinly veiled antipathy, suggesting that Gingrich believes all youth are suspect criminals who have to "earn" citizenship rights in addition to the qualification of age. It's one or the other, not both. It's bad enough that the political infrastructure of the U.S. reinforces second-tiered citizenship for American children and youth; Gingrich seems to believe that adding injury upon insult is more apt. That's hatred at it's best.

At it's worse, antipathy towards youth gets very ugly, very fast. The War On Youth has been raging in this country for at least 30 years; some would suggest it goes back to the beginning of the Commercial Age. It is definitely the grand reinforcer of discrimination against youth, and certainly calls for a radical redefinition of values in this country if we are to defeat it. Recently we've seen antipathy toward youth take the form of defunding public education and healthcare for children; the criminalization of youth through curfews, dress codes, and raised driving ages; and myriad more examples. It's mildly sickening, mostly because we know the outcomes from this type of rage. The 1960s didn't happen by accident.

And ultimately, that is my concern: We are fomenting revolution in the U.S. today. Young people here aren't going to sit idly by and watch the youth of the Middle East demand democracy while they suffer authoritarianism at it's worst. Antipathy toward youth is enforced through authoritarianism towards young people, and both of those phenomena are on the rise.

Something must be done differently. Learn how.

Adults' Fear, Exclusion, and Addiction

More than ever, adults need to understand that the roles of young people need to change throughout society. The radical problems we face need radical solutions, and the only hope for actually conceiving and carrying out those radical possibilities comes in the form of the youngest among us: children and youth, for whom anything is possible at any moment.

Why haven't we come further as a society? Why don't we simply flip the switch from what was and what is to what can be? What holds us from seeing the potential and power of all young people right now?

For over a decade I have been educating youth, parents, youth workers, teachers, and others about concepts like adultism, adultcentrism, and ephebiphobia. These different forms of discrimination against youth are surely what drives our current treatment of young people.

The belief that people who are seen as adults have distinct and intrinsic attributes that people who are not seen as adults don't have is called adultism. It is the belief that adults are superior to young people because of their age and nothing more. Further, it is the prejudice and discrimination young people experience because of their age, as well as the addiction society has for all things adult. Adultism is a cultural phenomenon that enables adultcentrism.

Adultcentrism is the view that only adults have something to contribute to society. The outcome of adultcentrism is the routine and anti-democratic exclusion of children and youth from society. Most institutions in our society operate under the premise that young people do not have anything of value to contribute until they are adults. This includes schools, government agencies, elected bodies, and (even) youth-serving organizations. Adultcentrism encourages the "youth-as-deficit" model, even to the point of George Bernard Shaw's idiom, "Youth is wasted on the young", becoming the standard operating procedure across the board. Adultcentrism encourages ephebiphobia.

Crossing the street when you see a group of kids on the other side, or hanging a sign declaring, "No more than 2 teens allowed in the store at a time", or banning cruising in your town are all expressions of ephebiphobia, which is the fear of youth. Ephebiphobia is encouraged by the mainstream media that hypes violence among teens; popular culture that elevates the difference of youth; and police and social services that benefit from exploiting the problems young people face. Many parents face their own fear of youth as their children grow into their teen years and seem far away from themselves; many kids perpetuate the fear unconsciously by enforcing the alienation that's been thrust on them by segregationist adults. 

All these forms of discrimination impact the very course of our society, and each should be addressed deliberately and with intention. Learn more about the language of youth discrimination at The Freechild Project website. You can get ongoing news and resources about adultism and contribute to the "I Fight Adultism" page on Facebook. If you are interested in training or technical assistance for your organization, contact me, Adam Fletcher, by calling 360-489-9680 or emailing adam@commonaction.org.

Calling the Shots

Adam's Note: This is an unpublished article I wrote about student involvement in district and state school boards in Washington. Let me know if your organization is interested in publishing it by emailing adam@commonaction.org

In the spring of 2011 a student-led campaign began working with the state’s Legislative Youth Advisory Council to lower the voting age for school board elections to 14. This campaign, which would give students a substantial say in education policy-making, is unique across the United States, and after 10 years of watching these trends internationally, I believe it may be the only proposal of its kind anywhere.

Answering the question of how students can be effectively involved in district and state decision-making is one that has been grappled with by educators, administrators, and policy-makers across the country for decades. Over the last decade, as part of my work through SoundOut, I have provided technical assistance and training to districts nationwide that are interested in systematically engaging students in education decision-making. I have researched more than 40 years of involving students in school boards, and I continue to follow national trends carefully. It is exciting to report that indeed, the practice of involving students in school decision-making is spreading, and even though it’s not widespread yet, there have been important strides made.

There are several types of practices that involve students in school decision-making on the district and state levels. The lowest bar is simply and routinely asking students what they think about school board policy-making issues. This can be a formal process mandated through policy, conducted through online surveys or in-person student forums. Another practice is to require regular student attendance at school board meetings. Generally viewed as non-meaningful forms of involvement, neither of these practices require students have an active role in the process of decision-making beyond that of “informant”.

Higher up the ladder is the practice of having student advisory boards that inform regular school board decision-making. This is the case in Boston, Massachusetts, where the Boston Student Advisory Council is a citywide body of student leaders representing their respective high schools. BSAC, which is coordinated by the administered by the district office in partnership with a nonprofit called Youth on Board, offers student perspectives on high school renewal efforts and inform their respective schools about relevant citywide school issues. In addition to personal skill development and knowledge building activities for their 20-plus members, BSAC students have strongly influenced district policy-making about cell phone usage, truancy, and reducing the dropout rate. They also have regular dialogues with the district superintendent and school board members.

The Denver (CO) Student Board of Education is a group of 30 students who represent the15 high schools in the city. They are charged to serve as leaders in their schools and represent all students at the district level. Students create projects that affect their local schools and report back on them to the district. They have also created a curriculum that is used in several high school leadership classes. However, these students have to ask permission to speak to their regular board, and that does not happen frequently. Closer to home, the Portland (OR) Superintendent’s Student Advisory Council meets with district administrators and provides feedback and ideas for issues facing students and schools in their district.

One of the main issues in student involvement in boards of education is whether students are legally allowed to sit on boards, and if they are allowed, whether they have a full vote akin to their adult peers. A 2002 study posted on the SoundOut website identifies laws regarding student involvement on state and local school boards in 39 states out of 50 states across the U.S. The results vary: As many as 16 states have laws allowing students to sit on school boards at the state level, with no vote. 20 states allow the same at the district level. Six states disallow either entirely, while seven allow full student voting on the state and district levels.

Despite being allowed otherwise in those seven states, only California and Maryland actually have full-voting members on their state boards of education. Both of those states have highly influential student organizations that openly lobby for student voice. The California Association of Student Councils, founded in 1947, proudly proclaims that all their programs are student-led. One of their most powerful activities is the Student Advisory Board on Legislation in Education, or SABLE. Each February SABLE convenes in the state capital to set education priorities and share them with key decision-makers. They have a direct audience with the Senate Education Committee, and their influence helped form a position for a full-voting student member of the California State Board of Education, whose position was created in 1969. They gained full voting rights in 1983, including closed sessions. The Maryland Association of Student Councils has similar impact in their state, with a student member serving in a regularly elected position annually.

Our state’s law regarding membership qualifications for directors of school boards, RCW 28A.343.340, does not specify whether students in Washington can join district and state school boards. In 2009, a staff member with the Washington State School Directors' Association reported to me that as few as 20 out of our state’s 195 school districts included formal student representation. Currently, two student representatives from the Washington Association of Student Councils serve two-year terms with the state board of education.

There is an inherent dilemma in all these forms of student involvement, though. While an extremely limited number of students have the opportunity to share their voices with adult decision-makers in the system, this type of “convenient student voice” is generally conducted at the adults’ convenience and with their approval. In a growing number of states, the status quo of being excluded does not suit students themselves anymore. Currently, a disjointed but growing movement is seeking to increase the authority of students in school policy-making and decisions. In Maryland, where students already have a role on the state board of education and in many district boards, in counties across the state there are active campaigns to increase the effect of student voice, with students calling for a full and regular vote in education policy-making. There is even an instance in Maryland where an 18-year-old named Edward Burroughs was elected to his local school board after running an effective campaign. According to a local newspaper, he is rated one of the county’s most effective school board members by voters.

These examples allude to a process of what I refer to as engagement typification, where the roles of students are repositioned throughout the education system to allow Meaningful Student Involvement to become the standard treatment for all students, rather than something that is exceptional. Consistently positioning students as in special positions doesn't allow adults, including educators, administrators, or parents, to integrate students throughout the regular operations of the educational system. While seeing their peers as school board members is enticing to a number of students, most are disallowed them from seeing themselves as regular and full members of the leadership and ownership of education, or as trustees for their own well-being. That is what differentiates Meaningful Student Involvement from other attempts at student engagement and student voice: Positioning students as full owners of what they learn. Giving students the right to vote in school board elections is a step in the right direction; the next question is whether any district in Washington is ready to go to the next level.

About the author: Adam Fletcher is the president of CommonAction Consulting, a firm working nationally from Olympia that supports youth engagement throughout communities. Learn more at www.commonaction.com or their program website for schools, www.soundout.org.

Youth Can Do ANYTHING

I believe young people are capable of doing absolutely anything, right now.

The roles of young people are actively changing right now throughout society. Today there are young people with jobs as city planners, volunteering as nonprofit board directors, and voting as members of public commissions. Other young people are actively creating film productions, developing high-end websites, and controlling other media. There are youth starting businesses, developing civic campaigns, and creating strategies for engaging their friends and peers throughout their communities.

None of this work is actively being done to throw off the shackles of oppressive adult control, or to wrest the torch of authority from adults—or at least very, very little of it is. Instead, it's being done because more than ever young people are facing a convergence of personal will and social aptitude: Young people are changing society at a point when society wants to be changed!

This is a wonderful reality. It really, truly signals the possibility of a grand future that I only imagined as a 17-year-old starting a youth council in my neighborhood, one that is limited only by the imaginations of young people and their adult allies, and those imaginations are limitless.

It's because of my knowledge of these realities that I firmly believe any presuppositions about age-oriented developmental psychology theory are based on age bias and discrimination. Today, after studying developmental psychology and education as an undergraduate and spending 22 years as a professional community educator, I maintain that youth development as we know it is a psycho-philosophical mis-orientation, a malignant tumor on the heart of society today. I believe that this bias towards adults and discrimination against youth—which is called adultism—is a society-wide construct that permeates our legal, political, cultural, economic, environmental, educational, and familial institutions.

There are those who would suggest that young peoples' motivations for engaging in social change is a psycho-chemical reaction that is responsive to their age. However, after these years of field study and practice, I have found that rather than any time-based orientation, the motivations of children and youth to change the world come from their socio-economic backgrounds, class consciousness, and political worldviews. Yes, that's correct: young people have political worldviews. In my belief age is irrelevant; rather, it is exposure, critical engagement, and conscious reflection that drives the desires of young people to want to form, reform, challenge, critique, examine, deconstruct, and otherwise identify the imbalances of the world around them. All children and youth do not want to change the world; however, all are capable of engaging in social change, and that capability is not contingent on their age.

Social conditioning—including familial backgrounds, socio-economic grouping, and education—is the single greatest factor in determining a young person's desire to change the world.

That is to say that I believe developmental psychology is generally bunkus when it comes to explaining social engagement. With regards to physiology, I don't believe that chemical reactions in the brains of an average young person make them incapable of empathizing with others; they merely make teachers, parents, and mentors more responsible for doing their jobs capably.

That said, it can easy for adults to agree with all that, and still make the assumption that age is still the predominant factor for engagement in social change, if only because age is assumed to be the great accumulator of experience. The thought is that the longer a person lives, the more they've done, and the more a person has done, the more they'll desire to change the world, and the more knowledge they'll have in order to change the world. None of this is true.

Age isn't determinant of experiential accumulation, if only because the breadth and depth of experience is due to cultural stimulation rather than age. In the same way that a lot of teens have more political education than a lot of adults, not because of age, but because of interest, it holds true that there are young children who may be more engaged than youth in work designed to change the world. However, that isn't because of interest, alone. Rather, it's because of their experiences, and this, in turn, reinforces my statement at the beginning of this paragraph. Children can have a great deal of experience with discrimination, oppression, disparity, and inequity, even at young ages. Whether they relate because of their race, socio-economic status, compassion for the Earth, or other factors, all young people of all ages have the ability to empathize, and that is what determines their aptitude for engaging in social change.

Again, this reinforces my belief that age isn't generally relevant, insomuch as their empathetic background. Let me say that I do believe that young children may not have the capability to determine when to run from a burning building. However, I do not believe that every situation is analogous to a burning building. Unfortunately, many adults treat almost every situation that way because we're conditioned to. That conditioning, which is adultism, unfortunately rears it's ugly head in a lot of ways.

That is to say that while there is a philosophical reasoning behind re-imagining the roles of young people throughout society and there is movement towards this, we have not overcome the broad acceptance of adultism. The next steps in this effort are to address the cultural and attitudinal effects of adultism. While continued action by children and youth is essential for doing this, I believe that it's absolutely imperative that as adults we re-examine our assumptions, beliefs, and actions throughout society towards young people. Only then will we be able to go to the next step. Only then will be have the radically effective democratic society millenia of people saw as possible. Only then will we actually become fully powerful as individuals, communities, and societies to become the world we have always dreamed of becoming.

Youth can do anything, and will continue doing as much as they can. It's up to us to create the scaffolding, opportunities, and sustainability needed to expand and deepen what anything means, and as long as we're not doing that, we're part of the problem—not the solution.