Favoring Adults By Dismissing Young People

Recently, I rewrote the Freechild Project webpage on adultism to add a short essay at the beginning of the page. This is going to be the new pattern for Freechild.org's content pages, with unique essays by me featuring information not available anywhere else on the web. I'm going to give you a preview here.

This is the new text to the page called, "Adultism: Favoring Adults by Dismissing Young People".

 
Introduction to Adultism
 
Adultism is favoring adults by dismissing young people. Adultism is also the addiction to the attitudes, ideas, beliefs, and actions of adults. Adultism promotes the discrimination of children and youth, and bias towards adults. 
 
It is a major factor in how society is organized: By assuming children and youth do not have anything of substance or value to add to the majority of social activities, adults keep their power intact. Adultism happens in government, education, social services, religious communities, and families. It is present in our laws, legal practices, economic activities, and the ways we share our cultures.
 
There is value to adultism, as adults sometimes act more responsibly and capably than young people. However, adults often act as if children and youth are never responsible and never capable. That is the problem.
 
Adultism ignores, silences, neglects, and punishes children and youth simply because they are not adults. Every young person experiences adultism from the day they are born until the day the world around them recognizes them as an adult. Every adult in our society today has experienced adultism.

Because of this unconscious sharing of the same experiences, adults often perpetuate adultism without knowing it. In some cases, young people themselves perpetuate adultism.
 
The result of adultism is severe. Seeing and treating young people as weak, helpless and less intelligent than adults impresses inability in the hearts and minds of youth into adulthood. Adultism often makes verbal, physical, and emotional abuse towards young people seem "okay". Further, adultism can make other negative opinions about people seem okay, so that young people see racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination being "okay".
 
There are children, youth, and adult allies who are working to challenge adultism right now. Find resources on our website at http://freechild.org/adultism.htm. 

Empower Students to Turn Around Schools!

Another abysmal year for academic achievement has flown by. Test results released here in Washington state and across the country show that K-12 public schools are failing in hordes. With a gridlocked Congress and state legislators strapped for cash, where to turn? To the students!

That's right: Let's empower the very people we aim to be teaching with the ability to turn schools around! After more than 100 years of being subjected to the whims of adult teachers, principals, administrators, and school boards, I am nominating that we put the students in the driver's seat and see where they take us.

This isn't a proposal on a whim, either. After 10 years of working in local schools, districts, and state education agencies across the U.S. and Canada to promote student engagement, I have seen the increasing power of effectiveness of students as they become more savvy within the education system. My research has shown me there are districts that have regular student boards of education who are fully empowered to make changes to school policies. While we're all familiar with the popularity of student-led self-evaluations, a growing number of schools have student-led evaluations that impact teacher performance ratings and pay. Still other schools are engaging students as education researchers, summer schools are hiring students as teachers, districts have roles for students as curriculum planners and classroom evaluators, and there are even states that have positions for students as full-voting members of their state boards of education. I have discovered all of this, and seen a lot of it in action.

Since the beginning of the modern school reform movement educators have been duped into believing there is inherent value to allowing our public education system to be governed by technicians. Test-makers, curriculum writers, and state evaluators are nothing more than education technicians. They are the people who should be learning from what teachers do, rather than dictating what teachers do. Instead of that, teachers are routinely relegated to the back seat and made into mere pawns of the schools they work in. While that sounds like a soulless, harsh analysis, it's not the worst of it. Students themselves are on the short end of the stick, as they are treated like nothing more than succeeding generations of test subjects. Without their consent or their parents' direct knowledge of what is going on, young people in public schools are made to fulfill whatever whim the technicians present next.

I want to turn that paradigm on it's head, and luckily, there is growing evidence that not only is this needed, it is happening right now. A growing commitment of educators to engage students in school improvement activities is evidence of the changing trends in education that will ultimately empower students to turn around schools. This is the best news in education yet, and the highest hope we can have for meaningful student involvement.

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Details

As you already know, The Freechild Project includes a massive website full of free resources for young people and their adult allies. The mission of The Freechild Project is to advocate, inform, and celebrate social change led by and with young people around the world, especially those who have been historically denied the right to participate. We do this by facilitating training and workshops, and through our website.

Given the rough economic times facing our communities, the training and workshops aren't paying for the website these days.

Please make a donation to help keep this important resource online.

"By far the largest repository of projects, ideas, and organizational links, [Freechild] provides more than adequate information to help students brainstorm ideas in order to start their own initiatives." -School Library Journal (2005).

"[Freechild] is especially relevant in getting young people to participate in the realms of politics and critical education." - Henry Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux in Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era(2004) New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

"This is a site well worth viewing. Information is critical to understanding as well as galvanizing youth programming and participation." - Ramona Mullahey in the American Planning Association ResourceZine (2003)

The Freechild Project website includes many popular resources:

• Youth Voice Toolkit
• Survey of North American Youth Rights
• Scan of International Youth Involvement
• Freechild Reading List
• and much more...

All donors will be recognized! Please give today, and give generously. Thank you.

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Grateful for Yearning

Sometimes we have to just be grateful for the chance.

I have worked to teach, engage, and activate young people and adults for more than 20 years. It's been hard, and I have struggled. It's also been very rewarding and gratifying! But today, today I'm feeling aware of the misses, not the hits. I know there is rapid and dramatic change coming in my life and that I may not make it there with you all, my awesome readers. So let me say this:

I'm grateful for yearning, wanting, and desire.

All along, my work has been about love for life, love for creativity, and love for my self. I have sought so much, nothing less than the complete re-envisioning of the roles of young people throughout society. Knowing that change is beyond my lifetime's range, I grew to be satisfied with knowingness and opportunity. All along I have known this is the right cause, the right path to have walked. I knew the rewards that I'd find were internal, and they have been. Waiting for awards and others' gratitude has (luckily) never been my style.

On days when it seems like those experiences are all I have, I am grateful for simply having those. I have known so many people who have lost desire. They deny their wanting. They negate their yearning. Rather than placating my determination with menial paychecks or my name in print, I have learned to take pride in me. Maybe that's what this work has been all about for me.

I'm learning how to just lean into the dream unrealized, and know that all things happen as they're supposed to... Today I sigh with gratitude, and I want to publicly thank you all. I don't know what the future holds, but I know it's even more amazing than what I'm doing today. Here's to the future!

Letting Our Personal Histories Teach Us

Me beatboxing. Hip hop culture is in my history,
as well as my present, and my future.

Lately I've been diving back into history, and it increasingly strikes me that we have to teach more about this aspect of our lives and our work in community engagement.

We owe a lot to history. Whether we know it or not, young people and their adult allies who are calling for the world to change and actively struggling to make a difference today are the successors of generations who have been at work doing the same. We also have our own personal histories, including our family history, our community's histories, and our personal life stories. All of these drive our understandings of what is going on in the world, what change needs to happen, and how that change can and should happen.

I've done a few things to get a hold of my own life's history. My brain doesn't naturally proceed in linear thinking patterns, so it takes a little mining for me to pull out chronological pasts for myself. When thinking about the activism and community organizing in my life, I usually start when I was 14 and first exposed to conscious critical action: A group of anti-war protesters asked my dad to read some of his poetry to them at a  gathering at Omaha's War Memorial park. I don't remember much about the occasion beyond the expression my dad poured into his recitation, and the appreciation of the folks afterwards. That was in the spring of 1989, since then I have seen, participated in, and led dozens and dozens of actions focused on changing the world. However, I only learned that was where my roots are by doing this conscious naming of my own history in social action.

Looking further back, and getting more personal still, I find that experience has led me in a determined course towards this moment in my life, this time when I stand at this precipice. From here I look back and see so many roots, be they childhood homelessness and poverty, border-crossing and living "illegally" in the United States, and many other experiences that gave me more than a superficial awareness of oppression, among many other lessons. Sure, a lot of them sucked- but that is where I came from. Denying these roots doesn't feel right to me; embracing them, while hard, is a way I build my sense of personal power and capability: I don't leave the past behind and ignore it ever happened. Instead, I acknowledge the impact on who I am, how I am, where I am, and what I do. I am the sum total of everything I've ever done, as well as everything I'll ever do! This is the first step to letting our history teach us.

Here's an exercise I'm developing:

1. Make a list of the work you have done to change the world.
2. Make a list of the experiences you have had in life that have changed your world. 
3. Draw a picture that shows how those two sets of experiences are connected, either directly or indirectly.

Let me know how your personal history teaches you, and I'll keep writing about how mine is teaching me.

Want to Stop Violence? Change Yourself.

I just got an email from Ari Melman, who leads Philadelphia's Urban Playground. Concerned about the violence raging throughout his city, Ari wanted to know why the youth movement hasn't succeeded in fostering the mass social change we need in order to stem this type of response. This is what I replied with:

Primarily, I would suggest that there are several different forces working to keep young people in subjugated positions throughout society. For a long time I thought it had to do with oppressive systems, and so I allied myself with organizations that dealt with changing systems and led a lot of projects focused on systems change. 

But over the last year I have come to understand that it's not systems change that is going to engender the transformation of the hearts and minds of the people. Instead (call it rocket science) I have figured out that I need to focus on personal development: To change the hearts and minds of people, we have to change the hearts and minds of people. 

So I've spent the last 6 months retooling my approach to my work. I am continuing to work with nonprofits, government agencies, schools, and other institutions that directly affect young people. 

However, instead of advocating the development of new rules and programs and funding streams and policies focused on youth involvement, I'm teaching people about themselves, what they know, and how that can change for the betterment of themselves individually, and in turn how they treat children and youth.

In turn, we're doing to see the rapid transformation of the ways that children are raised, taught, and treated throughout society. I'm going to reach out to moms and dads, teachers and counselors, politicians and preachers to teach all of them how to do this. We have to reach to peoples' hearts and minds.

Otherwise, your observation is right: we'll keep getting what we've always got, and as the situation in Philly (and London, and Haiti, and Somalia) shows us, that's just not enough anymore.

Let me know what you think of his question and my response! Here's another piece I've written related to this. Also, read this great editorial for more insight.

Youth Involvement Stagnates

The national youth involvement movement has stagnated. For more than 20 years it has promoted almost the exact same approaches to addressing challenges are radically different today than ever before. Something has got to get different, and get that way rapidly.

I first became aware of the national effort to systematically involve youth throughout systems when I was 15. That year I was given a manual by the neighborhood Methodist church focused on youth involvement at church. I don't remember too much about it, but I know that it highlighted different models of youth involvement and gave examples. That was 1990.

Ten years later I was hired into the national youth voice movement as a youth ambassador by the Points of Light Foundation, or POLF. At that point POLF had a high profile in that movement, sending folks around the country to promote the gospel of involving youth throughout society. That diminished in the years after, but the movement did not. Instead, throughout the 2000s more organizations than ever before sought to involve youth in decision-making, planning, evaluation, training, and advocacy. It was a powerful time. I logged a lot of these groups through my work in building The Freechild Project online database.

One of the feature technical assistance organizations, Youth On Board, contracted with me a few years ago to rewrite their primary manual about youth involvement, now called 15 Points to Successfully Involving Youth in Decision-Making. It was exciting to expose new action happening across the country focused on diversity in youth involvement, and show how deep the national movement had grown.

A lot of these efforts have been cut lately, and those that are left are generally slugging on the ropes. However, as much as I think this is a failure of politicians and movement builders to understand the necessity of youth involvement, I think it's a failure of the movement itself to transform with the times.

Instead of adopting radical new approaches to engaging youth throughout society, most organizations promoting youth involvement stagnated through the last decade, and are now stuck precisely where they started.

Here are some examples of youth involvement that might be from 2001 or 2011, reflecting the inability of the movement to change with the times:

• Manchester, CT Youth Commission 
• Be The Catalyst is an anti-tobacco and anti-obesity program in MN that has a youth board member. 
• The Aspen Institute Center for Native American Youth has three youth board members. 
• The Youth Leadership Institute maintains regular positions for youth board members. 
• The United Way of Fox Cities (Menasha, WI) has a youth board.
• The Forum for Youth Investment, whose youth involvement publication called "Building Effective Youth Councils", doesn't address any type of full-voting rights for youth in policy-making.

Those are all typical youth board member positions. Here are some exceptional ones:

• The California Board of Education has a full-voting, regular student member of their board. (Read an article I wrote about student school board membership.)
• The State Farm Youth Advisory Board gives away a ton of money every year.

Other places to look for exceptional examples of fully participating youth board members include city governments, and cities like Hampton, Virginia.

We need new approaches that re-envision the roles of young people throughout society. Youth involvement has stagnated.

Slide or Fall?

I'm sitting in a coffee shop here in my city of Olympia, Washington. Olympia is a small capital city, populated by state government workers, students from The Evergreen State College, and the various dwellers who rely on serving those populations. There's a sizable homeless population here owing to the temperate climate, and there's the children of the working- and middle-class majority.

Just now some middle-aged white guys were pontificating on the debt ceiling facade being thrown up by Congress and the White House, and given the badge I wear as a non-threatening looking member of their society, was privy to them speaking their truths. Oh joy.

Among the "wisdoms" pouring forth was the inevitable Fall of America into the broadcast pit of despair they see coming. From that place one of them postulated whether it would take a gradual slide to wake up the masses, or a sudden fall.

This type if hopelessness seems to be grabbing the consciousness of many in the middle class today. They're feeling the absence of their financial access and the toil of the daily news worsening. This is leading to questions about the efficacy of representative government and corporate ownership of democratic functioning throughout American society.

Traveling the country over the last decade talking and teaching young people and adults who do the good hard work of social change has shown me a lot of realities, not the least of which being, "Duh."

I know that I grew up different than a lot of people, homeless with hope-filled parents living on optimism seems anomalous. Spending my teens living as a white kid in an African American neighborhood doesn't happen that often. "Making it" afterwards is even rarer. Learning about the histories and herstories of oppressed peoples and committing oneself to advocating radical social transformation is rarer still. I know all that.

But from that unique vantage point I've seen the realities at work in thousands of hearts, minds and actions across this country all this time:

* America, as an idea, has always been rough for a large number of people whose voices aren't routinely heard through mainstream media or represented by politicians.
* Americans, as a people, have always been critical of the efficacy of the government. Always. This Is not a new phenom, or a different space. This country rallies, albeit with motivation.
* Young people always lead the way, and despite what mainstream society believes, there are still young people among us.

There is a long road ahead, but even with the mythology of America laid plain, it's ridiculous to assume that the tenants of free speech and democratic governance aren't enough to redeem this nation.

The hopelessness of the growing majority should not supplant the truthfulness of vast commitment to democracy. No amount of corporatism, commercialism, or gross consumption can placate the determined breath of our social power. Stand up for hope! And let's rekindle the knowledge and abilities of children and youth to lead us forward.


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

Youth Are Our Only Hope

The other day I listened to another adult rant about how terrible youth today are. She was my age (36). Back in the 1990s, she and I were subject to the same media demonization of our generation, railed against as "Generation X" and labelled slackers, we grew up with a bad name pinned to our commercialized lapels. To here her lob insults at kids today, well, reminded me why I do what I do.

"So I simply don't buy the concept of "Generation X" as the "lost generation." I see too many good kids out there, kids who are ready and willing to do the right thing, just as Jack was. Their distractions are greater, though. There's no more simple life with simple choices for the young."— Johnny Cash

Over the last decade I have conducted an ongoing action research project focused on perceptions of young people. Parents and teachers, cops and lawyers, politicians and academics have all lined up to reveal their bias against young people simply because they are young, and because the adults are old. Youth have skewered themselves and their peers in front of me, degrading themselves and their peers with the same arguments of the adults around them. I have even heard young kids do this, and have seen the parental behavior that condones and expects this, too.

At the same time, I have seen the opposite, too: A finely balanced tight wire act focused on allowing young people to assume the roles they're most comfortable with or the ones adults need for them to have throughout society. Meeting young people whose intellectual and emotional development allow them to lead powerful campaigns for systems change and cultural development has become a norm in my life, both as they make themselves known, and as I've come to know them.

All of this said, in our North American society we are simply dead wrong about the ways we treat young people.

"The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America." - Arundhati Roy

For millennia societies around the world have known this. They developed authentic responses to the various implications of young people, systematically teaching them their cultures, allowing them to mature at their own paces, and encouraging them to see themselves as the continuation and sustainability society. This directly opposes the North American behavior of treating young people as a cultural anomaly and inconvenience.

We are facing cataclysmic crises across our planet, more innumerable and loudly enumerated enough to not have to list here. Its the proportion of those realities that is duly set to overwhelm the masses. In order to address the situations that face every single one of us every single day, we must catalyze a new approach to social change. We must invigorate and activate new engines for change, new motivators and developers, organizers and leaders. We must turn to children and youth to lead our way forward.

The fact of the matter is that we have simple used up all our current resource pools. People my age have become deeply indebted to the capitalist/consumerist systems we begrudge, and older people own them. The hippies who were going to liberate the planet have become saturated by the cultural messages designed to placate them, while our oldest elders maintain the mythology that since they were the "greatest generation" they can simply cruise towards death. That is just not true.

"Our answer is the world's hope; it is to rely on youth... This world demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease." - Senator Robert Kennedy

More than ever we need to turn to the source of the world's hope for change. We must devise deft strategies to engage young people across the planet right now. I believe that this is ultimately our only hope. What about you?

No More Good Samaritan

“We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside…but one day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that a system that produces beggars needs to be repaved. We are called to be the Good Samaritan, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch, you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved.” - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I've spent a career working with young people and adults to teach young people to get engaged, get involved, and make a difference. I've taught adults how to take risks, called on leaders to step aside, and developed systems within systems to make sure that these new roles for young people throughout society were fostered in the most long-ranging ways I could imagine. For a long time I have been proud of what I've done, not in a boastful or arrogant way, but in a calmly content way that knew the time would arrive when my work wouldn't be needed in the same way.

I have arrived at that place, though not as I originally hoped I would. Instead, I have arrived in the roundabout way that Dr. King spoke about in his 1967 called, "A Time to Break Silence". His powerful rhetoric was directed at the Vietnam War, and determinedly called for a change in the very nature of the Civil Rights movement he'd been leading for more than two decades. It was in this speech that he uttered the quote above.

Today, I am in the midst of deciding to change the nature of my approach to the Youth Integration movement. Since I was 14, I have been involved in activist campaigns, community collaborations, and organizational transformation efforts designed to call adults to see further, and for youth to see deeper, into the very nature of our social structures. In the ensuing time I have learned a great deal of the ineffectiveness of this approach. However, I have learned a darker lesson: Somewhere within these well-intended initiatives is a poorly informed approach, which while reliant on systems to change, inherently pacifies the adults who are involved. We have not only allowed passiveness through sympathetic thinking, this Youth Integration movement has actually allowed for the system to further disable and entrench the oppression of youth, making pity the norm for youth engagement, youth involvement, and youth empowerment efforts.

It's for this reason that I call on myself to take other steps, and why I am continuing my committed efforts to step away from complacency and towards discomfort. I am not sure where this will go, but I assure you that you, my faithful readers, will know when I arrive to this new place I am going.