critique essay the problem with today's youth language

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The Problem with Today's Youth Language

The author of this text is concerned about the decline of proper vocabulary and sentence structure among young people in modern society. They point out that many words are being misused or becoming extinct due to the casual and lazy language of the youth. The author discusses how this can carry into adulthood and cause problems in formal settings. They suggest ways to encourage the use of more advanced language in speaking and writing. The author emphasizes that while informal language is acceptable in certain settings, it is important to understand when to switch to a more formal tone. Overall, the author argues that the decline in proper language usage is a serious issue that needs to be addressed.

Have you noticed something wrong with the vocabulary that the young people of the modern world have been using? If not, I suggest you take another look. The words and sentence structure has become lazy and lost its rightful rank of importance, falling into the youths’ view of boring and tedious. The vast amount of words are slowing decaying to the last of their lives, soon to be un- or misused by the masses, some even becoming extinct out of malpractice or ignorance of the current existence. Sadly, definitions have even been altered due to being wrongly used in everyday speak, mainly misused by the youth of today. I will talk about how some or most young adults speak, how it can carry into adulthood, the cons of using the language, ways to …show more content…

Have you noticed something wrong with the vocabulary that the young people of the modern world have been using? If not, I suggest you take another look. The words and sentence structure has become lazy and lost its rightful rank of importance, falling into the youths’ view of boring and tedious. The vast amount of words are slowing decaying to the last of their lives, soon to be un- or misused by the masses, some even becoming extinct out of malpractice or ignorance of the current existence. Sadly, definitions have even been altered due to being wrongly used in everyday speak, mainly misused by the youth of today. I will talk about how some or most young adults speak, how it can carry into adulthood, the cons of using the language, ways to encourage the use of proper and advanced language in speaking and in writing and more. The tone that many young people take on that is informal, and that is all right, especially if it is around friends or family. The problem is that some of them do not understand the appropriate times to change their tone and slang language to fit a more proper or formal setting. Instead, they continue to use the slang and inappropriate tones that are normal for their everyday conversations. This can cause complications for the youth in certain situation, such as, job interviews or when talking to an adult who is not familiar with them. The speaking mannerisms may also show up in writings, causing hardship on students in classes that require essays. .

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It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations”

By Louis Menand

The discovery that you can make money marketing merchandise to teen-agers dates from the early nineteen-forties, which is also when the term “youth culture” first appeared in print. There was a reason that those things happened when they did: high school. Back in 1910, most young people worked; only fourteen per cent of fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds were still in school. In 1940, though, that proportion was seventy-three per cent. A social space had opened up between dependency and adulthood, and a new demographic was born: “youth.”

The rate of high-school attendance kept growing. By 1955, eighty-four per cent of high-school-age Americans were in school. (The figure for Western Europe was sixteen per cent.) Then, between 1956 and 1969, college enrollment in the United States more than doubled, and “youth” grew from a four-year demographic to an eight-year one. By 1969, it made sense that everyone was talking about the styles and values and tastes of young people: almost half the population was under twenty-five.

Today, a little less than a third of the population is under twenty-five, but youth remains a big consumer base for social-media platforms, streaming services, computer games, music, fashion, smartphones, apps, and all kinds of other goods, from motorized skateboards to eco-friendly water bottles. To keep this market churning, and to give the consulting industry something to sell to firms trying to understand (i.e., increase the productivity of) their younger workers, we have invented a concept that allows “youth culture” to be redefined periodically. This is the concept of the generation.

The term is borrowed from human reproductive biology. In a kinship structure, parents and their siblings constitute “the older generation”; offspring and their cousins are “the younger generation.” The time it takes, in our species, for the younger generation to become the older generation is traditionally said to be around thirty years. (For the fruit fly, it’s ten days.) That is how the term is used in the Hebrew Bible, and Herodotus said that a century could be thought of as the equivalent of three generations.

Around 1800, the term got transplanted from the family to society. The new idea was that people born within a given period, usually thirty years, belong to a single generation. There is no sound basis in biology or anything else for this claim, but it gave European scientists and intellectuals a way to make sense of something they were obsessed with, social and cultural change. What causes change? Can we predict it? Can we prevent it? Maybe the reason societies change is that people change, every thirty years.

Before 1945, most people who theorized about generations were talking about literary and artistic styles and intellectual trends—a shift from Romanticism to realism, for example, or from liberalism to conservatism. The sociologist Karl Mannheim, in an influential essay published in 1928, used the term “generation units” to refer to writers, artists, and political figures who self-consciously adopt new ways of doing things. Mannheim was not interested in trends within the broader population. He assumed that the culture of what he called “peasant communities” does not change.

Nineteenth-century generational theory took two forms. For some thinkers, generational change was the cause of social and historical change. New generations bring to the world new ways of thinking and doing, and weed out beliefs and practices that have grown obsolete. This keeps society rejuvenated. Generations are the pulse of history. Other writers thought that generations were different from one another because their members carried the imprint of the historical events they lived through. The reason we have generations is that we have change, not the other way around.

There are traces of both the pulse hypothesis and the imprint hypothesis in the way we talk about generations today. We tend to assume that there is a rhythm to social and cultural history that maps onto generational cohorts, such that each cohort is shaped by, or bears the imprint of, major historical events—Vietnam, 9/11, COVID . But we also think that young people develop their own culture, their own tastes and values, and that this new culture displaces the culture of the generation that preceded theirs.

Today, the time span of a generational cohort is usually taken to be around fifteen years (even though the median age of first-time mothers in the U.S. is now twenty-six and of first-time fathers thirty-one). People born within that period are supposed to carry a basket of characteristics that differentiate them from people born earlier or later.

This supposition requires leaps of faith. For one thing, there is no empirical basis for claiming that differences within a generation are smaller than differences between generations. (Do you have less in common with your parents than with people you have never met who happen to have been born a few years before or after you?) The theory also seems to require that a person born in 1965, the first year of Generation X, must have different values, tastes, and life experiences from a person born in 1964, the last year of the baby-boom generation (1946-64). And that someone born in the last birth year of Gen X, 1980, has more in common with someone born in 1965 or 1970 than with someone born in 1981 or 1990.

Everyone realizes that precision dating of this kind is silly, but although we know that chronological boundaries can blur a bit, we still imagine generational differences to be bright-line distinctions. People talk as though there were a unique DNA for Gen X—what in the nineteenth century was called a generational “entelechy”—even though the difference between a baby boomer and a Gen X-er is about as meaningful as the difference between a Leo and a Virgo.

You could say the same things about decades, of course. A year is, like a biological generation, a measurable thing, the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. But there is nothing in nature that corresponds to a decade—or a century, or a millennium. Those are terms of convenience, determined by the fact that we have ten fingers.

Yet we happily generalize about “the fifties” and “the sixties” as having dramatically distinct, well, entelechies. Decade-thinking is deeply embedded. For most of us, “She’s a seventies person” carries a lot more specific information than “She’s Gen X.” By this light, generations are just a novel way of slicing up the space-time continuum, no more arbitrary, and possibly a little less, than decades and centuries. The question, therefore, is not “Are generations real?” The question is “Are they a helpful way to understand anything?”

Bobby Duffy, the author of “The Generation Myth” (Basic), says yes, but they’re not as helpful as people think. Duffy is a social scientist at King’s College London. His argument is that generations are just one of three factors that explain changes in attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. The others are historical events and “life-cycle effects,” that is, how people change as they age. His book illustrates, with a somewhat overwhelming array of graphs and statistics, how events and aging interact with birth cohort to explain differences in racial attitudes, happiness, suicide rates, political affiliations—you name it, for he thinks that his three factors explain everything.

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Duffy’s over-all finding is that people in different age groups are much more alike than all the talk about generations suggests, and one reason for all that talk, he thinks, is the consulting industry. He says that, in 2015, American firms spent some seventy million dollars on generational consulting (which doesn’t seem that much, actually). “What generational differences exist in the workplace?” he asks. His answer: “Virtually none.”

Duffy is good at using data to take apart many familiar generational characterizations. There is no evidence, he says, of a “loneliness epidemic” among young people, or of a rise in the rate of suicide. The falling off in sexual activity in the United States and the U.K. is population-wide, not just among the young.

He says that attitudes about gender in the United States correlate more closely with political party than with age, and that, in Europe, anyway, there are no big age divides in the recognition of climate change. There is “just about no evidence,” he says, that Generation Z (1997-2012, encompassing today’s college students) is more ethically motivated than other generations. When it comes to consumer boycotts and the like, “ ‘cancel culture’ seems to be more of a middle-age thing.” He worries that generational stereotypes—such as the characterization of Gen Z-ers as woke snowflakes—are promoted in order to fuel the culture wars.

The woke-snowflake stereotype is the target of “Gen Z, Explained” (Chicago), a heartfelt defense of the values and beliefs of contemporary college students. The book has four authors, Roberta Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, Jane Shaw, and Linda Woodhead—an anthropologist, a linguist, a historian, and a sociologist—and presents itself as a social-scientific study, including a “methodological appendix.” But it resembles what might be called journalistic ethnography: the portrayal of social types by means of interviews and anecdotes.

The authors adopt a key tenet of the pulse hypothesis. They see Gen Z-ers as agents of change, a generation that has created a youth culture that can transform society. (The fact that when they finished researching their book, in 2019, roughly half of Gen Z was under sixteen does not trouble them, just as the fact that at the time of Woodstock, in 1969, more than half the baby-boom generation was under thirteen doesn’t prevent people from making generalizations about the baby boomers.)

Their book is based on hour-long interviews with a hundred and twenty students at three colleges, two in California (Stanford and Foothill College, a well-regarded community college) and one in the U.K. (Lancaster, a selective research university). The authors inform us that the interviewees were chosen “by word of mouth and personal networking,” which sounds a lot like self-selection. It is, in any event (as they unapologetically acknowledge), hardly a randomized sample.

The authors tell us that the interviews were conducted entirely by student research assistants, which means that, unless the research assistants simply read questions off a list, there was no control over the depth or the direction of the interviews. There were also some focus groups, in which students talked about their lives with, mostly, their friends, an exercise performed in an echo chamber. Journalists, or popular ethnographers, would at least have met and observed their subjects. It’s mystifying why the authors felt a need to distance themselves in this way, given how selective their sample was to begin with. We are left with quotations detached from context. Self-reporting is taken at face value.

The authors supplemented the student interviews with a lexical glossary designed to pick out words and memes heavily used by young people, and with two surveys, designed by one of the authors (Woodhead) and conducted by YouGov, an Internet polling company, of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in the United States and the U.K.

Where there is an awkward discrepancy between the survey results and what the college students say in the interviews, the authors attempt to explain it away. The YouGov surveys found that ninety-one per cent of all persons aged eighteen to twenty-five, American and British, identify as male or female, and only four per cent as gender fluid or nonbinary. (Five per cent declined to answer.) This does not match the impression created by the interviews, which suggest that there should be many more fluid and nonbinary young people out there, so the authors say that we don’t really know what the survey respondents meant by “male” and “female.” Well, then, maybe they should have been asked.

The authors attribute none of the characteristics they identify as Gen Z to the imprint of historical events—with a single exception: the rise of the World Wide Web. Gen Z is the first “born digital” generation. This fact has often been used to stereotype young people as screen-time addicts, captives of their smartphones, obsessed with how they appear on social media, and so on. The Internet is their “culture.” They are trapped in the Web. The authors of “Gen Z, Explained” emphatically reject this line of critique. They assure us that Gen Z-ers “understand both the potential and the downside of technology” and possess “critical awareness about the technology that shapes their lives.”

For the college students who were interviewed (although not, evidently, for the people who were surveyed), a big part of Gen Z culture revolves around identity. As the authors put it, “self-labeling has become an imperative that is impossible to escape.” This might seem to suggest a certain degree of self-absorption, but the authors assure us that these young people “are self-identified and self-reliant but markedly not self-centered, egotistical, or selfish.”

“Lily” is offered to illustrate the ethical richness of this new concern. It seems that Lily has a friend who is always late to meet with her: “She explained that while she of course wanted to honor and respect his unique identity, choices, and lifestyle—including his habitual tardiness—she was also frustrated by how that conflicted with her sense that he was then not respecting her identity and preference for timeliness.” The authors do not find this amusing.

The book’s big claim is that Gen Z-ers “may well be the heralds of new attitudes and expectations about how individuals and institutions can change for the better.” They have come up with new ways of working (collaborative), new forms of identity (fluid and intersectional), new concepts of community (diverse, inclusive, non-hierarchical).

Methodology aside, there is much that is refreshing here. There is no reason to assume that younger people are more likely to be passive victims of technology than older people (that assumption is classic old person’s bias), and it makes sense that, having grown up doing everything on a computer, Gen Z-ers have a fuller understanding of the digital universe than analog dinosaurs do. The dinosaurs can say, “You don’t know what you’re missing,” but Gen Z-ers can say, “You don’t understand what you’re getting.”

The claim that addiction to their devices is the cause of a rise in mental disorders among teen-agers is a lot like the old complaint that listening to rock and roll turns kids into animals. The authors cite a recent study (not their own) that concludes that the association between poor mental health and eating potatoes is greater than the association with technology use. We’re all in our own fishbowls. We should hesitate before we pass judgment on what life is like in the fishbowls of others.

The major problem with “Gen Z, Explained” is not so much the authors’ fawning tone, or their admiration for the students’ concerns—“environmental degradation, equality, violence, and injustice”—even though they are the same concerns that almost everyone in their social class has, regardless of age. The problem is the “heralds of a new dawn” stuff.

“A crisis looms for all unless we can find ways to change,” they warn. “Gen Zers have ideas of the type of world they would like to bring into being. By listening carefully to what they are saying, we can appreciate the lessons they have to teach us: be real, know who you are, be responsible for your own well-being, support your friends, open up institutions to the talents of the many, not the few, embrace diversity, make the world kinder, live by your values.”

I believe we have been here before, Captain. Fifty-one years ago, The New Yorker ran a thirty-nine-thousand-word piece that began:

There is a revolution under way . . . It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structure are changing in consequence. Its ultimate creation could be a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. This is the revolution of the new generation.

The author was a forty-two-year-old Yale Law School professor named Charles Reich, and the piece was an excerpt from his book “The Greening of America,” which, when it came out, later that year, went to No. 1 on the Times best-seller list.

Reich had been in San Francisco in 1967, during the so-called Summer of Love, and was amazed and excited by the flower-power wing of the counterculture—the bell-bottom pants (about which he waxes ecstatic in the book), the marijuana and the psychedelic drugs, the music, the peace-and-love life style, everything.

He became convinced that the only way to cure the ills of American life was to follow the young people. “The new generation has shown the way to the one method of change that will work in today’s post-industrial society: revolution by consciousness,” he wrote. “This means a new way of living, almost a new man. This is what the new generation has been searching for, and what it has started to achieve.”

So how did that work out? The trouble, of course, was that Reich was basing his observations and predictions on, to use Mannheim’s term, a generation unit—a tiny number of people who were hyperconscious of their choices and values and saw themselves as being in revolt against the bad thinking and failed practices of previous generations. The folks who showed up for the Summer of Love were not a representative sample of sixties youth.

Most young people in the sixties did not practice free love, take drugs, or protest the war in Vietnam. In a poll taken in 1967, when people were asked whether couples should wait to have sex until they were married, sixty-three per cent of those in their twenties said yes, virtually the same as in the general population. In 1969, when people aged twenty-one to twenty-nine were asked whether they had ever used marijuana, eighty-eight per cent said no. When the same group was asked whether the United States should withdraw immediately from Vietnam, three-quarters said no, about the same as in the general population.

Most young people in the sixties were not even notably liberal. When people who attended college from 1966 to 1968 were asked which candidate they preferred in the 1968 Presidential election, fifty-three per cent said Richard Nixon or George Wallace. Among those who attended college from 1962 to 1965, fifty-seven per cent preferred Nixon or Wallace, which matched the results in the general election.

The authors of “Gen Z, Explained” are making the same erroneous extrapolation. They are generalizing on the basis of a very small group of privileged people, born within five or six years of one another, who inhabit insular communities of the like-minded. It’s fine to try to find out what these people think. Just don’t call them a generation.

Most of the millions of Gen Z-ers may be quite different from the scrupulously ethical, community-minded young people in the book. Duffy cites a survey, conducted in 2019 by a market-research firm, in which people were asked to name the characteristics of baby boomers, Gen X-ers, millennials (1981-96), and Gen Z-ers. The top five characteristics assigned to Gen Z were: tech-savvy, materialistic, selfish, lazy, and arrogant. The lowest-ranked characteristic was ethical. When Gen Z-ers were asked to describe their own generation, they came up with an almost identical list. Most people born after 1996 apparently don’t think quite as well of themselves as the college students in “Gen Z, Explained” do.

In any case, “explaining” people by asking them what they think and then repeating their answers is not sociology. Contemporary college students did not invent new ways of thinking about identity and community. Those were already rooted in the institutional culture of higher education. From Day One, college students are instructed about the importance of diversity, inclusion, honesty, collaboration—all the virtuous things that the authors of “Gen Z, Explained” attribute to the new generation. Students can say (and some do say) to their teachers and their institutions, “You’re not living up to those values.” But the values are shared values.

And they were in place long before Gen Z entered college. Take “intersectionality,” which the students in “Gen Z, Explained” use as a way of refining traditional categories of identity. That term has been around for more than thirty years. It was coined (as the authors note) in 1989, by the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. And Crenshaw was born in 1959. She’s a boomer.

“Diversity,” as an institutional priority, dates back even farther. It played a prominent role in the affirmative-action case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, in 1978, which opened the constitutional door to race-conscious admissions. That was three “generations” ago. Since then, almost every selective college has worked to achieve a diverse student body and boasts about it when it succeeds. College students think of themselves and their peers in terms of identity because of how the institution thinks of them.

People who went to college in an earlier era may find this emphasis a distraction from students’ education. Why should they be constantly forced to think about their own demographic profiles and their differences from other students? But look at American politics—look at world politics—over the past five years. Aren’t identity and difference kind of important things to understand?

And who creates “youth culture,” anyway? Older people. Youth has agency in the sense that it can choose to listen to the music or wear the clothing or march in the demonstrations or not. And there are certainly ground-up products (bell-bottoms, actually). Generally, though, youth has the same degree of agency that I have when buying a car. I can choose the model I want, but I do not make the cars.

Failure to recognize the way the fabric is woven leads to skewed social history. The so-called Silent Generation is a particularly outrageous example. That term has come to describe Americans who went to high school and college in the nineteen-fifties, partly because it sets up a convenient contrast to the baby-boom generation that followed. Those boomers, we think—they were not silent! In fact, they mostly were.

The term “Silent Generation” was coined in 1951, in an article in Time —and so was not intended to characterize the decade. “Today’s generation is ready to conform,” the article concluded. Time defined the Silent Generation as people aged eighteen to twenty-eight—that is, those who entered the workforce mostly in the nineteen-forties. Though the birth dates of Time’s Silent Generation were 1923 to 1933, the term somehow migrated to later dates, and it is now used for the generation born between 1928 and 1945.

So who were these silent conformists? Gloria Steinem, Muhammad Ali, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Noam Chomsky, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Martin Luther King, Jr., Billie Jean King, Jesse Jackson, Joan Baez, Berry Gordy, Amiri Baraka, Ken Kesey, Huey Newton, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Andy Warhol . . . Sorry, am I boring you?

It was people like these, along with even older folks, like Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Pauli Murray, who were active in the culture and the politics of the nineteen-sixties. Apart from a few musicians, it is hard to name a single major figure in that decade who was a baby boomer. But the boomers, most of whom were too young then even to know what was going on, get the credit (or, just as unfairly, the blame).

Mannheim thought that the great danger in generational analysis was the elision of class as a factor in determining beliefs, attitudes, and experiences. Today, we would add race, gender, immigration status, and any number of other “preconditions.” A woman born to an immigrant family in San Antonio in 1947 had very different life chances from a white man born in San Francisco that year. Yet the baby-boom prototype is a white male college student wearing striped bell-bottoms and a peace button, just as the Gen Z prototype is a female high-school student with spending money and an Instagram account.

For some reason, Duffy, too, adopts the conventional names and dates of the postwar generations (all of which originated in popular culture). He offers no rationale for this, and it slightly obscures one of his best points, which is that the most formative period for many people happens not in their school years but once they leave school and enter the workforce. That is when they confront life-determining economic and social circumstances, and where factors like their race, their gender, and their parents’ wealth make an especially pronounced difference to their chances.

Studies have consistently indicated that people do not become more conservative as they age. As Duffy shows, however, some people find entry into adulthood delayed by economic circumstances. This tends to differentiate their responses to survey questions about things like expectations. Eventually, he says, everyone catches up. In other words, if you are basing your characterization of a generation on what people say when they are young, you are doing astrology. You are ascribing to birth dates what is really the result of changing conditions.

Take the boomers: when those who were born between 1946 and 1952 entered the workforce, the economy was surging. When those who were born between 1953 and 1964 entered it, the economy was a dumpster fire. It took longer for younger boomers to start a career or buy a house. People in that kind of situation are therefore likely to register in surveys as “materialistic.” But it’s not the Zeitgeist that’s making them that way. It’s just the business cycle. ♦

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By Neal Katyal

By Zadie Smith

By Edwidge Danticat

To understand what young people think, speak their language

Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences (Psychology), Cardiff University

Disclosure statement

Dawn Mannay received funding from Cardiff University as part of the University of Wales Press Funding allocation in relation to this project.

Cardiff University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK.

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At times, it can feel like adults are speaking a completely different language when talking to young people. Even small generational divides feel like gaping chasms as each party tries to relate their experiences in a way the other will understand. This is not just a parental matter: young people are often disregarded as stereotypes of their generation – millenials, hipsters, hoodies – by much of society. But young people have now and always will have a powerful voice.

A range of valuable research conducted with young people has enabled young people to collaborate in research projects and share their views, but these studies are still often designed by adults to their own agendas. So rather than signing up reviewers for a new collection of essays on gender, class and identity in Wales we were publishing we decided to instead ask young people to critique the book, tell us what we got wrong, what was missing and what was important to them.

The book had three themes centred on Wales: Welshness, language and identity; education, labour markets and gender; and public life, social policy, class and inequality. We invited a range of young people, aged 13 to 23, from a community-based arts initiative to attend workshops, and create music videos and audios around the three themes, and style photographs to illustrate or question each of the 12 central chapters.

What we learned gave us far more insight into the contributors’ cultural identity than a simple question and answer interview ever could.

Youth identity

In terms of Wales, Welshness, language and identity, some of the young reviewers, told us that our book did not allow an adequate discussion of migration and ethnicity. These reviewers had African heritage as well as identifying as Welsh and were further concerned that there was no discussion on how people negotiate a hybrid identity. The chapter in question talked about the arts as well as education in the medium of the Welsh language and identities and inequalities linked to gender – but not issues of ethnicity. Responding to this, the participants wrote and performed a song, “ Hybrid Identity ”, to explore the issue, and discuss being both Welsh and retaining their African heritage, and discrimination.

The lyrics concisely express feelings that the participants may have otherwise struggled to articulate: “I’m mixed race, a descendant of many nationalities; It’s a shame people have tried to use that to embarrass me”. They also celebrate their multiple connections with nation and place: “Tell them why being hybrid is so great.”

Work and school

Our discussions of education and work in the book were centred on gender and inequality. We looked at non-traditional, mature students in higher education as well as the exploitation of teachers, divisions in pay, zero hours contracts, and in-work poverty. But the young participants felt that our writing did not communicate the everyday experience of school from the student’s point of view, and in particular, bullying and the pressure to have the right body image. In response, Tasha Harvey recorded her track Beautiful .

Although bullying had not been covered in a specific section of the book, “Beautiful” put the topic on the agenda, and it was then explored in the concluding chapter. The song powerfully communicates the devastating impacts of bulling and feelings of hopelessness: “Day after day thinking that it would end, and for them to stop and just be her friend.” The song’s story ends with the protagonist’s death and it communicates a warning and call for help for young people negotiating the darker side of school life.

Social and public life

Responses to the theme Welsh public life, social policy, class and inequality were explored in the song: “ Politricks ”. Inequality and division was centralised: “Heard the food banks taking donations. Sports cars cruise past the bus station.” There was also a frustration with the political system: “New promises, old legislation; it’s not a solution it’s a dictation. Look at the real problems we’re facing”. As well as a search for answers: “conspiracy theories make more sense than the truth; that’s why they’re so popular with the youth”.

In looking forward to the evolving future of the nation it is clear that many issues which directly affect the youth of today – such as bullying and racism – need attention, and that government cuts are a threat to ideologies of equality and community. But to gauge what the younger generations want to happen to their own futures, we need to change the way we think. Policy documents and traditional research are all well and good, but there needs to be an understanding of how young people are expressing themselves in different ways, whether through social media, music, art or some other format. Only then can we respond and act and start listening.

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‘Speaking of Youth Culture’: A Critical Analysis of Contemporary Youth Cultural Practice

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For a number of years, theorists have suggested that the term ‘youth culture’ corresponds with particularized forms of youth cultural practice clustered around the more spectacular manifestation of the consumption of music, style, and associated objects, images, and texts. However, such a focus serves to close off any discussion of ‘ordinary’ youth, that is, those young people who are not obvious, card-carrying members of style-based youth cultures. With the increasing turn in academic research to issues of youth leisure and lifestyle in more mundane contexts, combined with a growing body of work focusing on youth’s online practices, questions now need to be asked about the value, and validity, of focusing on ‘youth culture’ as this term has hitherto been defined and applied in sociology, cultural/media studies, and other academic disciplines interested in the cultural practices of youth. Aligned with this is the blurring now evident between youth culture as an age-specific practice and as a series of discourses through which individuals who are far beyond any categorization as ‘youth’ based on age continue to invest in ‘youth cultural’ identities. For example, many adults identify as punks, hard-core, or dance music fans, while simultaneously engaging with adult responsibilities and leading adult lives. This chapter will examine these and other challenges to our understanding of the term ‘youth culture’ and consider whether the latter continues to be a valid conceptual and analytical category.

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Bennett, A. (2015). ‘Speaking of Youth Culture’: A Critical Analysis of Contemporary Youth Cultural Practice. In: Woodman, D., Bennett, A. (eds) Youth Cultures, Transitions, and Generations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137377234_4

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education, community-building and change

Positive for Youth: A critique

Positive for Youth: A critique. Lesley Buckland explores the English government’s Positive for Youth policy. She focuses on what ‘Positive or Youth’ means for young people in relation to youth work and informal education. She concludes the policy is the government’s attempt to ‘do something’ about the situation facing young people but without providing the necessary resources or addressing key structural issues.

Contents : introduction • Positive for Youth on young people • a vision for a society that is positive for youth • youth work and youth workers • the problem of facilities • the problem of employment • the changing policy environment • the maths – is it really about money? • the impact on young people • conclusion • further reading and references • how to cite this piece

The much awaited Positive for Youth policy was published on December 19 th 2011 following the issue of various discussion papers that, we are told, were ‘developed in partnership with experts from the youth sector’ (DfE, May 2011). These papers were circulated to named individuals, agencies, local authorities etc., and in many cases, according to Garath Symonds not always cascaded down to the workers on the front line (Symonds, Thinking Seriously about Youth Work Conference, 2012). Many of these ‘specific persons’ were already familiar to us, for example Paul Oginsky a key author of the National Citizen Service. A number were also afforded the opportunity to appear as a witness at the House of Commons Education Committee.

Clearly a lot of thought had gone into some of the discussion papers and it is disappointing that many of the issues that were raised did not make the final draft of the policy. For example, one of the papers, An education for the 21 st century: A narrative for youth work today recognized that it is the youth work process that is a key factor in the development of young people, not just putting on activities (Bateman, Blacke, Davies et. al. 2011). Another discussion paper Positive for Youth: Young People’s Role in Society (DfE,May 2011) stated that public services and professionals help young people realize their ambitions. Yet throughout Positive for Youth it is clear that the main role that is anticipated from public services is that of commissioning, and it is anticipated that much of the work (especially more generic or open work) will be picked up by volunteers and voluntary organizations.

The key theme in Positive for Youth seems to be around what young people need to do for society (a sort of ‘your country needs you’ approach). Little attention is paid to any structural change that may facilitate ‘a more socially mobile and just society’ where ‘all young people have a stake in their communities’ (Loughton, Ministerial Foreword, 2011) and have the resources to achieve their aspirations. Of course we are not talking about all young people as this policy is clearly aimed at working with ‘those who are at risk of dropping out’ ( ibid ). The Positive for Youth policy seems also to be based on the premise that current youth provision is in some way failing young people yet no substantial evidence is presented to support this idea. There is a drive to ‘reform how services are delivered locally’ (HM Government Positive for Youth Executive Summary, 2011:8) and a commitment to create four youth innovation zones, which will carry out assessments to explore the options for ‘re-modelling services for young people’ (Devon County Council 09/01/2012).

So what, apart from the widely espoused need to save money, is really behind the most substantial change for almost 50 years to youth services?

Positive for Youth on young people

The English government is keen to point out that it recognises ‘most young people are doing well and enjoying life’ whilst ‘a very small minority of young people feel no sense of belonging and as a result do not respect the community’ (HM Government Positive for Youth Executive Summary, 2011:3). Whilst this is welcome news, the research upon which this is based ( Health Behaviour in School-aged Children 2011 ) may not, however, be the most appropriate information to inform such a policy document such as Positive for Youth . The careful choice of language here deserves attention as neither ‘most’ nor ‘minority’ are quantifiable in numbers. Perhaps this is how the government can justify such limited resources being invested in young people whilst having such high expectations of what local councils will have to achieve. Whilst there is no statutory obligation to fund actual ‘youth services’, councils will be obliged to ensure they are complying with the government-specified outcomes for young people.

For those who do endeavour to read the full policy the numbers of young people being talked about becomes more quantifiable. Positive for Youth claims that according to the report Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (2011) ‘over 85%’ of teenagers in England today ‘report high life satisfaction’. (The HBSC report this figure as 80% in their executive summary). What it omits to say that this survey was from a sample of 11,13 and 15 year olds ‘who were in mainstream education at the time of the survey’ (HBSC, 2011:1). As Positive for Youth is primarily concerned with young people aged 13-19 we might have expected it to be mentioned that over 45% of 15-year-old girls and 23% of boys reported ‘feeling low’ at least once a week. Further, these were young people in mainstream education, so what about those who weren’t? It is significant that this report which is specifically aimed at 13-19 year olds utilises data to inform it’s strategies gathered from young people who are clearly do not represent the target group. Not only with regards to age but even in the fact that they are attending school.

At least, we could argue, the English government is aware that many young people in this country have very negative experiences of childhood, adolescence and making that transition into adulthood and the working world. Although there appears to have been an improvement in the academic attainment of young people from marginalised groups e.g. living in poverty, looked-after children, those with special educational needs, they are still not able to make inroads into society on a level platform. The Government claims that it ‘is committed to narrowing the gap in outcomes between the most disadvantaged and vulnerable young people and the rest’ (HM Government, 2011:4). So what changes is it proposing to achieve this?

Vision for a society that is Positive for Youth

The Government sets out a Vision for a Society that is Positive for Youth that is detached from even its own research i.e. many of the discussion papers, reports (and indeed practice) that have allegedly been utilised to inform this policy. For example according to their research ‘Young people want to be listened to and have their views heard, respected and acted upon… When their views cannot be acted upon they want a proper explanation of why this is the case’ (HM Government, 2011:6). Key elements of the current Government (and I am referring primarily to the Liberal Democrats) made attempts to solicit the views and support of young people prior to the last election. Arguably the most significant aspect of this concerned their promise not to raise higher education fees. When this undertaking was reneged upon no satisfactory explanation was offered to the young people. Where was the respect offered for their views when they protested and marched on Milbank? Which Government minister offered them an explanation as to why their views would not count for anything? Young people had actively engaged in what they believed to be a democratic process, many for the first time. They gave their views and trusted that they would be listened to. They were badly let down. As widely acknowledged, when people feel alienated from society and democratic processes this can result in what is considered by many as ‘bad behaviour’ (Alinsky 1972; Fromm 1941). This clearly manifested itself in the summer riots of 2011. One of the antecedent factors in determining the riots that was identified in the subsequent report was that ‘young people and community stakeholders identified “[they felt] excluded – no expectations/aspirations and lack of support”’. Young people felt that they in particular had been targeted for cuts in relation to their existing youth provision (Morrell, Scott et. al. 2011).

The Government suggests their vision will be achieved by providing young people with ‘opportunities to express their views and influence public decision making’ (HM Government, 2011: 12). This is nothing new. Many young people up and down the country have been afforded opportunities to express their views in a range of ways from Youth Councils, to questionnaires, to care leavers’ forums and Youth Parliaments. The problem isn’t in soliciting the views from young people, the difficulty is in how much weight is given to their views, and how they can actually influence public decision-making. Positive for Youth suggests a plethora of people and organisations with responsibility for turning this vision into a reality ranging from young people themselves, parents, media, community leaders, local authorities to teachers and youth workers. Much of the task of implementing this vision seeming to fall on the shoulders of the latter. The Coalition’s policy statement Positive for Youth (2011), mentions youth workers and youth work no less than 32 times (Stanton 2012).

Youth work and youth workers

The Government appeared to recognise that in many cases youth workers are best placed to facilitate this process, so why is the English government committed to cutting youth services on such an unprecedented scale? Is it that there is a lack of understanding of the youth work processes and the skills, knowledge and experience that enables youth workers to operate at this level with young people? Across the country youth services have been decimated, clubs closed, workers made redundant. So how is it intended that they are actually going to achieve this vision? It seems that the Government has an idea that youth work can easily (and cheaply) be provided by developing volunteers and commissioning services

Many youth workers come into the profession as volunteers However many volunteers and voluntary organisations had support from their local authority youth services in providing them with development and training opportunities for example. With large numbers of those people gone, and training budgets cut to the quick, who is going to be in the position to provide this support? Youth work comprises of much more than running short term projects and activities for young people (e.g. the National Citizen Service). It is the relationship between the worker and the young person that lies at the heart of work. This doesn’t happen overnight and has to be an on-going process to provide any meaningful outcome. There is no quick fix. There will be ‘numbers’ of people who engage in some of these short-term projects, but will they make a difference? What about the quality of the work? How much meaning or value will it have to the young person, and how is the Government going to monitor this if it is clear if it really isn’t sure on what it’s supposed to be monitoring?

According to the research that supposedly informed the policy young people, ‘Trusted professionals…including teachers, youth workers and religious leaders’ (HM Government,2011:6) played a significant part in many of their lives. If the Government is committed to, as it professes, ‘listening to the views of young people’, why is it failing yet again to act on this information it has heard? With the commissioning out of youth services, running provision with volunteers, and the massive hike in student fees it appears that the Government is doing it’s best to de-professionalize youth workers. Just at the point when the National Youth Agency recognised that the minimum requirement to qualify people to work with young people in such an influential role should be at degree level, the hike in student fees alongside the likelihood of limited paid work at the end of it is very likely to consign youth work to church groups and voluntary organisations run with well-meaning and enthusiastic volunteers. There are some highly skilled youth workers within these sectors, however they are often the ones that have had the exposure to good quality training and personal development themselves (often provided indirectly or directly by local authorities). This is unlikely to be available in the future. More worryingly the government is committed to ‘…restore commonsense and proportionality’ by ‘reducing unnecessary burdens related to vetting and checking adults who come forward to volunteer to work with young people’ (HM Government Executive Summary 2011: 5). Whose ‘common-sense’ we are talking about here? I am assuming that by ‘un-necessary burdens’ the English government were referring to Criminal Record Bureau checks, which admittedly can be very long winded to process. However, it is the system that needs overhauling rather than the requirement for vetting. System problems should not be an excuse to cut corners in order to get people working with young people more quickly. As the Munro Report (Munro 2011) made clear, many of the ‘burdens’ that professionals working with young people suffer from concern collecting enormous amounts of often unnecessary data for the government. The Munro report made recommendations that it the systems needed changing rather than cutting corners.

The problem of facilities

So let’s say best-case scenario a group of competent, experienced and qualified volunteers does try to establish a youth club, where are they going to meet? Unless they are privileged to have access to their own buildings/halls, as many church groups do (although whether they would be as ‘attractive’ as young people have expressed they want is up for debate) they will most probably find themselves in a position of having to solicit premises. Many local authority buildings have been sold off (or given up) as running a building is one of the biggest cost implications for youth work. Obviously not all youth work takes place in a building, but much of it does. The English government proposed giving ‘community groups the right to bid to take over the running of local council services’ and came up with a whole range of ways to access money more easily in order to grow. One of these initiatives is Social Impact Bonds that will be facilitated by Big Society Capital (formerly the Big Society Bank). The government was to invest £600 million (made up of £400 million from dormant bank accounts and approximately £200 million from the “Merlin” group (the big four high street banks) (Chandiramani 2012). It was proposed that they will not administer the funds directly but that the CATALYST GROUP (chaired by the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services) will be involved – in part by looking to add to the amount for investment by soliciting funds from philanthropists and other charitable fundraisers. They will then loan this money (this is an investment) to various groups wishing to set up youth or community projects, and services (often previously run by local authorities). They are expected to ‘deliver’ both on the basis of making a positive social impact as well as making money. These are loans, they incur interest, and whether this is paid directly to the government or to CATALYST was unclear. However what does seem apparent is that there is a move away from charities and local groups being able to directly access grants from funding charities which they wouldn’t have had to pay back with interest, and a move towards brokerage. This will leave the voluntary sector with even less money.

The myplace initiative was to continue with its capital programme to build more ‘world class’ places for young people to spend their leisure time in (Durham University & YMCA George Williams College 2011: 17). The buildings may or may not be ‘world class’ but the question remains as to who is going to run these centres and pay for running costs etc. For example The Salmon Centre in Bermondsey, one of the first myplace centres, reported an 80% loss of funding after a year in operation, resulting in plans to radically reduce staff numbers as a result. This is a centre already heavily dependent on volunteers (Jozwiak 2010).

The problem of employment

According to the HESA survey in 2010 almost 28% of UK graduates who left university in 2007 were still not in full-time employment three and a half years later. This figure has not improved, according to more recent statistics, of the 2009/2010 cohort 37% were not in full-time employment. Of the 63% who have found employment only 31% were in what is termed ‘Associate Professional and Technical Jobs’. This is hardly surprising given that the most common destination for both DLHE and LFS graduates to be employed in was Public Administration, Education and Health (Kitchen, Lloyd, Vignoles, Finch 2008: 1). So although much of the focus has been, and is still pretty much, dominated by the drive for young people to achieve high standards of academic attainment, it is evident that this alone will not necessarily enable them to get a job at the end of it. There is a widely held belief that this is because many young people are not ‘work ready’; they do not have the skills that are needed to access the job market, they lack experience in the real work place. As a consequence there has been much emphasis put on volunteering opportunities to afford young people this experience. However according to the English government ‘The proportion of young people aged 16-19 who engaged in voluntary work in 2010-2011 (42%) was higher than the population as a whole’ (HM Government 2011: 3). The Citizenship Survey (April 2010-March2011) revealed that 25% of people volunteered (formally) at least once a month. So clearly if almost half of young people volunteer anyway, this is not having a significant impact on youth unemployment. Likewise there are not many students in full-time higher education who do not have to work part-time. According to Finch et al (2006) at least 56% of students in full-time education have part-time jobs, so could it be something other than academic qualifications and experience then? Maybe it is lack of jobs? Between November 2011 and January 2012 45,000 jobs were created in the private sector whilst over the same period 37,000 were lost in the public sector, according to figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). However the long term view is less rosy as at the year end December 2011 overall the private sector had created 226,000 new jobs compared to the loss of 270,000 jobs in the public sector. There is also the type of job created to be considered, for example in March 2012 Tesco announced the creation of 20,000 new jobs over the next two years. Unfortunately, there is very little other detail on whether these will be full or part-time jobs for example. Is there really job creation in the private sector or is it more a question of ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’? The public sector has been outsourcing services (commissioning) for quite a while now. Many of these new private contractors are in fact formed by what were previously public sector workers. A growing number of private organisations have been created as people (often ex- public sector workers) have been tendering from anything to run youth projects to ‘free schools’. The public sector has been contracting services for years e.g. cleaning services in schools and hospitals, household waste collection centres etc. Sadly, not only is it not always the cheapest option it is not necessarily the one that meets the needs of the people most effectively.

The changing policy environment

‘Young People’s Views’ (Source: Key Issues for young people and parents, HM Government,2011:6)

Positive for Youth stresses throughout that ‘Government cannot realise this vision on its own’ (HMG 2011: 13) yet the fact that ‘Government’ appears at the end of a long list of parties that can contribute to helping young people ‘to have a strong sense of belonging and succeed’ is no coincidence. This indicates that it will be communities and individuals that are left very much on their own to sort out their own problems and ensure their needs are met, whilst not having access necessarily to either the skills or the resources to do this. This is further confirmed by acknowledging that the vision it has set for itself is strategic and monitoring. It’s premise throughout the ‘Big Society Agenda’ has been about empowering people, empowering communities however from the role the government intends to take it is clear that it is more a question of offloading responsibility for the most vulnerable in our society. There is a move from:

· Grants to Loans

· Welfare (state) to Private Companies

· Social responsibility to Corporate investment.

The former being people driven, whilst the latter being profit driven.

One of these strategies clearly identified in the policy is ‘Building Character and a sense of belonging’ (HM Government 2011: 32). The August Riots in England report ( op. cit. ) said much about young people not belonging or feeling any sense of attachment with the communities in which they live. The coalition recognises that ‘supporting young people to develop a strong sense of belonging is also crucial to developing a healthy society’ (ibid) and one of the key ways in which it envisages providing volunteering opportunities to young people and helping them to develop skills necessary to make them more employable in an attempt to address youth unemployment, is through the newly launched National Citizen Service. Paul Oginsky, one of the key authors of this scheme, was also one of those whose opinion was solicited by the Commons Select Committee on the Positive for Youth Policy.

In spite of the disappointing uptake last summer (Wimpress 2012) and a less than favourable evaluation of the scheme by the University of Strathclyde (2009) which was commissioned by the Conservatives, the English government is determined to plough on with this regardless. This is somewhat alarming considering that the very people it was aimed to attract, the most economically and socially disadvantaged, are the very ones that this scheme is failing (University of Strathclyde,2009). The scheme has attracted much criticism from youth workers (St.Croix, 2011) and politicians (House of Commons Education Committee, 2010-12) alike and on this rare occasion there are some points that both parties agree on. The National Citizen Service is nothing new or revolutionary and is comparable to schemes such as The Prince’s Trust, Raleigh International or Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, to name a few. Predominantly the underpinning methodology is youth work, but just as the Duke of Edinburgh’s Awards scheme was originally to provide opportunities for personal growth and development for the least advantaged people in our society it became quickly monopolised by the middle classes. The report by Strathclyde University drew much attention to the fact that in the pilot schemes not only was recruitment from disadvantaged groups the most challenging, drop out from these groups of young people were the highest, there are many key indicators that suggest history could indeed repeat itself. However, the main issue that both parties tend to agree on is the economics of the scheme. Why at a time when youth services are being closed and youth workers made redundant are new schemes being launched that in reality will cost just as much, economically, and could possibly damage the lives even further of many disadvantaged young people by removing services and more importantly workers that they are already familiar and have already established relationships with.

The maths – is it really about money and improving the life chances for young people?

According to Ian Mearns MP for Gateshead (Youth & Policy Conference, March 2012) the Commons Education Select Committee identified that if the National Citizen Service scheme was taken up by half the young people it was offered to, this would cost the Government £335 million per year compared with the more than the £350 million spent on youth services in 2009-2010. This is just one of the many pots of money that the Government will be designating to organisations of its choice, for example £4 million will be made available to V – the national youth volunteering charity, over £40 million to support volunteering, giving and volunteering infrastructure through the Social Action Fund, Innovation in Giving Fund etc. (HM Government 2011: 41). This shift to National Citizen’s Service may be an indication that youth services were not ‘fit for purpose’. Yet there is little evidence that this and previous policies including Connexions and myplace were based in any substantial evidence from practice. In many respects they have all been vanity projects that fail to tackle fundamental ills like unemployment, the housing crisis and poverty and inequality.

Youth unemployment is at its highest for many years, affecting over 1 million young people, and you can hardly blame parents, schools, youth services etc. for this when fundamentally there is a lack of jobs. It is at best unfair and at worst invidious to lay the fault at the feet of young people not achieving their potential, especially when so many of them have but have still been denied places at university, left university with no job at the end of it, or left school with a ‘good enough’ all round education wanting to work but being unable to get even the most low paid job as they find themselves in direct competition with older people who are vastly more experienced. The cut to the EMA has ensured many of the most economically deprived young people have no opportunity to stay in education, even if they wanted to. It appears to me that the main reason for this change in direction is down to choice. The Government wants to choose who it does business with, and I mean this in the truest sense of the word. It cannot be seen as coincidental that several of the private businesses (under the vague disguise of charities in many cases) have been able to directly influence government policy (St.Croix 2011). This gives the government far more control about how they run these services and is in complete contrast to the ethos that informed the creation of public services. I have always believed that as a worker in the public sector (and I’m referring to both my time working in a local authority as well as in the voluntary sector) that you are accountable to the government for spending public money wisely but you have a duty to serve the needs of the people you work with. This was always the tricky bit for managers as often the needs they identified required addressing were not the same as the governments agenda, these competing tensions made for a healthy and critical delivery of services. With youth services being commissioned out to the private sector, who at the end of the day are in it to make a profit, where will be the motivation to put people over profit. Youth services used to be free and universal, this is not the case for the National Citizen Service, and depending on which organisation is running it from The Challenge to Vinspired (and all the rest in-between) can mean a cost of anything from £20 -£90 The University of Strathclyde saw this as a barrier to participation.

So what will be the impact on young people?

Fewer places to go – even though there is a commitment to continue the myplace programme it is still a reduction in the many planned centres that had been scheduled to be built under the last government. Whilst the future of those that are to be built is still uncertain as there are no guarantees that there will be enough staff to run them. The number of Myplace centres does not equate to the number of clubs and provisions already closed due to the cuts.

Reduction in quality of staff – many experienced and skilled staff have been lost already, these professionals were not only crucial in providing youth services but were also an essential part in training volunteers and facilitating learning. Without training budgets, or experienced skilled staff to learn from what opportunities are going to be available for practitioners to develop. One of my first year students recently went for an assessment to become a leader on The Challenge project over the summer (The Challenge are running one of the NCS programmes). She was dismayed as when she returned from her assessment she claimed ‘apart from one other person of the 5 who attended the training assessment with me none of them had a clue about young people’ (Jackson, YMCA Student, George Williams College) she explained how none of the other candidates had even worked with young people before, yet they all got offered jobs.

More state control – young people may experience further alienation from society and their communities now that they are being told that they will have to remain in full-time education until they are 18.

Exposure to greater risks – one of my biggest concerns is the proposed relaxation of CRB checks; it feels that this is not a decision informed by adequate knowledge in this area. I believe this may put some of the most vulnerable people in our society at much greater risk.

Inequality – within the UK (and many northern economies) there has been a worrying widening of inequality in many areas of live – and this is deeply unfair, and reflects fundamental failures in both economic and political systems (see Stiglitz 2013). The economic crisis that began with the breakdown of the banking system in 2008 has disproportionately impacted on younger people – and Positive for Youth adds to the problem. What is appearing is two-tiered provision depending on your wealth. Local authorities, where they still commission generic youth services, turn largely to the voluntary sector. The civil society organisations that have traditionally been involved in youth work have taken a particular hit over the last few years. They often do not have the orientation nor the infrastructure to engage with commissioning. Many smaller clubs and organisations have withered away, leaving uniformed organisations and religious organisations as the main local providers of leisure time opportunities for young people. Three things come into play here. First, these organisations have also suffered losses in income that can be used for youth work. Second, many of these organisations are in more affluent areas. Third, if young people live in an area in which a faith based organisation is the main voluntary youth worker provider and they happen to subscribe to a different set of beliefs, this may mean that they are excluded. Local authorities are under no obligation to provide youth services, and given the government line is ‘where practically possible’ this means many areas could be left with no effective provision. It is likely that the number of commercial organisations offering activities and experiences for young people will increase to respond to demand for those who can afford to pay for provision. The number of private organisations involved in National Citizen’s Service (NCS) will increase, as will those offering adventure activities and things like the ‘Camp America’ model. Social impact bonds will also see more private youth organisations set up. Young people will have to pay for youth work. ‘The Government has confirmed that it will retain the duty on local authorities set out in section 507B of the Education 2006 to secure sufficient educational and recreational leisure-time activities for the improvement of the wellbeing of 13 to 19 year olds, so far as is reasonably practicable’ (Consultation on Draft Revised Statutory Guidance for Local Authorities on Services and Activities to Improve Young People’s Wellbeing, March 2012). It seems whilst there may be an obligation to provide certain targeted services, there will be no obligation to provide anything else if the local authority can justify that they are not able to.

Positive for Youth clearly exposes the government’s agenda for more social control rather than less social control, more so than even the Big Society agenda. Far from being about moving away from the ‘nanny state’ and towards a more empowered society it looks more to do with social control without accountability. When a dominant group recognises that specific practices are ‘economically advantageous and politically useful’ in maintaining their position, they come to be colonized and ‘maintained by global mechanisms and the entire state system’ (Foucault 1980 cited in Brookfield 2005: 127). This is a theme that has been developed most recently by Ferdinand Mount (a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher). He has argued that oligarchic tendencies in both UK economic and political systems is causing fundamental harm (Mount 2013). The English government is keen to be seen to be doing something for young people, whilst many of them are not yet at an age to vote their parents do, and in the light of the summer riots of 2011 and rising youth unemployment it has to be seen to act. Positive for Youth is their attempt to ‘do something’ by abdicating responsibility and placing accountability for ensuring young people are in work, school, not rioting etc. entirely in the hands of individuals and communities. This is to be done but without the appropriate resources, and alongside a failure to address key structural issues such as job creation and investment that it is in their power, and as our elected leaders their responsibility, to do.

Bibliography

Allinsky,Saul, D. (1972) Rules for Radicals: a pragmatic primer for realistic radicals, USA : Wildwood

Bateman, Blacke, Davies et al (2011) An education for the 21 st century: A Narrative for Youth Work today

available@ http://www.ncvys.org.uk/UserFiles/Workforce%20Development/An_education_for_the_21st_century.pdf .

Chandiramani, R. (2012) ‘Bang for The Buck’ in Children & Young People Now available @ http://www.cypnow.co.uk/cyp/feature/1071704/bang-buck .

DfE (2011) Positive for Youth Discussion Paper: Young people’s role in society available at http://www.education.gov.uk/childrenandyoungpeople/youngpeople/Positive%20for%20Youth/b00200933/positive-for-youth-the-statement .

Consultation on Draft Revised Statutory Guidance for Local Authorities on Services and Activities to Improve Young People’s Wellbeing (March 2012). available @ http://www.education.gov.uk/consultations/index.cfm?action=conSection&consultationId=1811&dId=1174&sId=7594&numbering=1&itemNumber=1&menu=1 .

Devon County Council (09/01/2012) Devon chosen as ‘innovation zone’ for new youth programme available @ http://www.devon.gov.uk/index/councildemocracy/deliveringservices/directorates_and_departments/chiefexecutives/communication/newscentre/press-releases/press-release.htm?id=4289 .

Durham University & YMCA George Williams College (2011). myplace evaluation – final report Department for Education available@ http://www.education.gov.uk/publications .

Faucault in Brookfield Stephen D. (2005). The Power of Critical Theory for Adult Learning and Teaching , Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Finch, S., Jones, A., Parfrement, J., Cebulla, A. (NatCen), Connor, H., Hillage, J., Pollard, E., Tyers, C., Hunt, W. and Loukas, G. (IES) (2006) Student Income and Expenditure Survey 2004/05 . DfES Research Report RR725, March 2006. Available from: http://www.employment-studies.co.uk/pdflibrary/rr725.pdf .

Fromm, E. (1941). ‘Overcoming Alienation’ in Brookfield Stephen D. (2005) The Power of Critical Theory for Adult Learning and Teaching , Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC): (October 2011) World Health Organisation Collaborative Cross National Study Executive Summary University of Hertfordshire available @ http://www.hbscengland.com/reports/ .

HESA (2011). Statistical first release 162 June 2011.

House of Commons Education Committee (2011). Services for Young people Third Report of Session 2010-12 Volume II The House of Commons London: The Stationery Office Ltd.

Mearns, Ian MP, March 15 th 2012, Youth & Policy Conference: Thinking Seriously about Youth Work and Policy YMCA George Williams College: London.

Jackson, L. (2012). YMCA George Williams College: London.

Jozwiak, G. (Tuesday 7 th 2010 December). ‘Flagship Salmon Centre in Staff cull as funds dry up’ in Children & young People Now. www.cypnow.co.uk/news

Morrell, G,. Scott, S., Mc Neish, D., and Webster ,S. (2011). The August Riots in England:Understanding the involvement of young people NatCen:London available@ www.natcen.ac.uk/study/study-of-august-riots-in-england .

Munro, E. (2011). The Munro Review of Child Protection: Final Report A Child Centred System London: HMSO available@ http://www.education.gov.uk/publications .

St Croix, T, de (2011) Struggles and silences: Policy, Youth Work and the National Citizen Service available@ http://youthandpolicy.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=37&Itemid=53&limitstart=4.

Stanton, N. and Crompton, D. (2012). Positive for Youth Work? Reforming Young People’s Priorities Conference at York University.

Stiglitz, J. E. (2013). The price of inequality . London: Penguin.

University of Strathclyde (2009). Final Report on the Evaluation of the Challenge Programme 2009 for the Conservative Party by Innovative Routes to Learning and the Applied Research Centre at the University of Strathclyde.

Wimpress,C. (2012). National Citizen Service Confirmed for Summer 2012 with 30,000 Places. available @ http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/03/01/national-citizen-service-summer-2012-nick-hurd_hurd_1313612.html .

Acknowledgement : Picture: Stamp commemorating the International Youth Forum 1961. Photographed by Joseph Morris, sourced from Flickr and reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)  licence. http://www.flickr.com/photos/austin80s/2303492008/

How to cite this piece : Buckland, L. 2013). ‘Positive for Youth. A critique’, The encyclopedia of pedagogy and informal education . [ [ https://infed.org/mobi/positive-for-youth-a-critique/ . Retrieved: insert date ].

Last Updated on May 10, 2013 by infed.org

Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

How Teens Today Are Different from Past Generations

Every generation of teens is shaped by the social, political, and economic events of the day. Today’s teenagers are no different—and they’re the first generation whose lives are saturated by mobile technology and social media.

In her new book, psychologist Jean Twenge uses large-scale surveys to draw a detailed portrait of ten qualities that make today’s teens unique and the cultural forces shaping them. Her findings are by turn alarming, informative, surprising, and insightful, making the book— iGen:Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us —an important read for anyone interested in teens’ lives.

Who are the iGens?

Twenge names the generation born between 1995 and 2012 “iGens” for their ubiquitous use of the iPhone, their valuing of individualism, their economic context of income inequality, their inclusiveness, and more.

She identifies their unique qualities by analyzing four nationally representative surveys of 11 million teens since the 1960s. Those surveys, which have asked the same questions (and some new ones) of teens year after year, allow comparisons among Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials, and iGens at exactly the same ages. In addition to identifying cross-generational trends in these surveys, Twenge tests her inferences against her own follow-up surveys, interviews with teens, and findings from smaller experimental studies. Here are just a few of her conclusions.

iGens have poorer emotional health thanks to new media. Twenge finds that new media is making teens more lonely, anxious, and depressed, and is undermining their social skills and even their sleep.

iGens “grew up with cell phones, had an Instagram page before they started high school, and do not remember a time before the Internet,” writes Twenge. They spend five to six hours a day texting, chatting, gaming, web surfing, streaming and sharing videos, and hanging out online. While other observers have equivocated about the impact, Twenge is clear: More than two hours a day raises the risk for serious mental health problems.

She draws these conclusions by showing how the national rise in teen mental health problems mirrors the market penetration of iPhones—both take an upswing around 2012. This is correlational data, but competing explanations like rising academic pressure or the Great Recession don’t seem to explain teens’ mental health issues. And experimental studies suggest that when teens give up Facebook for a period or spend time in nature without their phones, for example, they become happier.

The mental health consequences are especially acute for younger teens, she writes. This makes sense developmentally, since the onset of puberty triggers a cascade of changes in the brain that make teens more emotional and more sensitive to their social world.

Social media use, Twenge explains, means teens are spending less time with their friends in person. At the same time, online content creates unrealistic expectations (about happiness, body image, and more) and more opportunities for feeling left out—which scientists now know has similar effects as physical pain . Girls may be especially vulnerable, since they use social media more, report feeling left out more often than boys, and report twice the rate of cyberbullying as boys do.

Social media is creating an “epidemic of anguish,” Twenge says.

iGens grow up more slowly. iGens also appear more reluctant to grow up. They are more likely than previous generations to hang out with their parents, postpone sex, and decline driver’s licenses.

Twenge floats a fascinating hypothesis to explain this—one that is well-known in social science but seldom discussed outside academia. Life history theory argues that how fast teens grow up depends on their perceptions of their environment: When the environment is perceived as hostile and competitive, teens take a “fast life strategy,” growing up quickly, making larger families earlier, and focusing on survival. A “slow life strategy,” in contrast, occurs in safer environments and allows a greater investment in fewer children—more time for preschool soccer and kindergarten violin lessons.

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“Youths of every racial group, region, and class are growing up more slowly,” says Twenge—a phenomenon she neither champions nor judges. However, employers and college administrators have complained about today’s teens’ lack of preparation for adulthood. In her popular book, How to Raise an Adult , Julie Lythcott-Haims writes that students entering college have been over-parented and as a result are timid about exploration, afraid to make mistakes, and unable to advocate for themselves.

Twenge suggests that the reality is more complicated. Today’s teens are legitimately closer to their parents than previous generations, but their life course has also been shaped by income inequality that demoralizes their hopes for the future. Compared to previous generations, iGens believe they have less control over how their lives turn out. Instead, they think that the system is already rigged against them—a dispiriting finding about a segment of the lifespan that is designed for creatively reimagining the future .

iGens exhibit more care for others. iGens, more than other generations, are respectful and inclusive of diversity of many kinds. Yet as a result, they reject offensive speech more than any earlier generation, and they are derided for their “fragility” and need for “ trigger warnings ” and “safe spaces.” (Trigger warnings are notifications that material to be covered may be distressing to some. A safe space is a zone that is absent of triggering rhetoric.)

Today’s colleges are tied in knots trying to reconcile their students’ increasing care for others with the importance of having open dialogue about difficult subjects. Dis-invitations to campus speakers are at an all-time high, more students believe the First Amendment is “outdated,” and some faculty have been fired for discussing race in their classrooms. Comedians are steering clear of college campuses, Twenge reports, afraid to offend.

The future of teen well-being

Social scientists will discuss Twenge’s data and conclusions for some time to come, and there is so much information—much of it correlational—there is bound to be a dropped stitch somewhere. For example, life history theory is a useful macro explanation for teens’ slow growth, but I wonder how income inequality or rising rates of insecure attachments among teens and their parents are contributing to this phenomenon. And Twenge claims that childhood has lengthened, but that runs counter to data showing earlier onset of puberty.

So what can we take away from Twenge’s thoughtful macro-analysis? The implicit lesson for parents is that we need more nuanced parenting. We can be close to our children and still foster self-reliance. We can allow some screen time for our teens and make sure the priority is still on in-person relationships. We can teach empathy and respect but also how to engage in hard discussions with people who disagree with us. We should not shirk from teaching skills for adulthood, or we risk raising unprepared children. And we can—and must—teach teens that marketing of new media is always to the benefit of the seller, not necessarily the buyer.

Yet it’s not all about parenting. The cross-generational analysis that Twenge offers is an important reminder that lives are shaped by historical shifts in culture, economy, and technology. Therefore, if we as a society truly care about human outcomes, we must carefully nurture the conditions in which the next generation can flourish.

We can’t market technologies that capture dopamine, hijack attention, and tether people to a screen, and then wonder why they are lonely and hurting. We can’t promote social movements that improve empathy, respect, and kindness toward others and then become frustrated that our kids are so sensitive. We can’t vote for politicians who stall upward mobility and then wonder why teens are not motivated. Society challenges teens and parents to improve; but can society take on the tough responsibility of making decisions with teens’ well-being in mind?

The good news is that iGens are less entitled, narcissistic, and over-confident than earlier generations, and they are ready to work hard. They are inclusive and concerned about social justice. And they are increasingly more diverse and less partisan, which means they may eventually insist on more cooperative, more just, and more egalitarian systems.

Social media will likely play a role in that revolution—if it doesn’t sink our kids with anxiety and depression first.

About the Author

Diana Divecha

Diana Divecha, Ph.D. , is a developmental psychologist, an assistant clinical professor at the Yale Child Study Center and Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and on the advisory board of the Greater Good Science Center. Her blog is developmentalscience.com .

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Youth Issues and Adult Society Essay

The youth comprise a significant proportion of every society. Youth can be defined as a group of young people who are in the transitional stage from childhood to adulthood and are considered to be the most energetic. It is a stage during which the young people try to define their identity and prepare them for citizenship and adulthood (Shamsie, 2006). However, it has not been easy to fix the definition of youth in chronological terms. In most countries, the age of the youth is drawn at the time when an individual is treated equally under the law, normally referred to as the age of majority. Many countries place it at age 18 and beyond this age, one is considered an adult. It is therefore important to note that the definition of the term youth depends greatly on the socio-cultural, political, institutional, and economic factors of a given country. The working chronological age for the purposes of this essay is between the ages 15 and 29, which is used mainly by most National Youth Councils. This essay will discuss some problems facing the youth and why this crisis appears to be a major concern for adult society.

There are a number of problems encountered by the youth of today all over the world. Unemployment is one of the major problems facing today’s young generation (Shamsie, 2006). Every young person must be prepared to overcome the challenges of adolescence and adulthood. This means that he or she must engage in progressive experiences and activities which will, in turn, enable him or her to become socially, emotionally, morally, economically, physically, as well as cognitively competent. As one approaches the mid-20s, he or she starts experiencing the transition from schooling to work. Many young people at this age would be expected to secure a job and earn instead of the continued reliance on the parents or guardians. This trend in most instances is hampered by the lack of job opportunities for a large number of young people in society.

Difficulty in securing a place of work implies that the youth can hardly get a stable source of income for personal use and even for the other dependents like the parents or siblings. This is despite the fact that a lot of resources are injected towards educating them. The fact that many young people lack a stable source of income and yet they are the most energetic members of society is ridiculous. A number of youth resort to other alternative ways of survival like theft, forceful robbery, carjacking, and other illegal deals that will enable them to get the money that they desperately need. This is one concern that threatens the fabric of society especially the adult members of the society. The problem is worsened by the fact that there are many young people who are faced with the same problem and hence adding to the magnitude of illegal incidences. In most countries, therefore, the problem of unemployment among the youth has become a major concern of the adult society especially the governments (White, 1999).

Furthermore, unemployment can become the genesis of all other sorts of problems that face the youth. Young people who fail to prosper in society may end up despairing in life and may start smoking, using alcohol, and the use of other drugs. This is common among the youth who leave schooling at an early age and hence can get no meaningful employment. The use of drugs among the youth results in a less productive generation of young people who should otherwise be the building stones for a more stable society. Any adult society, therefore, ought to be concerned about this major problem that faces the youth since they are expected to be the society’s tomorrow.

For the female youth, difficult times at this particular stage may force them to engage in promiscuous activities like sex for pay, and these results in unwanted pregnancies and the contraction of sexually transmitted diseases. The general loss of morality among the young people can plunge the whole generation into enormous problems like increased psychological distress and other mental problems, HIV/AIDS prevalence among the youth, and criminal activities that may ruin a whole generation (White, 1999). These youth problems in many countries appear to be of major concern for adult society.

It is therefore paramount for every society to rise up and address the plight of the young people if it is to prosper to greater heights. This will call for the creation of job opportunities in society and empowering the youth through training on entrepreneurial skills. This will go a long way in ensuring that the society gets proper continuity through its youth.

Shamsie, S. J. (2006). Youth: Problems and solutions. Lea & Febiger.

White, R. (1999). The Australian youth subcultures: in the Mainstream and on the margins. Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies.

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IvyPanda. (2022, March 9). Youth Issues and Adult Society. https://ivypanda.com/essays/youth-and-society/

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IvyPanda . 2022. "Youth Issues and Adult Society." March 9, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/youth-and-society/.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Youth Issues and Adult Society." March 9, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/youth-and-society/.

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Lucy Warwick-Ching

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

A series of FT View editorials and daily online debates will make the case for a new deal for the young. Beginning on Monday 26 April, they will address housing, pensions, jobs, education, the climate and tax over the course of the week.  Click to register for the events and see all the other articles

Growing inequality between generations has been exacerbated by the pandemic and has left many people in their teens, twenties and thirties feeling like they have got a raw deal.

The Financial Times wanted to bring those young people into a discussion about shifts in asset prices, pensions, education and the world of work so we launched a global survey. We asked people aged between 16 and 35 to tell us what life has been like for them in the pandemic, and which problems need fixing most urgently.

The survey was only open for one week but we had a record number of responses, with 1,700 people replying to the callout and spending an average of 30 minutes each on their responses.

While the majority of respondents were from the UK and US, others who shared their views were from Europe, Brazil, Egypt, and Asia-Pacific. Many of the respondents, though not all, were graduates who worked in sectors such as law, banking, media, education, science and technology. Many did not want to share their full names or personal details for fear of professional and personal repercussions.

People spoke of the difficulties — and benefits — of being young in today’s difficult economic times compared with their parents’ generation, and about issues relating to housing, education, jobs, pensions and the environment.

The responses formed the starting point for an in-depth analysis of the problems faced by young people today by Sarah O’Connor, our employment columnist. It is the first article in an FT series on what policies would make the economy work better for today’s youth.

Here we highlight some of the many hundreds of comments we received from readers:

Cramped housing

I absolutely cannot relate to mid career professionals being glad to be at home in their leafy three bedroom houses with gardens, when I have to have mid afternoon calls with the sound of my flatmates frying fish for lunch in the background. — A 20-year-old female reader living in London

The burden of student loans

Student loans feel like a unique problem for our generation. I can’t think of a similarity in the past when youth had such large financial burdens that can’t be discharged in most cases. Not that cancellation is necessarily the right choice. I knew what I signed up for, but what was the alternative, work in a coffee shop while the rest of my generation bettered themselves?

Mortgages and car payments just aren’t comparable to the $100k in loans I’ve been forced to deal with since I was 22. The rest seems similar. We have climate change and equality, my parents generations had communist totalitarian governments, nuclear war and . . . equality. — Matt, who works in Chicago, US

Mismatched ideas

The older generation has never understood that while our pay has increased it has been wiped out by extortionate rise in property prices. The older generation also thinks young people only enjoy spending money on experiences rather than saving money, which is not true. — A 30-year-old engineer living in the UK

Living with uncertainty

Older generations don’t feel the uncertainty we younger generation live with. Now it is more common for us to have more temporary jobs, for example, the gig economy. This uncertainty makes planning for future harder and makes taking risks impossible. — Ahmed, a lecturer living in Egypt

Scrap stamp duty on housing

The government needs to sort out house prices and stop inflating them. It should also scrap stamp duty and introduce annual property taxes instead. — A 25-year-old investment banker living in London

Emotionally better off than my parents

I know I’ll be better off than my parents. My mom came from an Italian immigrant family with seven siblings. I’m one of the first people to graduate from college with a four-year degree and one of the only people employed. Neither of my parents really ‘did’ therapy through their adult lives despite needing it, whereas I’ve had a therapist since my second year in college.

I think a common misperception about being better off is the focus on wealth — being better off also means being more emotionally and mentally healthy, which I know I am already better off than many of my family members. — Alicia, a financial analyst living in America

London feels increasingly full of anxious, burnt out 20- and 30-something-year-olds who spend half their income on a cramped flat with a damp problem and spend their weekends in the foetal position on their landlord’s Ikea sofa, endlessly scrolling through the latest app.

We have so much more than our parents did at our age, but also so much less. — A 25-year-old woman from the UK

Artificially high property prices

Current policies like Help to Buy are making things worse for young people in Britain. The prices of new builds are artificially inflated as builders know HTB can only be used on new builds! £450,000 for a one bed flat in London? Jog on. It’s insane. — Chris, in his late twenties living in London

Gen X doesn’t understand Gen Y

Generation X, doesn’t understand Generation Y, who doesn’t understand Generation Z — Andreas, a young doctor from Bulgaria

Regulate financial markets

I also have a feeling that regulating the financial markets would create more stability which would reduce the constant fear of a market meltdown — Kasper from Finland

Who is accountable?

Sustainability (renewable energy, mindful meat consumption, plastic usage awareness, social responsibility, ESG) are utmost key, and older generations seem to miss this. It feels they have put us in a stage where there is no going back, and there is no accountability whatsoever. — Renato, a risk manager from Brazil

Soaring rents

Many items that are considered a luxury to older generations, holidays, clothes, going out to eat, for example, are cheaper these days, but buying a house or renting is so much more expensive compared to when my parents were young. A lot of young people can afford the former not the latter, but for many older generations it seems the opposite was true, which creates contrasting views from each side about who has it worse. — Sophie, in her mid-twenties, from London

Young vs old

A number of older people I know are relatively sympathetic to a lot of the issues we face. There is a young versus old narrative pushed by certain sections of the media which, at least for many older people with families, has rung hollow with me. Generally they do recognise that we live in a more competitive world than they grew up in, for university places, jobs, housing etc. If anything I feel older generations probably understand younger people better than we understand them — Alex, a student solicitor in London

Cannot afford to buy a house

There is no acceptance that working from home is not feasible for younger people where you’re in significantly smaller accommodation. My company released an internal communication informing us how to be more efficient working in shared accommodation or working from your bedroom at the same time as starting consultation on closing all offices and homeworking permanently. — Lewis, who is working and studying in Bristol, UK

I have a mildly dystopian view

I feel older generations don’t understand the value of money, and it feels strange because my parents have lived a frugal life and I am doing well enough for myself, yet, given the economy, I feel compelled to save, while they don’t understand why I think thrice before every purchase.

On the issue of non-renewable resources, I feel that my parents have a particularly different mindset compared to mine; I have a mild compulsion to turn off any running tap or switch if it’s not being used. They have this comfort and faith that there will be enough for the coming generations, while I have a mildly dystopian view of the future Water/Resource Wars — Pia, a woman in her twenties in India

Steep housing costs

At my age on an apprentice’s salary my dad owned his own house and was buying and flipping more houses. I’ve got a masters degree, earning about 40 per cent more than the national average and I’m still struggling to find anywhere. They just don’t seem to understand, my dad refused to believe me until I showed him the tiny studio flats selling in my area for almost £300k — A data scientist in his late twenties, working in the UK

My generation is worn out

In many ways I think I am better off than my parents were. I’ve been able to travel and live in different countries. I had more choices than women before me. Where I live, I can love whomever I want to love. I do not have a physical job that wears down my body. But I guess each generation faces different challenges.

My generation is perhaps more likely to be mentally worn out. Housing is less affordable and returns are relatively less certain and I don’t have a pension or a pensions saving account that is protected from double taxation. — Deborah from the Netherlands

Change the voting system

It is probably an unrealistic policy change, but I would like to see some kind of weighting system applied to future voting (be it elections or referendums). The older you are, the fewer years you have left to live and the less you will have to suffer from poor long-term choices.

Brexit is a good example of this. Foolish and impressionable members of the older generation selfishly voted to leave the EU — a decision which will cause long-term damage for my generation well after they are deceased. Older people’s votes should have counted for less in the referendum. — David, working in fintech in London

Introduce a ‘meat licence’

I would introduce a “meat license” which every adult in the UK would require before they purchase/consume meat. To get this license, once a year they would have to go to an abattoir and slaughter a cow or pig. Once they have done this, they are allowed to consume as much meat as they want during the year.

This would encourage others to switch to alternatives that are available or at least reduce meat waste which is a tragically growing issue in the rich world. — Dan, working in London, UK

Replace student fees

Instead of tuition fee loans and maintenance loans I would give all young people a lump sum at regular intervals for their first several years post 18. They could use this towards going to uni, getting training, buying a house, etc. It would help diversify the paths people take post 18 whilst redistributing wealth. — A man in his mid-twenties living in Sheffield, UK

*Comments have been edited for length, style and clarity

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Chapter 5: African American English and the communities it influences

5.4.3 The way rap and hip-hop have influenced today’s African American youth (research essay)

Amiri Austin

English 102, November 2020

Today I believe young people not just limited to African American’s find themselves being in a situation in which they have turned to their favorite rapper for motivation, a voice to listen to, or even just background music. Since I started this topic, I’ve been intrigued to find out just how big of an impact Rap and Hip-Hop have had on African American youth in areas of high income along with impoverished areas. Music has helped many of these kids get through tough situations and help escape their reality of gang violence and perhaps not the best circumstances. Rap and Hip-Hop music have also helped influence this generations views on certain topics and helped create opportunities young men and women of color otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to experience.

Now you may be wondering how exactly music can help African American communities. To start I will introduce you to a study used and created by counselors to better help them understand their clients of color. In the article titled “Using Rap Music to Better Understand African American Experiences.”, the authors start off by describing Hip-Hop as more than just a culture you can adopt by buying certain clothes or going to see a few concerts. Hip-Hop is described as more of a dream or an emotional outlet or a way to build relationships and to help young people network their way to a career or profession to get out of the projects or another tough living situation. The authors went about this study by using a content analysis design and chose a genre known as conscious rap, featuring multiple artists and 10 different songs. The songs included were NWA-F**K The Police, 2Pac-rapped, Killer Mike- Don’t Die, Rage Against the Machine-Killing the Name, MainSource- Just a Friendly Game of Baseball, Dead Prez-Cop Shot, Gil Scott Heron- No Knock, Ice-T – Cop Killer, KRS-One-Sound of Da Police, and UGK-Protect and Serve.(7) Each of the researchers listened to the songs in 30 second intervals and then wrote down their thoughts/decoded versions.  Time was taken to relisten and truly feel what the artist was trying to describe to its listeners. The authors found that these songs were more than just lyrics for people to memorize and recite at concerts, they were words used to help these artists get out of their struggle and help their family members out, they were words used to inspire other youth and let them know that even in the worst situations you can achieve the biggest of dreams. This advancement of understanding the lyrics and usage of certain verbiage in songs helped counselors become more culturally competent and helped them institute encouraging activities and helped bring out locked up stories from clients of color. It also helped them understand their social identity and made them feel more wanted even in a world of privilege and oppression. This study is important to the climate of today’s world because I think a lot of people have a misunderstanding of Rap and Hip-Hop music and how it can be used to help. Counseling especially is now more important than ever with the increased awareness of mental illness in the United States and around the world. Suicide rates are at the highest they’ve been in a long time especially in teens and youth and a lot of these kids talk about artists like Juice Wrld or Lil Peep who helped them get through rough times in their life where they thought the only way out was suicide. My next topic will be moving from a health perspective in counseling to ways in which rap and hip-hop have helped African American youth from an education perspective.

From my education experience I never really was forced to have music as a class until 5th grade when I had a required recorder class and we learned how to read basic sheets of music and perform songs in front of our peers. In a scholarly article titled “Connecting Black Youth to Critical Media Literacy Through Hip-Hop Making in the Music Classroom” a program called Foundations of Music encouraged participants to increase their effort and maximize their abilities in the classroom through making music of the hip-hop genre. The Foundation of Music program introduces students to both the process of writing lyrics of a rap song and the technology used to produce rap songs in a classroom. Each day the authors would record observations like the concept’s kids learned every day, reactions from student-to-student and student-to-teacher, along with informal conversations between the students. It was discovered that having the same group of kids come in every day and work on a new hobby built a sense of belonging among them that replicated what it felt like to be a part of a team. A common goal of bettering themselves every day and a sense of having an actual end goal of creating a song or producing a song helped them create a work ethic they weren’t otherwise used to or aware of. Many kids were also able to express their emotions and real-life experiences and let their stories be heard in their communities without being harassed by their normal teachers for talking during a lesson or being off topic. One of my research questions I’d like to answer with this topic would be just “How effective are these literacy practices involving rap music” and “How do African-Americans benefit as a whole from literacy teaching practices involving rap or hip-hop music.” In the article titled “Toward a Critical Pedagogy of popular Culture: Literacy Development Among Urban Youth”, the author talks about how educators have wanted to use new strategies and approaches to teach literacy to urban youth. It can be argued that hip-hop music is the representative voice of urban youth because it was created by and for urban youth, in addition to acting as voices in their urban communities’ rappers consider themselves educators and see at least a portion of their goal as raising consciousness of their communities. The author and his colleague in this article first designed a unit in their curriculum that incorporated hip-hop music and culture into a traditional senior English poetry unit. The major portion of the unit was a group presentation of a poem and a rap song from a historical period that was discussed in the class. The groups were asked to prepare a justifiable interpretation of their poem and song with relation to their specific historical and literary periods and analyze the links between the two. The students generated quality interpretations and made interesting connections between the poems and the rap songs. Their critical investigations of popular texts brought about oral and written critiques like those in college preparatory English classrooms. The students moved beyond critical reading of literary texts to become cultural producers themselves, creating and presenting poems that provided crucial commentary and encouraged action for social justice. Another area used by this study was teaching with popular film. The notion of films as visual texts worthy of academic study has been growing within the postsecondary academy for some time. The critical studies field has grown in prominence, and there are now academics who use critical theory to study film at nearly every major university in the U.S. During the units, the students watched the films in class while reading the accompanying texts at home. By combining popular film with canonical texts, the students were able to hone their critical and analytical skills and use them in interpretations. They were also able to understand the connection between literature, popular culture, and their everyday lives. Further they were able to translate their analyses into quality oral debates and expository pieces. While working with urban youth in Los Angeles, the author coordinated a group of research seminars that brought high school students to the local university to study access to corporate media and the corporate media’s portrayal of urban youth. The students read literature relating to critical media literacy and the sociology of education, designed a study, conducted interviews, analyzed countless hours of news coverage, and performed a content analysis of major U.S. daily newspapers. The author noticed that through the teens research process they were increasingly able to meaningfully draw upon personal experiences during the reading of texts concerning critical media literacy or during interviews they conducted with members of the mainstream media. Motivated and empowered by the prospect of addressing a real problem in their community, the students learned the tools of research, read difficult texts, and produced their own text of high academic merit.

The next topic I will move on to is the “healing power of hip-hop” as stated in an article written by authors Alexander Crooke and Raphael Travis Jr on theconversation.com. Hip-hop and rap culture alike have been criticized as a criminal threat and numerous studies have been undertaken on the harmful influence of hip-hop on kids. While there’s no denying that the lyrical content of hip-hop can be confrontational and many rappers do glorify violence and drugs if you look past certain artists and certain situations you find the “hidden gem” that everyone loves and enjoys. Hip-hop at its core is built on the values of social justice, peace, respect, self-worth, community, and having fun. That is why it is so increasingly popular to youth all around the world and why many kids alike idolize these artists and truly believe they are a therapeutic tool. At its simplest you can make a beat with your mouth or by using a pencil on a school desk or just recite lyrics about anything and with cost-friendly music creating software, young kids are able to take their talents to new levels and pathways to entrepreneurship. Aside from assisting African American youth in urban areas in career options, hip-hop music can also just be a way to cope with problems in their life. I know at least for me that in my first semester in college 10 hours away from home I have definitely used music as an outlet in many situations. In fact for the first week or two my roommates and I would come back from lacrosse practice, sit on the couch and listen to music or “vibe” as we call it. Each day we played different music depending on our mood and just talked about our problems or just listened to the music and relaxed. It was the only time we really interacted to be honest but after two or three days it was what I looked forward to the most in my day, just listening to music and screaming lyrics with my friends. In his U.S. based research Dr. Travis found that those who listen to hip-hop have strong benefits to individual mental health, in areas of coping, emotions, identity and personal growth, can help promote resilience in communities.  Marginalized urban communities around the world share the feeling of resisting exclusion or discrimination and fighting for equity and justice and the rappers that come from these areas have a certain sound that echoes this feeling. Hip hop is not a cure or antidote and it isn’t perfect, but its promise is undeniable. It is a culture with complicated social and historical roots. Its complicated history enables us to critically reflect on our society, and forces us to face issues of race, privilege, class, and cultural appropriation.

I’d like to discuss a very controversial topic in today’s society for many reasons but the main one is that this topic often intertwines with African American youth today and I believe Rap and Hip-Hop music play a very big part in this. That topic would be Police brutality and the way in which Rap lyrics are used as a political force against it. In the scholarly article titled “Rap Music as a Positive Influence on Black Youth and American Politics” the author Natalie Wilson discusses lyrics from an artist named Ice-T in his song titled “Squeeze the Trigger”. He raps “Cops hate kids, kids hate cops. Cops kill kids with warnin’ shots. What is Crime and what is not? What is justice? I think I forgot.” The lyrics in this song are quite blunt but I do believe he is stating true information and addresses the grey area of our justice system. African-American youth are constantly the victims of homicide by cops in most cases they are unarmed and in most cases cops are let off with no charges. I believe a lot negativity in rap songs comes from the artist just speaking on the climate they were raised in whether it be around gang violence and drugs or living in harsh situations where their parents couldn’t provide them with certain necessities. Many young black men are in a situation in which they get a sudden sense of discomfort around police wondering of they’ll be the next hashtag or next face on a t-shirt that people are purchasing in order to support my family. I do understand that in some situations the teens or people are in the wrong and the media takes some stories are out of context but like Ice-T said cops kill kids with warning shots and certain precautions are not taken. I also understand that it can be out of self-defense but in cases in which the civilian is unarmed how are they supposed to protect themselves or even attack without a weapon. There is no question that black youth are unproportionally racially profiled and stooped and questioned simply because of their skin color. I will now discus an artist named Kendrick Lamar who is a positive role model to black youth across the U.S. as he persevered as a good kid and escaped the dangerous streets of Compton. In one of his songs titled “good kid” he shares his experience of gang violence while never being affiliated with one himself. He depicts memories of being jumped by gang members despite his disaffiliation, he is self-described as a good kid who stays out of trouble and attends bible studies regularly. When recognized by the wrong person he is a victim of conflict simply because he associates with friends who are gang members, he then recognizes he is a good kid trapped in a mad city, alluding to the title of this song being good kid and the title of the album m.A.A.d. city. I believe many young African American kids struggle with this situation and often turn to music as a way to escape their city and live a better life away from conflict.

In the next article I will be introducing titled “Hip-Hop & the Global Imprint of a Black Cultural Form” helps me take a slightly odd view on my thesis but nonetheless it states that hip-hop is one of the most popular genres’ in America and that it is really becoming the lingua franca for popular and political youth culture around the world. As hip-hop has skyrocketed in global popularity, its defiant and self-defining voices have been both multiplied and amplified as they challenge conventional concepts of identity and nationhood. Global hip-hop has emerged as a culture that encourages and integrates innovative practices of artistic expression, knowledge production, social identification, and political mobilization. The hip-hop nation is an international, transnational, multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual community made up of individuals with diverse class, gender, and sexual identities. While hip-hop heads come from all age groups, hip-hop culture is primarily youth driven. The global influence of hip-hop directly relates to its popularity as a major music source among youth in the United States. According to the national Gallup poll of adolescents between the ages of thirteen and seventeen in 1992, hip-hop music had become the preferred music of youth (26 percent). Along with hip-hop’s cultural norm of inclusion, global hip-hop remains symbolically associated with African Americans. It has incorporated many aspects of African American language ideology. Hip-hop presents African American English (AAE) as a symbolic and politicized dialect where speakers are aware of complex and contradictory processes of stigmatization, valorization, and social control. The hip-hop speech community is not necessarily linguistically and physically located but rather bound by this shared language ideology as part of politics, culture, social conditions, and norms, values, and attitude.

It would be unfair if after discussing all the positive effects and influence rap and hip-hop has on African American youth I didn’t discuss the negative effects. I will be doing so with the help of an article titled “How Hip-Hop holds Blacks Back” and it is by John H. McWhorter who’s podcast we listened to earlier this year in class. He believed that encouraging rap culture reinforced stereotypes that long hindered people of color, and by teaching young African Americans that a thuggish appearance or dialect is the “authentic” response to a presumptively racist society impedes future black success. Of course, not all hip-hop is belligerent or profane, entire CDs of gang-banging, police-baiting, and woman-bashing would get old fast to most listeners, but it’s the nastiest rap that sells the best, and the nastiest cuts that make a career. The top ten best-selling hip-hop recordings all celebrate the ghetto as “where it’s at”. Keeping the thug front and center has become the quickest and most likely way to become a star. So much so that many artists nowadays try to cultivate a gangsta image, even if they aren’t actually from an area they claim to be or if they never struggle like they say they do. Many fans, rappers, producers, and intellectuals defend hip-hop’s violence, both real and imagined as a revolutionary cry of frustration from disempowered youth. While I do agree with McWhorter on some of his stances about hip-hop, not all rappers or hip-hop artists preach violence and negative energy. I do believe there was a time period where there was a lot of civil unrest and racial tension where artists did just seem like their music was just angry rants about rival gangs or police or certain events but I believe that rap and hip-hop, like all things evolve and grow and we have a new generation of artists who are trying to turn the views of rap and hip-hop around. There will always be some artists that just rap to rap and say what they want to say but if you’re really looking for someone speaking real lyrics you can find it. That’s another great part of music that I enjoy, you can really find anything you want for your mood and it doesn’t always have to be someone speaking deeply about their story, you can just listen to someone mumbling over a cool beat if you want.

To conclude my paper, I will discuss my final thoughts on how rap and hip-hop influence African American youth. As I’ve stated many times above, music can be used in many ways to help people get through their days whether it’s playing music in the car or listening to a playlist while working out. So, music isn’t just tailored to those who are in tough times or those who need it to get out of a certain situation. I just believe that rap and hip-hop have had an extremely significant impact on African-American youth because to some of those kids it’s all they have, and even for me some days this semester when I missed home or just didn’t feel like doing anything, turning on some music was always my go-to. For some African American youth music is what drives them to do well in school, as you saw in the studies above adding music to a curriculum helped students stay engaged longer and helped them learn multiple advanced techniques just by creating what they thought was a silly rap. The study of rap and hip-hop songs helped counselors better understand their clients of color just by hearing what the artists had to say, it helped them come to a better understanding of possibly what some of their clients were going through and they were able to better connect with clients and truly fulfill their task of helping people feel better. Many artists are telling their stories of their youth through their songs and you really get a look into the good, bad, and the ugly. I believe that rap and hip-hop both get a bad reputation for being all about drugs, violence, or disrespecting women but maybe it’s just what these artists saw growing up and at that moment they weren’t able to tell right from wrong. I bring this up to say that we must come together as a society and understand the cries out for help and instead of just letting songs go by without any action we must get out and help these people and save them from their struggles and help break this everlasting cycle of poverty and recession in black communities. Especially with the political climate of the United States right now, there’s riots in the streets over a black man being killed by the police and there were protests in all 50 states at one point. It’s more important than ever to understand what is going on with African American youth and I believe that rap and hip-hop music are a good gateway to an inside look on their lives, of course their stories don’t represent all of the youth but there is a fairly good representation of different cities that rappers are from and each of their stories relate in some way or another. This topic has been a rollercoaster of emotions for me, from being confused at the start of what I really wanted to write about but I did enjoy truly understanding stories and seeing interpretations of a hobby so simple as listening to music because I do it just about every day.

Works Cited

Brooks, Michael. “Using Rap Music to Better Understand African American Experiences.”  Taylor & Francis , 26 Feb. 2020, www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15401383.2020.1732251.

Evans, Jabari. “Connecting Black Youth to Critical Media Literacy through Hip Hop Making in the Music Classroom.”  Latest TOC RSS , Intellect, 1 July 2020, www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/jpme/pre-prints/content-intellect_jpme_00020.

Morrell, Ernest. “Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Popular Culture: Literacy Development among Urban Youth.”  Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy , vol. 46, no. 1, 2002, pp. 72–77.  JSTOR , www.jstor.org/stable/40017507. Accessed 4 Nov. 2020.

Powell, Catherine Tabb. “Rap Music: An Education with a Beat from the Street.”  The Journal of Negro Education , vol. 60, no. 3, 1991, pp. 245–259.  JSTOR ,  www.jstor.org/stable/2295480. Accessed 4 Nov. 2020 .

Wilson, Natalie, “Rap Music as a Positive Influence on Black Youth and American Politics” (2018).  Pop Culture Intersections . 21. https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/engl_176/21

McWhorter, John H., et al. “How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back.”  City Journal , City Journal, 18 June 2019, www.city-journal.org/html/how-hip-hop-holds-blacks-back-12442.html.

Crooke Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Music Therapy, Alexander, and Raphael Travis Jr. Associate Professor of Social Work. “The Healing Power of Hip Hop.”  The Conversation , 18 May 2019, theconversation.com/the-healing-power-of-hip-hop-81556.

“Positive Impacts.”  Impacts of Rap Music on Youths , impactofrapmusiconyouths.weebly.com/positive-impacts.html.

Morgan, Marcyliena, and Dionne Bennett. “Hip-Hop & the Global Imprint of a Black Cultural Form.”  Daedalus , vol. 140, no. 2, 2011, pp. 176–196.  JSTOR ,  www.jstor.org/stable/23047460. Accessed 5 Nov. 2020 .

D’Amico, Francesca. “Welcome to the Terrordome: Race, Power and the Rise of American Rap Music, 1979-1995.”  YorkSpace Home , 11 May 2020, yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/37409.

Understanding Literacy in Our Lives by Amiri Austin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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One of the most alarming developments across the United States in recent years has been the growing mental health crisis among children and adolescents.

The already dire situation is evolving 2024 already presenting a new set of challenges that Vicki Harrison, the program director at the Stanford Center for Youth Mental Health & Wellbeing , is closely monitoring and responding to.

Stanford Report sat down with Harrison to find out what concerns her the most about the upcoming year. Harrison also talked about some of the promising ways she and her colleagues are responding to the national crisis and the importance of bringing the youth perspective into that response.

Challenging current events

From the 2024 general election to evolving, international conflicts, today’s dialed-in youth have a lot to process. As teens turn to digital and social media sources to learn about current events and figure out where they stand on particular issues, the sheer volume of news online can feel overwhelming, stressful, and confusing.

One way Harrison is helping teens navigate the information they consume online is through Good for Media , a youth-led initiative that grew out of the Stanford Center for Youth Mental Health & Wellbeing to bring teens and young adults together to discuss using social media in a safe and healthy way. In addition to numerous youth-developed tools and videos, the team has a guide with tips to deal with the volume of news online and how to process the emotions that come with it.

Harrison points out that the tone of political discourse today – particularly discussions about reining in the rights a person has based on aspects of their identity, such as their religion, race, national origin, or gender – affects adolescents at a crucial time in their development, a period when they are exploring who they are and what they believe in.

“If their identity is being othered, criticized, or punished in some way, what messages is that sending to young people and how do they feel good about themselves?” Harrison said. “We can’t divorce these political and cultural debates from the mental health of young people.”

Harrison believes that any calls for solving the mental health crisis must acknowledge the critical importance of inclusion, dignity, and respect in supporting the mental health of young people.

Talking about mental health

Adolescence is a crucial time to develop coping skills to respond to stressful situations that arise – a skill not all teens and youth learn.

“It hasn’t always been normalized to talk about mental health and how to address feeling sad or worried about things,” Harrison said. “It’s not something that all of us have been taught to really understand and how to cope with. A lot of young people aren’t comfortable seeking professional services.”

The Stanford Center for Youth Mental Health & Wellbeing is helping young people get that extra bit of support to deal with problems before they get worse.

This year, they are rolling out stand-alone “one-stop-shop” health centers that offer youth 12-25 years old access to a range of clinical and counseling services with both trained professionals and peers. Called allcove , there are three locations open so far – Palo Alto, Redondo Beach, and San Mateo. More are set to open across the state in 2024.

“If we can normalize young people having an access point – and feeling comfortable accessing it – we can put them on a healthier track and get them any help they may need,” Harrison said.

Another emerging issue Harrison is monitoring is the growing role of social media influencers who talk openly about their struggles with mental health and well-being.

While this is helping bring awareness to mental health – which Harrison wants to see more of – she is also concerned about how it could lead some teens to mistake a normal, stressful life experience for a mental disorder and incorrectly self-diagnose themselves or to overgeneralize or misunderstand symptoms of mental health conditions. Says Harrison, “We want to see mental health destigmatized, but not oversimplified or minimized.”

“We can’t divorce these political and cultural debates from the mental health of young people.” —Vicki Harrison Program Director at the Stanford Center for Youth Mental Health & Wellbeing

Eyes on new technologies

Advances in technology – particularly generative AI – offer new approaches to improving teen well-being, such as therapeutic chatbots or detecting symptoms through keywords or patterns in speech.

“Digital solutions are a promising part of the continuum of care, but there’s the risk of rolling out things without the research backing them,” Harrison said.

Social media companies have come under scrutiny in recent years for inadequately safeguarding young adult mental health. Harrison hopes those mishaps serve as a cautionary tale for those applying AI tools more broadly.

There’s an opportunity, she says, to involve adolescents directly in making AI applications safe and effective. She and her team hope to engage young people with policy and industry and involve them in the design process, rather than as an afterthought.

“Can we listen to their ideas for how to make it better and how to make it work for them?” Harrison asks. “Giving them that agency is going to give us great ideas and make a better experience for them and for everyone using it.”

Harrison said she and her team are hoping to engage young people with policy and industry to elevate their ideas into the design process, rather than have it be an afterthought.

“There’s a lot of really motivated young people who see potential to do things differently and want to improve the world they inhabit,” Harrison said. “That’s why I always want to find opportunities to pass them the microphone and listen.”

Essay on The Role of Youth Today

Students are often asked to write an essay on The Role of Youth Today in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on The Role of Youth Today

The importance of youth.

Youth is the foundation of a society. They are the future leaders, innovators, and change-makers. Their role is crucial for societal development.

Education and Youth

Education empowers the youth. It gives them the knowledge and skills to contribute positively to society.

Youth and Technology

Youth today are tech-savvy. They use technology to learn, communicate, and solve problems, which is beneficial for the modern world.

Youth and Social Change

Youth are often at the forefront of social change. They challenge old norms and fight for equality and justice.

The role of youth today is significant. They have the potential to shape a better future.

250 Words Essay on The Role of Youth Today

The catalysts of change.

Youth today are not just the leaders of tomorrow, but also the partners of today. They represent a dynamic, energetic, and innovative segment of the population. Their role in society is not confined to self-development and securing a future, but extends to shaping the present.

The Power of Innovation

The digital native generation is at the forefront of technological innovation. They are not just consumers, but creators, harnessing the power of technology to develop new solutions to old problems. From climate change to social justice, the youth are using their digital prowess to drive change.

Agents of Social Transformation

Youth today play a pivotal role in social transformation. They challenge traditional norms, advocate for equality, and strive for a more inclusive society. Their voices are loud and clear in movements against racial discrimination, gender inequality, and environmental degradation.

Driving Political Change

The role of youth in politics is increasingly significant. They are not just voters, but active participants, influencing policy and demanding accountability. The youth’s engagement in politics is redefining democracy, making it more participatory and representative.

The Challenges Ahead

However, the youth face numerous challenges, including unemployment, mental health issues, and a lack of access to quality education and healthcare. Addressing these challenges is crucial for harnessing the full potential of the youth.

In conclusion, the role of youth today is multifaceted and crucial. They are the catalysts of change, the drivers of innovation, and the agents of social and political transformation. The future lies in their hands, and it is our collective responsibility to ensure they are equipped to shape it.

500 Words Essay on The Role of Youth Today

The significance of youth in the contemporary world.

In today’s rapidly evolving society, the role of youth is more critical than ever. They are the torchbearers of change and progress, acting as catalysts in the transformation of society. They are the ones who question, challenge, and break the rigid structures of the past to pave the way for a more progressive future.

The Youth as Agents of Change

The youth of today are not just the leaders of tomorrow – they are also the leaders of today. They are at the forefront of social, political, and environmental movements, driving change in their communities and countries. From climate change activists like Greta Thunberg to social justice advocates like Malala Yousafzai, young people are making their voices heard on the global stage.

Their activism is not limited to public protests and speeches. They are leveraging technology and social media to amplify their voices, mobilize support, and effect change on a scale that was previously unimaginable. They are harnessing the power of digital platforms to challenge the status quo and push for reforms in various spheres of life.

The Youth as Innovators

In addition to being change-makers, the youth are also innovators. They are the ones pushing the boundaries of technology, science, and art, creating new possibilities for the future. They are not afraid to take risks and experiment, and this spirit of innovation is what drives societal progress.

Young entrepreneurs are disrupting traditional industries with innovative business models and technologies. They are creating jobs, driving economic growth, and contributing to societal development. Their innovations are not just about profit – they are also about solving pressing social and environmental problems.

The Youth as Builders of Peace

The youth also play a crucial role in peacebuilding. They are the ones who can bridge cultural, ethnic, and religious divides, fostering mutual understanding and respect. They can challenge divisive narratives and promote a culture of peace and tolerance.

In conflict-ridden societies, the youth can play a crucial role in reconciliation and healing. They can promote dialogue and understanding, helping to mend the social fabric and pave the way for a peaceful future.

The Challenges Facing the Youth

Despite their potential, the youth face numerous challenges. They are often marginalized and excluded from decision-making processes, their voices unheard and their needs unmet. They also face numerous socio-economic challenges, including unemployment, lack of access to quality education and healthcare, and discrimination.

These challenges are not insurmountable. With the right support and opportunities, the youth can overcome these obstacles and fulfill their potential as agents of change, innovators, and builders of peace.

In conclusion, the role of youth today is multifaceted and crucial. They are the agents of change, the innovators, and the peacebuilders. Their energy, creativity, and resilience make them a powerful force for progress. It is therefore essential that we recognize their potential, address their challenges, and provide them with the opportunities they need to thrive. After all, the future of our society depends on them.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

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Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

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