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ListenI have been worrying lately, although worry is really not a strong enough word to convey my level of concern about what we are doing or not doing about preparing young people for the future. It seems clear to me that the world is shifting and changing extremely rapidly and that the changes are anything but trivial. The shifts are at all levels that include biological transfigurations of the human body, massive reconfigurations of our neurology and modes of consciousness, dramatic changes to the material environment in which we live, and astonishing tectonic realignments of the political realm.
All these shifts are having and will have a direct and unprecedented impact on the world young people will inherit at all levels, including the most intimate aspects of their subjectivity and identities. The assaults on the world as we have known it are coming at all levels at a velocity that is hard to comprehend. The amount of information flooding us in every moment of every day is overwhelming. There couldn’t be a greater and more imminent crisis for anything even tangentially connected to our lived experience as sentient beings. In the face of this, I must ask, are we prepared or more importantly are we preparing young people to sustain a full and rich life in the face of an increasingly dystopian world?
I think the short answer is that we are most certainly neither prepared or preparing. As the generations of adults that span the end of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century, we are clearly out of our depth and treading water, hoping that things will get back to normal very soon. I would suggest that normal is gone and won’t be back. The more we wait for the clock to reverse itself so that the world becomes comprehensible, the more time we waste letting other forces create a world that is inhospitable to everything we value and everyone we love. We are running out of time and yet I see no urgency in the field of CYC to do much of anything about the world the young people we serve will inherit.
Those of us working in the field of Child and Youth Care are in a unique position to shift the cultural narrative from one of cynicism and despair to a vibrant and forceful exploration of alternative ways of living. We have day-to-day contact with the next generation across the world. The young people in our care are some of the most disenfranchised and marginalized human beings on the planet. Their investment in the current system of global capitalist rule is tenuous at best and utterly broken in the extreme. It is Marx who tells us that revolution is initiated by those who have nothing to lose. Most certainly, when we look at the economic and social prospects for most of the young people in our care, the view is increasingly bleak.
Most of the young people we serve have daunting intersectional coordinates. They are specifically the kinds of young people who are the most likely to be the subjects of multiple forms of systemic oppression. CYC workers are positioned deep within the social and political geography of those young people who are becoming disposable bodies. No amount of psychological or relational remediation can alter this fact. Our kids are at the bottom of the social hierarchy, and they are falling further behind all the time. The fact that this is not an urgent and universal conversation in our field is both astonishing and irresponsible.
We could certainly excuse our silence by pointing out that such concerns are beyond the scope of the kinds of work we are hired to do. We could argue that the dominant system is so large and comprehensive, there is really no way our small efforts could make an impact. We could maintain that young people in our care don’t care about “politics,” they are too busy trying to survive. Using this kind of logic, we have dedicated our work to making sure that if they are in our care, they are safe, cared for, and connected to meaningful relationships with adults they can count on.
I should note that there is nothing wrong with building safe and trusting relationships between marginalized young people and adults. And it is both important and admirable that CYC workers make every effort to make their programs responsive to the emotional and psychological needs of the young people in their care. However, as Jack Phelan has pointed out numerous times, making sure that young people do well in our programs and build strong relationships with workers in those programs, only prepares them for a life of doing well with an institutional context. If we don’t consider their lived experience in the world they will enter after leaving our programs, we have abdicated an essential aspect of fundamental care. Regrettably doing well within the institutional parameters of residential care is no guarantee of success once a young person leaves that admittedly rather particular social construction of care.
In addition, the ways that we describe our work with young people also more often than not leaves out the social dynamics of the world that is shaping their future. We tend to focus on each young person as if they could be separated from the world they inhabited before they came to us and to which they will return when they leave. Don’t get me wrong, in recent years we have included a trauma-based orientation that takes a young person’s social context into account. We recognize that bad things have happened to them before they came to us and that those significant life events can impact on the growth and development of young people. However, even in the instance in which we acknowledge the world outside our programs as important in shaping young people’s lives orientations, our view is historical. We tend to understand young people through the lens of what has happened to them. We think in terms of remediation and repair. Not to say that we are not interested in taking a young person’s strengths and assets into account as resources for building possible futures. We can do a good job of that. But I would argue that the focus on the young person as the site of trauma and reservoir of resources is myopic and fails to consider the necessity for young people to understand the social coordinates of the world they will need to negotiate when they leave our care.
It is Paulo Friere who tells us that when working with disenfranchised and marginalized people, the development of social agency is crucial. If life is to change for those bodies often considered disposable, the capacity to act on their own behalf in meaningful ways is crucial. Of course, all people act day in and day out. We all go through our days doing this and that. Sometimes our actions are overtly political and intended to change our circumstances. But for those actions to really have an effect, they need to be truly responsive to the materially lived conditions of our lives.
We see this in our work all the time. Young people and adults, sometimes entire communities engaging in acts of resistance that are intended to push back against a world that denies them the ability to really live. Unfortunately, oftentimes these acts of resistance, while filled with energy and creativity, have little or no impact on the actions of the dominant system of control and discipline. Acts of resistance can be dramatic and filled with passion and still fall on deaf ears or worse bring down even more radical methodologies of oppressive tactics.
To be effective in actually changing the world, so that it is a life affirming system of real care, requires clear eyed analysis and well thought strategy. And our actions need to be collectively generated out of all our relations. To do that kind of work, we need an up-and-coming generation who has access to the information necessary to fight for a new world in which they matter.
Friere recognized this in his own work. As a result, he proposed that one of the key elements in building the agency necessary to bring about change was to assist those living under conditions of oppression to begin to understand the conditions of their own oppression. He argued that an essential aspect of collaborative care was the introduction of cogent and accurate information about what was happening to the communities suffering under current sociopolitical conditions. It was essential that there be what he called a pedagogy of the oppressed that would give them the information necessary to produce effective tactics for taking charge if their lives.
Now some of us might argue that such a pedagogy should be aimed at the adults in the community who can take action to remediate the harms being done to their community. That this is not the job of young people who should be allowed their childhood free from such cares. I would argue that this kind of thinking is rooted in a nostalgia for a childhood already past. Young people are already immersed in a virtual field saturated with capitalist ideology from the moment they can hold and manipulate some kind of screen. And that age is getting younger and younger every day. The yearning for the childhood of the mid twentieth century was never realistic for most of the world’s children and is certainly not a reality for any child living in the world of the 21qst century. If we want to affirm a different set of social coordinates that valorizes living things and a viable planet, we must engage young people in an alternate pedagogy anywhere we have them in our care.
For us in CYC that means in the places where we work as well as our own families and communities. However, this requires a reflexive pedagogy in which we are educating ourselves at the same time we working to educate young people in our care. We must do our homework and dive deeply into an analysis of how the current system works and what might be done to produce an alternative. Because most workers today are what I would call the hinge generation (they have a foot in both the world of the pre-virtual and a foot in the contemporary world) they will need to learn as much as they can from the young people in their work about the world as it emerging now. In other words, workers need to produce a collaboratively constructed model of the world as it is and how it might become something else.
Of course, some might argue this is indoctrination and has no place in our programs which should be ideologically neutral. I would argue that there no ideologically neutral spaces in a world saturated with screens flooding our consciousness with the messaging of virtual capital. For the young people we serve, the messaging of global capital is a death sentence. There is nothing in the realm of neoliberal capitalist discourse that valorizes or affirms their lived experience in any way. As those responsible for their care, we have an obligation to do what we can to prepare them for a world that has little or interest in their survival.
If we take on this task, we are following in the footsteps of a number of community-based groups that saw themselves as defending their communities against occupation by a system hostile to them and their children. There have been quite a lot of these over the past several hundred years, but in this instance, I am thinking of the American Indian Movement and the Black Panther Party. Both movements saw themselves as self-defense organizations, but I would argue for our purposes they model very proactive agendas for reenvisioning a different world for young people.
In the case of the American Indian Movement there was a powerful reassertion of Indigenization that reaffirmed and valorized deep connections to language and ceremony that affirmed connection and care to the earth and all things on the earth. There was a powerful rejection of the genocidal and ongoing project of colonization and global capitalism. Often the more militant aspects of the movement have been highlighted but I would argue that what has been sustained over time has been the cultural shift that offers a different way of living.
The Black Panthers have also been portrayed as primarily an armed and militant movement. And without a doubt there was that aspect to their activities as well. But what caught the attention of the FBI as the most dangerous element of the Black Panther program was the Children’s Breakfast program. This free breakfast for children in communities where the Panthers were centered offered free food for sure, but it also included an educational element that focused on the revolutionary re-education of impoverished children of color. This combination was what the U.S. government felt was so dangerously subversive it needed to be shut down with all due haste.
I would suggest that both movements have a great deal to offer us in the our work with young people. It wouldn’t hurt for us to see ourselves as self-defense organizations working against the ongoing assaults on young people by a hostile system of exploitation and domination. I would propose that we take this task seriously and start to engage in offering cultural and political alternatives to the young people in our care.
Many years ago, a visionary leader in our field by the name of Jim Nelson brought community leaders into his program in Minneapolis in an effort to connect to the communities he served. The leaders he engaged were controversial because they included by gang leaders and Indigenous elders. The FBI considered such inclusion profoundly dangerous and eventually infiltrated the agency and caused enough conflict that the project failed and Jim lost his job. It is significant that the FBI used tactics against the agency that they had developed to disrupt the Panthers and the American Indian Movement.
Perhaps it is time to revitalize the work we do in such a way that we also seriously engage community and offer alternative modes of life to our young people. The elders in both movements are still out there. The Panthers and the American Indian Movement are still active and were deeply engaged in the community-based responses to the incursions by ICE across the U.S. They are still working to defend their communities 50 years later. Perhaps they might have something to offer us? Maybe we should invite them in.
