Mutual Obligation of Active Citizenship?
(Draft Working Paper)
A Background Analysis for the
ACAL Forum on Youth Literacy
and Numeracy
by John Freeland, Evatt Foundation
South Brisbane, 19 March 1999
1. Introduction
This paper will argue that youth policy should have social justice and equity as organising principles, and that the concept of adequately resourcing all young people to participate as active citizens should be the basis for reconstructing the institutional landscape through which young people chart their life trajectories. Such provision must ensure access to the requisite socio-economic and socio-cultural resources to facilitate effective life course decision making and full citizenship participation by all young people.
Young people
negotiate their identity and life course in an
always-already structured world.
encounter in their everyday lives, and they chart their own life paths. They develop their own belief systems and their own subjective identities. These belief systems and subjective identities influence and are influenced by their actions in the physical and social world.
But they do not do these things in a vacuum. They do them in an always already structured world. The structures range from the form and dynamics of interpersonal relationships in the family and peer group to the structures of broad socio-cultural-economic institutions. Those structures are ever-changing: being changed by individual, collective and institutional actions which are more often than not intentional and rational (given the resources at hand), but which do not always produce the anticipated or desired result. The structures reflect past intentions and belief systems and carry meanings. They influence both the behaviour and beliefs of all social participants, including young people.
Section Two develops a conceptual framework and theoretical argument informing these propositions. I argue that a prerequisite for developing policies to facilitate young peoples’ structured and structuring problem solving, is the rejection of perspectives which either reduce young people to the status of puppets on the structuralist’s string or alternatively inflate them to self actualising relativists on the post-modernist’s de-constructing couch. In their stead, we must develop a non-dualist understanding which simultaneously accounts for the presence and effect of structure and individual intentional action. It is argued that the smooth post-war transition from childhood to adulthood has been dislocated for many young people by the long term structural collapse of teenage full-time employment; and that an effective policy response has to be based on an awareness of young people’s propensity to pragmatically sole their own problems with the resources at hand. From this, it is argued that there has to be a broad socio-political commitment to provide the socio-cultural and socio-economic resource base necessary to facilitate young people’s successful transition to autonomous adulthood and active citizenship.
This will be followed in Section Three by an analysis of young people’s changing patterns of labour market, education and training participation, and an identification of those young people who can be said to be at risk of not effecting a successful transition to autonomous adulthood. Some 15 per cent of 15 to 19 year-olds are identified as being at grave risk, but the degree of risk is not evenly distributed across the age group. Rather, a range of structural factors over-determine the likelihood of individual young people being in this statistical category. A high probability of being at risk is associated with the subjective experience of an integrated complex of disadvantaging factors such as class, sex, race, ethnicity, region, etc.
In Section Four the analysis turns to government policy responses to the identified changes and problems, with the primary focus being on education and training, labour market and income support policies. It is demonstrated that while many of the reforms and programs have been necessary and progressive, and while many constitute elements of a potentially effective raft of policies and programs, they to date have failed to provide the basis for successful transitions by those who are at risk.
Section Five advances a number of social policy reforms designed to more adequately resource disadvantaged young people, their families and communities, and society at large. It is argued that:
2. Analytical and Policy Approaches
2.1 Countering Dualist Frameworks
The understanding we develop of social inequalities is important in that it influences the development of policy and program prescriptions aimed at addressing those inequalities and their consequences. This relationship is evident in one of the dominant characteristics of Western thought - its tendency to develop discrete categories and to see things in terms of dualist "this or that" (black or white, male and female) alternatives. English sub-cultural analysis of the 1970s had a strong tendency to analyse young people in terms of a fundamental divide between conformists and resisters. For example, Willis (1977) divided young people between those who conformed to the dominant norms and expectations of school and those working class young people who resisted; and McRobbie and Garber (1976) drew similar dualist distinctions between those who conformed to and those who resisted dominant notions of femininity.
At a more every-day level, the dualist tendency is frequently evidenced in debates about secondary school students’ rights and responsibilities. On the one hand, students’ lack of maturity and reasonableness are presented by school principals, bureaucrats and politicians as sufficient grounds for rejecting proposals that students be granted greater autonomy and responsibility. On the other hand, miscreant students are held, by the same people, to be fully accountable for their deeds despite the logical implications of the prior argument. (If a student is not sufficiently mature to assume greater responsibility and autonomy within the school, how can the same student legitimately be punished for a misdeed for which s/he does not possess the maturity and autonomy commensurate with full accountability?)
All too frequently these overly reduced accounts are translated into one dimensional policy prescriptions designed either to support or oppress the resisters/miscreants. All too infrequently do we see solutions proposed which are based on an understanding of the complex interaction of individuals and small group and institutional structures and processes. There is evidence, however, of a growing willingness to embrace the necessary ambiguities of complex accounts which identify no single defining or causal factor. Walker (1988) has rejected dualist notions of male individual and sub-cultural group resistance and conformity, and Davies (1989) has argued against similarly simplistic notions of masculinity and femininity. Both have argued that young people negotiate their way through the complexity of structures, representative forms, images and icons to establish their own world views.
As Jones and Wallace (1992, p. 142) have argued:
We have been evaluating two different approaches to the study of young people's lives, that which stresses structure and determinism, and that which emphasises agency and self determination. The life-course approach allows us to see these two perspectives not as conflicting but as compatible. While the social structure of stratification, based largely on social class, gender, race and ethnic inequalities, affects young people's life chances from birth, during their life course they steer their way, with varying degrees of success, through the formal and informal institutional structures, which put new constraints and opportunities in their paths; structural inequalities mean that there are more opportunities for some and more constraints for others, so that some young people's actions may clearly be seen as informed choice strategies, arising from opportunity, and others as survival strategies, arising from constraint. The approaches are not polarised, the extent to which agency or structure predominates is more a question of degree.
2.2 Dislocated Transitions
In their report for the OECD,
Becoming Adult in a Changing
Society, Coleman and Husen
(1985) provided valuable insight into both the problems
associated with the transition from childhood to adulthood
and the historical nature of concepts such as 'adolescence'
and 'youth' which identify discrete stages of life between
childhood and adulthood. They associate childhood as an
ideal type with physiological immaturity, emotional and
economic dependence and primary ties with parents and siblings. Adulthood is associated with physiological maturity, emotional and economic autonomy, and by primary ties with the adult partner and children. The transition involves the provisional resolution of a range of questions relating to personal morality, sexuality, politics and economics, all of which contribute to one's personal identity. As such, the stage of life identified as youth should be seen not as a discrete or distinct period with a clear cut beginning and end but rather as a process: a process of simultaneously un-becoming a child and becoming an adult. As such, it is a process which in some cases may never be completely resolved.
After the Second World War the length of schooling was extended for increasing numbers of young people, thus prolonging the process of transition from childhood through schooling to the labour market and adulthood. The prolongation of economic dependence combined with the lessening age of puberty and an emerging youth popular culture to contribute to an increased incidence of alienation among the young. These tensions were first recognised in popular culture with 1950s films such as East of Eden, The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause. Then in the late 1960s and early 1970s Keniston argued that changing patterns of teenage participation in education and the labour market had resulted in the emergence on a mass scale of a previously unrecognised ‘stage of life', a stage between adolescence and adulthood - youth (Coleman & Husen, 1985, p.11).
In Australia, the 'youth revolt' of the late 1960s and early 1970s paralleled, and to a certain extent mirrored that in the rest of the developed capitalist world. It was also a highly visible manifestation of a wider ranging social democratic resurgence around issues such as the Vietnam War, conscription, racism and Aboriginal land rights, gender inequality, ethnic inequalities, and Galbraith’s public squalor. On closer examination, the disaffection and alienation of young people from mainstream society was a minority phenomenon largely confined to those who were a part of the tertiary education explosion. They were a part of a lucky full employment post-war generation able to defer the transition to adulthood and challenge prevailing social values without threatening their ultimate transition to economic autonomy. There was an opportunity to pose fundamental questions about the quest for unremitting economic growth, the persistence of class, race and ethnicity based inequalities and poverty, undiluted materialism and about the nature of the family. It was a time to experiment with drugs, to overturn sexual mores and to explore alternative life styles. Despite this, the vast bulk of these young people made successful if postponed transitions to adulthood. For the overwhelming majority of baby boomers the transition to adult autonomy occurred after the completion of ten years of schooling and with a trouble free entry to the labour market.
The long term structural collapse of the teenage full-time labour market from the late 1960s has severely dislocated these processes. The experience of transition has been prolonged for all young people, and there is an identifiable stage of life wedged between adolescence and adulthood, but the experience of this prolonged transition is not uniform. It is marked by the complexity of interrelated social divisions based on class, gender, race, ethnicity and region.
For teenagers in emotionally and economically secure households and intent on pursuing professional careers, the only impact the labour market changes have had is the increased competition to secure entry to their preferred tertiary institution and course. The expansion of part-time employment opportunities has provided them with access to an independent source of income to supplement family provided and/or youth allowances. Their transition is not threatened and they face a secure and affluent adulthood.
For those students with a preference for a job but who stay on for Year 11 and 12 and who achieve a reasonable grade, the changes mean an imposed extension of emotional and economic dependence, but their transition to adulthood is not at significant risk.
transition to adulthood is dislocated and they face an unknown period of dependence on either family, an inadequate social security transfer payment, or both.
For young people in low income families which expect their children to secure an early job and contribute to the household finances, the failure to secure employment can break the transition to adult autonomy and may impose an extended period of economic, social and cultural marginalisation on the family. The possibility of family tension and resentment is heightened. For the most severely disadvantaged a history of school failure and rejection combine with the ever-diminishing employment prospects to produce a sense of hopelessness. For these young people there is no prospect of an easy transition to adulthood, only the prospect of a life marked by an uncertain and inadequate income from their tenuous connections with the labour market and/or from social security.
Young people whom have the effects of poverty compounded by the impact of racism, isolation, ethnocentrism, domestic abuse, and/or of homelessness, the transition to adulthood can be quite traumatic. Many of these deeply disadvantaged young people have been failed by the inability of the schooling, social security, accommodation and community service systems to understand and address their needs. Many of them have been permanently excluded from the teenage full-time labour market by long term structural change. Governments have not provided adequate counseling and support programs for abusive families and for families at risk of becoming abusive. Commonwealth and State authorities have failed to cater for the increasing numbers who are unable to live in the parental household and find themselves in the refuge circuit and/or on the streets. White society has failed to understand and make provision for the many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people who have been directly affected by third world health conditions, the cycle substance abuse and its attendant violence, and by the extremely high incidence of incarceration - all the result of imposed cultural anomie, social exclusion and economic destitution. Despite years of 'non-sexist' educational program intervention, and despite the introduction of anti-discrimination and equal employment opportunities programs, young women are still denied equitable access to a gender-neutral labour market.
These failings on the part of our society reflect the range of structural barriers faced by the deeply disadvantaged. They also indicate the areas in need of reform, for there can be no significant reduction in the existing inequalities in post-compulsory education and training access, participation and outcomes if the structural barriers are not demolished. The barriers are not only educational. They are not only to be found within the schools and the training system, and they do not even start within the schools. As previously argued, young people are born into an always-already structured society, and those structures constitute opportunities for some and for others they constitute barriers to equitable access and participation well before they reach school age.
While stressing the need for deep structural reform it is important to remember that even if the structural barriers were demolished, socio-economic and socio-cultural legacies live on in people's world-views and continue to influence their decisions and actions. It is therefore essential to have an adequate understanding of how young people develop their world-view, their identity, of how they view their life chances, and of how they develop and pursue their life paths.
2.3 Pragmatic Problem Solving
Perhaps one of the most fruitful books on young people and schooling to be published in past decade is Walker's (1988) Louts and Legends which presents the product of an extended five year ethnographic study of inner city working class Anglo and non-English speaking background males from Year 10. The study is limited in that it does not deal with:
Despite these limitations the book does provide insights into the way young urban Anglo and non-English speaking background working class males operate in the world to make sense of it and to chart their life courses. In their general form those insights are applicable to all young people. While each identifiable group of disadvantaged (and advantaged) young people has its specific problems and barriers to equitable access and participation, and while each group has its own specific problems of transition, there exists a range of characteristics, factors and experiences common to them all.
Young people generally do not operate as isolated individual ‘subjectivities’. They do experience the concrete specifics of their social context subjectively, but they tend to do so from within cultural groups. Small cultural groups are formed and they appropriate elements from the mainstream cultural environment and develop them as their own cultural symbols and signifiers, thus developing a group identity. In turn this group identity provides the framework for developing individual identities within the cultural group. For females these cultural groups are smaller and less overtly public than they are for males, but they still play a central role in the formation of individual female subjectivties. The cultural group identities and their associated individual identities are based significantly on the self-perceived differences between their own group and other groups which frequently are seen in oppositional terms.
Cultural groups develop their own understanding of the world they encounter, generate their own meanings, their own means, ends, priorities and values. In short they develop their own view of the world and of their particular place in that world-view. These cultural products are not merely ideational: they dispose group members to particular courses of action in particular situations; and they define appropriate behaviour and ways of seeing.
Individuals are of course a product of their history, of their life cycle membership of, and participation in a number and range of cultural groups, both simultaneously and sequentially. Those cultural groups have their own ways of seeing, their own behavioural dispositions and their own modes of problem solving; and individuals are constituted by the diversity of personal relationships they have with members of their cultural groups and with people outside their own groups. The cultural groups to which an individual may belong (sequentially and at any point in time) will generally have a number of common elements in terms of cultural understandings and behavioural dispositions. There generally will be some common ground - in terms of situations experienced, problems encountered and ways of seeing and solving those problems - between an individual's own cultural groups and other external groups. It is the existence of this common ground or, as Walker calls it touchstone, both within specific cultural groups and between them which forms the basis of intracultural and intercultural articulation respectively.
In turn it is such communication which is the basis of people being able:
The cultural resources that an individual (and group) can bring to bear on a problem will reflect the structural location of that individual, their experience and worldview: their understandings of class, ethnicity, race, gender and sexuality. The cultural resources they have at their disposal for problem solving will provide more or less successful outcomes.
This process of problem solving tends to be rational and pragmatic. Walker's young males can be seen to be acting rationally to secure the most effective solutions to the problems they encounter. Their world-view informs their identification, perception and understanding of a problem, their prior cultural learning and their cultural (ideational, economic and social) resources are brought to the task of forming a hypothesis about the most appropriate course(s) of action to solve the identified problem. The cultural resources, the world view and the behavioural dispositions that a young member of Walker's Greeks would bring to an encountered problem, differ in significant ways from those of young members of his Aussie footballers, the handballers and/or the three friends (and from various groups of young females and so on).
If the outcome is successful the existing world-view, cultural learning, understandings and behavioural dispositions will be reinforced. If the outcome is not successful something new will have been learned and the search will begin for modified or new ways of solving similar problems.
Young people’s problem solving processes are rational and pragmatic, but they are marked by their access to and control of socio-economic and socio-cultural resources.range of possible courses of action available to the individual and the cultural group. Even if an action does not provide a completely satisfactory solution, there will be no alternative attempted if the world-view fails to indicate the possibility of an alternative course of action and the probability of that alternative providing a more successful outcome.
In this way young people are much the same as any scientist who operates within the parameters provided by the scientific culture, and who develops hypotheses consistent with the operational paradigm. If the hypothesis is found wanting an alternative is usually sought from within the paradigm, and the probability of moving outside the established cultural boundaries is not very high. Similarly, unless young people are convinced that alternative understandings and courses of action are available to them, and unless they are convinced that those alternatives will provide a better solution to the problem, they will be very unlikely to see and reluctant to accept options that fall outside their own paradigm or cultural boundaries.
Walker's study also demonstrates the central importance for the individual group members of negotiating a positive personal identity through their personal relationships in cultural groups, through their intracultural and intercultural articulation, and through their problem solving activity. For his young males the search for identity involved the struggle to define masculinity, and this process encompassed questions of sexuality, national and ethnic identity, and occupation. But the search was from the context of cultural group participation:
What needs special emphasis, however, granting personal differences between individuals, is that we are all cultural beings, and that culture is always a personal matter. Individuals work out their own personal 'careers' using cultural programs; they draw on culture to develop coping strategies, to negotiate working relations with others, cultural colleagues or not; and perhaps most importantly culture is indispensable in an individual's struggle to work out their own personal identity, to answer the questions 'What kind of person am I?' and 'Where do I belong?' An individual values membership of a group, or acts within its culture, because of the experienced problem solving power of the culture, its capacity to contribute to answering such questions as these, and proposing consonant courses of action (Walker, 1988, p. 36. Author's emphases).
That the solutions pursued by certain individuals and groups sometimes will serve to entrench their pre-existing structural disadvantage, and that they sometimes will serve to harm and oppress others (and other groups) has to be recognised. Structurally, disadvantaged young people have access to fewer cultural resources and life-cycle opportunities, and as such have less to work with in their search for solutions to the problems of identity and transition. However, the existence of structural barriers should not blind us to the reality that they are active participants, through their cultural group memberships, in the identification and definition of their transitional options, and in their pursuit of those options. Moreover, they have to be active participants in the identification, definition and pursuit of less restrictive and restricting life options.
2.4 Resources for Active Citizenship
Resourcing
young people for active citizenship provides a basis for
policies and programs to ensure young people equitable
opportunities to effect a successful transition to
autonomous adulthood.
autonomous adulthood and active citizenship. Civil rights are largely a product (for some a long delayed product) of eighteenth century liberalism, and centre on the rights of the individual to own and dispose of property, and to legal equality. Political rights relate to the rights of the citizen to participate freely and equally in the determination of the governance of the nation state, and initially emerged (in modern times) from nineteenth century struggles for democratic suffrage. Both civil and political rights have their roots firmly embedded in the market system and in classical and democratic liberalism.
The twentieth century has been marked by struggles to secure the geo-political extension of civil and political rights and to secure the socio-economic and socio-cultural resources necessary to enable the full and effective exercise of those rights. The latter struggle - the struggle for social and economic rights of citizenship - has been seen by most to be critically oriented towards the market system. Tensions between market forces and state intervention in the market have emerged as the focus of the central moral and political debate of the late twentieth century.
Marshall saw the objects of these struggles as social rights: the right to accessible education, health care and accommodation, the right to employment and an adequate income. In short, these rights are characteristic of the developed welfare state, and the object of recent attack by neo-liberals. They can be summarised as the citizen's right to the socio-economic and socio-cultural resources necessary to facilitate full and effective participation in the economic, social, political and cultural life of their society.
More recently Marshall's analyses of citizenship rights have been adopted and extended by the left as a means of broadening class claims to equitable access and participation (see Turner 1993). In turn these analyses, and Marshall's, have been subjected to critique by feminists (Pateman, 1989; and Cass, 1994) who have argued that the debate has been a-historical, prefaced on white male assumptions, and been related to the dominant male modes of economic, social and political participation. Such analyses have sought to develop an analysis of citizenship which is inclusive of gender, race and ethnic divisions and inequalities as well as those based on class without falling into the trap of single factor reductionism.
The analyses advanced in this paper of multiple factor divisions and inequalities underlying certain young people being at risk, and of the need for a life course approach to resourcing pragmatic problem solving by individuals and groups within structured situations is informed by these debates.
If disadvantaged young people are to secure more equitable prospects they have to be provided with a less restrictive array of ideational, economic, social and cultural resources which open up the possibility of pragmatically identifying and pursuing more equitable and rewarding life options. This has implications for policies and programs relating to both structural and individual/small group socio-cultural barriers. At the structural level there is a need for policies designed to lower external structural barriers to educational and labour market participation and performance - socio-economic and socio-cultural barriers such as joblessness, poverty, homelessness, remoteness, institutional racism, sexism, and so on.
At the more personal, small cultural group and community levels there is a need for policies and programs designed to:
It also should be remembered that while there is a plurality of cultural forms and identities in modern Australian society, it is not a plurality of equally effective and powerful cultural forms and identities. The dominant cultural form is western, industrialised, liberal-democratic, middle class, male and Anglo-Australian. Any policy which seeks to expand the options, opportunities and prospects for young people living and forming their world views in structurally disadvantaging socio-cultural contexts, must address the need to provide them with literacy in the dominant socio-cultural forms.