14 - New youth workers and new youth work
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 April 2023
Summary
A new form of youth work is needed. Youth workers must assert its progressive nature and reconnect with its origins in an alternative socialist education. In this final chapter I argue that socialist commitment must shape this new practice. Youth workâs defensiveness has meant that it has articulated an abstract sense of its value; while it has defended its form it has lost sight of its content. This reflects the huge pressures placed on it by the decline of political liberalism stemming from the Enlightenment and the suppression and transformation of socialist thinking and organisation. The effectiveness of youth workâs method needs to be combined with a new consciousness and purpose. This will enable it, through face-to-face relationship building and dialogue with young people, to overcome the alienation culturally and economically inherent in the capitalist system. It points very significantly to a new political and economic future.
It is time to put some content in the forms of how youth work is practised â technique and process on their own are insufficient. Youth workersâ successful resistance to a capitalist curriculum for youth work that the Tory government sought to impose in the 1990s should not be a distraction from creating a socialist curriculum. Such a curriculum cannot be simply process-driven. Following the election of the Coalition government in May 2010 things have changed, and previous dispositions and ways of working cannot hold things together.
Youth work has been compelled under recent pressures to defend its processes, values and methods. This has resulted partly in a reliance on abstract nouns rather than active, practical verbs. There is also much contentment with process, and not enough concern for product, or what has been referred to as praxis in the critical pedagogical tradition, meaning a combination of thought, and, I add, feeling and action. The phrases have come close to running out of meaning. There is a danger that these key descriptors become empty formal fetishes, slogans without content and purpose. This has perhaps been understandable in that the emancipatory elements of method have been under attack, but the defence of process without regard for the society and kind of citizenship we are seeking to build becomes a flimsy and potentially irrelevant framework to preserve on its own.
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- Information
- For Youth Workers and Youth WorkSpeaking out for a Better Future, pp. 215 - 236Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2012