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Youth at risk - of learning the risks

By Mercurius Goldstein - posted Monday, 30 October 2006


Every summer, Sydney’s newspapers contain accounts of drownings at surf beaches or fishermen swept off rocks. The hazards of the ocean inevitably result in the loss of irreplaceable lives. Yet the sense of tragedy is magnified if the person happens to drown while swimming between two red-and-yellow flags - the area patrolled by lifeguards.

Conversely, those who swim outside the flags, while their deaths are no less tragic, are more likely to be viewed as somehow complicit in the disaster that befell them, a view summarised in the oft-heard phrase “they knew the risks”. In extreme cases, we might feel no sympathy at all for those who are dragged out to sea from precarious rocky fishing-spots - we might shrug and say “they brought it on themselves”.

What is going on here? Why is our society predisposed to treat the same fate differently, based on the relative location of swimmer and flags? Why are councils so solicitous in erecting signposts and educating swimmers to swim between the flags? To what mystical power do we ascribe the ability of rock fishermen to “bring upon themselves” a killer wave?

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And what has any of this to do with young people navigating the overlapping years of formal education, career initiation and adulthood? An explanation can be found in the cultural assumptions behind “risk” and “youth transition” which underpin many social and political judgments concerning education and employment.

This article identifies a positive feedback loop between the political uses of risk and education as tools to distribute accountability among young people, perpetuating many of the perceptual errors in which our society is caught.

In recent decades, Ulrich Beck and Mary Douglas emerge as two key theorists of risk. Beck’s explanation of risk, grounded in economic and political philosophy, emphasises the discontinuities between contemporary society and earlier forms of modernity. Conversely, Douglas’s account, based in anthropology, emphasises the continuities with which risk has replaced “sin” or “taboo” to perform the socially-essential functions of apportioning blame.

Beck elucidates the probabilistic, indeterminate nature of risk as being when we feel “no longer trust/security, [but] not yet destruction/disaster”. Risk exists forever in potentia. It is not real; but nor is it fantastical. To be “at risk”, there must be a non-zero chance of the feared disaster occurring. Moreover, Beck proposes that individuals modify their behaviour in the presence of risk - usually seeking to act in manner that reduces the amount of risk they feel.

An important implication of this view is that, if the feared event never occurs or is forever deferred, the risk can exist, and so influence behaviour, indefinitely (the fear of terrorism being a cogent example).

Beck’s central claim is that the ever-present behavioural influence of risk is the defining characteristic of the late-modern period, setting us apart from earlier societies, in a mould he termed “risk society”.

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As for “youth transition” this is referred to as the period, usually years long, during which young people conclude their secondary education and eventually emerge as acknowledged adults engaged in an independent household and or career. During transition, youth are said to make “biographical decisions” concerning further education, vocation, family, sexuality and recreation: and they may oscillate between the socially-recognised youth and adulthood phases.

Youth in transition are, to borrow Beck’s phraseology, no longer children/family but not yet adults/workers. Living as they do in a fluctuating identity phase-space, youth are the very quintessence of risk, and remain so as long as their indeterminate status holds.

A corollary of Beck’s thesis, echoed by Anthony Giddens, and especially pertinent to youth in transition, is that in risk society, the formerly stable elements of modern identity formation - family, education and work - have been overwhelmed by global economic and political forces. Indeed, throughout developed countries, there is much empirical evidence that youth transitions are taking longer and follow a less predictable course, coupled with a higher likelihood of unemployment, than in the immediate post-war generation.

Armed with no more theory than this, we can form a hypothesis that the political and educated classes will seek to minimise the amount of perceived “risk” posed by youth in transition and, since the formerly effective mechanisms of stable family and work structures are no longer available, education might emerge as the universal panacea for these youth “at risk”.

However, the preceding is only one dimension of the phenomenon of risk. Another crucial element is provided by Mary Douglas, who charts how risk has been transformed from its historical antecedents as “technical calculations of probability” in gambling and economics, to emerge in 20th century societies as the “forensic vocabulary with which to hold persons accountable”.

According to Douglas, individuals in modern society who transgress by taking risks are deemed to be as culpable for the consequences that befall them as individuals in pre-modern societies who offend against the deity(ies) or the taboos of the local tradition.

For Douglas then, a “risk society” is one in which the trope of risk solves the “debate about accountability that is carried out in any culture”. Thus through the prism of risk we mourn the poor swimmer drowned between the flags, but shrug when we hear about the rock fisherman.

In recent years, Australian society has applied to youth in transition a new category of risk - leaving school before completing Year 12 - that in previous generations was not considered risky at all. After all, Year 12 completion rates in prior to 1970 were below 30 per cent. Does it follow that three-quarters of the post-war generation failed to develop into adults who participated in Australia’s development?

For youth in transition, risk society erects risk signposts at every fork in the road - Caution: Swim between the flags! Stay in school! - and, since our culture has attributed a forensic risk to the act of not completing high school, it follows that those who leave after Year 10 are considered to be swimming outside the flags, and are therefore “at risk”. Conversely, one might expect that those who complete Year 12 are therefore safely between the flags, attracting the approbation of society and absolution of responsibility for whatever difficulties they encounter.

However, the situation is not nearly so straightforward. Douglas’ thesis implies a strong link between education and risk, for in the mind of most modern observers it is not risk per se, but the knowledge of risk, that transfers moral blame to the sufferer of disaster, just as in pre-modern Judeo-Christian cultures, it was the knowledge of good and evil that created humankind’s original sin.

In other words, the only “innocents” in a risk society are those who don’t “know the risks”. Therefore education, to the extent that it can transfer knowledge of risk - sexually-transmitted diseases, drug-use and work-ethic - to the next generation, can also transfer accountability and blame upon them.

It could be that the reason youth policy is so focused on youth “at risk” is that, if young people don’t receive the apple of knowledge from post-compulsory schooling, then politicians will, by the unstated logic of risk society, be deemed responsible for those teenagers’ future unemployment and disadvantage, which has been trending upwards in many countries since the 1970s.

Conversely, if the children emerge from transition with the stamp of “educated” upon their forehead, the adult generation can sleep well at night in the knowledge that accountability has been transferred to the young, and need not trouble their consciences if these youth are swept off the rocks over which they so riskily clamber about.

Little wonder then that politicians are enthusiastic to prescribe post-compulsory education to all teenagers, regardless of their academic aptitude, regardless of their desire to complete school, and regardless even of the teenagers deriving any employability dividend from the experience.

This bureaucratic logic creates circular and absurd policy positions in which schools are re-conceptualised as early intervention facilities - for the prevention of “dropping out”!

Beyond education, the decades-long trend towards casualised labour markets has reduced the ability of many people to plan for the long-term. So, even though they are educated and thus deemed accountable, many people are unable, due to structural labour market features, to obtain the stability of employment that would enable them to determine their eventual career, social and class location.

It is also worth noting that although the concept of risk society is relatively recent, it seems that education has long been used to reduce the prevalence of perceived intra-societal threats.

For example, the current anxiety expressed by adults towards youth “at risk” echoes the disquiet expressed by adults towards teenagers’ perceived delinquency since teenagers were first identified as a cultural category in the post-war period.

Looking further back, much of the reasoning used to advocate education programs in risk society seem little different to that of the early 19th century. For example, an historical study by R.J. Selleck chronicles that public education was conceived, in part, as a means to lift the “criminal and necessitous poor” out of their lot of “misery, poverty and degradation” and to reduce crime, promiscuity, sweatshops and drunkenness.

We can find the intellectual descendents of such sentiments in a vast range of current education policy documents today. So it seems reasonable to suggest that public education was invented and implemented as a risk-mitigation strategy, 150 years before Ulrich Beck and Mary Douglas ever put pen to paper.

Nevertheless whether the phenomenon is new or old - and to what extent the educated classes are conscious of the terrible political power of the risk-labels they wield - it is clear that risk, education and youth transition interact at a critical nexus in late-modern society.

The political classes, who alone possess the power to educate, can transform unaccountable innocents into knowledgeable persons who are culturally assumed to carry the moral responsibility for the state of their lives, even if forces beyond their control curtail the options for those youth.

Since this accountability contract is negotiated against a backdrop of sharply unequal child-adult power relationships, this calls into question the opprobrium with which risk society views youth who are surfing the treacherous waves of transition.

In risk society, education serves politically as an insurance waiver over youth “at risk”, foreclosing future claims against the providers and inoculating the tax-paying adult generation against further accountability for what becomes of those youth.

If the recipient of education ends up unemployed, alcoholic or drug-dependent, they are deemed to have no further moral claim to societal assistance, since they “knew the risks”. Such political use of risk and education renders irrelevant a young person’s decision to finish school at Year 10 or 12 - to swim inside or outside the flags - for in risk society, the lifeguard is off-duty.

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About the Author

Mercurius Goldstein is Head Teacher at an International School and is retained as a consultant at The University of Sydney as a teacher educator for visiting English language teachers. He is a recipient of the 2007 Outstanding Graduate award from the Australian College of Educators, holding the Bachelor of Education (Hons.1st Class) from The University of Sydney. He teaches Japanese language and ESL. These views are his own.

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