Youth at risk - of learning the risks

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”!