Youth at risk - of learning the risks

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.