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Adam Fletcher
Access = Empowerment
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There are adults in our society who insist on deciding what, how, when, where, why and who young people can access. Questions like this seems to plague their minds: - Who does my child hang around with?
- What should my students read?
- When can I tell her the truth?
- Why would they possibly want to know?
- Where are those little punks?
- How could they?!?
And so forth. These adults are considered with every issue that affects youth, and in every sector of almost every young person's life. Luckily, there is growing recognition that when young people have access to information they can change their own lives, the lives of others, and the whole wide world. Here are some examples regarding birth control, school reform, and public health.
We have to pull back the curtains and show young people the reality. Must.
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| March 30, 2009 | 11:03 AM |
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Its All About Communitatem, Baby!
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 The word "community" is from the Latin word communitatem, meaning "community, fellowship," and itself is from from communis, meaning "common, public, general, shared by all or many." That feels good, sounds good. But what does it really do? In an obtuse way it has meant we shared responsibilities and burdens, rights and freedoms. In a practical way it meant we shared common burdens with our neighbors, so everyone paid some amount for the roads and the teachers and the sheriff and the court and so on. It meant we shared the village green and the sidewalks and the schools and the libraries and the town hall and all these spaces we all use everyday. Community meant sharing.
Throughout the 1970s, 80s, 90s and into the 00s there was a growing sentiment that those things we own in common could and should be hacked up and divied out to the few, in order for them to make a few bucks. We did this with roads, hospitals, parks, and government buildings; to some extent we tried to do it to schools, too. Running around were small herds of people who wanted to make money from the things we all have to use everyday, and to some extent they succeeded. Sharing was on its way out.
I'm not sure if we're seeing a resurgence in sharing. But in times when we can't spring for the big houses and new cars and fancier clothes and all the things we indulged in for so long, there must be some silver lining to these clouds. I look up and see this idea of community being reborn right now. A new value placed on everyone's good, an understanding that we're part and parcel of something greater than ourselves. I'm going to talk about that tonight at a community summit in the town of Sumner, Washington. I'll post my notes tomorrow.
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History Versus the Future?
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In today's body slam match its history versus the future. Weighing in at 5 million pounds comes History, carrying the brunt of civilization on its back, including wars and famine, as well as enlightenment, society and knowledge. In the opposite corner, weighing in at a mere 129 pounds, is The Future, who has broad prospects, possibilities and hope in its support crew.
This morning I'm thinking about the relationship between the historical children's rights movement with today's youth rights movement. The two sound like they are from different planets at times: - Youth rights vanguard like the National Youth Rights Association call for the need for youth involvement and the expansion of youths' civil rights to include voting, driving, drinking and other important issues. They rarely approach basic human rights, although collectively there is a growing sophistication that is bringing that into play.
- Children's rights titans like the Children's Defense Fund and Save the Children calling for young people to have their basic needs met, namely food, shelter, water, clothing, education and health. They rarely vere towards youth engagement, although the topic is gaining popularity.
There has been both agreement and disagreement in the past, and I have shown some of the connections and disconnections before. My friend and ally Alex Koroknay-Palicz and I have frequently talked about the differences. He emphasizes the difference between the inherently paternalistic perspective of the CR advocates and the empowering perspective of YR advocates. While I see that and readily acknowledge it, I don't think we have to have an either/or perspective about this. At the core of the whole conversation is the remote prospect that yes, they are calling for the same thing - we just need to find the common ground.
With the weight of history on their backs many young activists today know they're standing on the shoulders of giants. The future awaits, too, as 5-year-olds today are being raised knowing they have rights to the basic and essential human rights - which include involvement. Let's get to work helping the two ends meet, because even if we don't they're going to.
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Schools as Community Centers
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 Making schools into community centers by opening buildings for 16-hour usage per day, seven days a week makes sense. US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is the latest proponent for the seemingly exceptional shift. On Charlie Rose recently he laid down the line, and its good to hear the federal government coming out on the side of communities.
For youth liberationists this may be a tricky call to arms, primarily because it calls for more exposure to these apparent institutions of oppression. However, I am not a liberationist. I am a radical inclusionist, and in this way I believe that any opportunity to transform the adultcentric decisions made everyday throughout our society into being inclusive of young people is a good thing. Now, its not enough to simply decide to let kids come and play or read or eat or hang out or otherwise just linger in schools after school - although I know that is exactly what more than a few young people in this country need, which is a safe and supportive environment to spend with caring adults. I know that. However, I also know that these young people (which included me as a youth), and all young people, need more than just involvement - we need opportunities to become engaged. They need a chance to build that sentiment towards their communities, towards their families and schools and places of worship and neighbors and peers and all these places where we need them desperately to become more than themselves.
Barack Obama recently reminded us of the urgent necessity of education by proclaiming that, "When you drop out you're not just giving up on yourself, you're giving up on your country." Schools are one avenue for learning that we should uphold and strenghten, day and night, to secure meaningful, successful learning opportunities for all people of all ages. Now, while we're into making them open day and night, let's talk about making schools meaningful...
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Crossing The Capitalist Fjord
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I don't much get into workforce development for youth for a lot of reasons. One is that I believe its our society's responsibility to create citizenry with a higher purpose than generating capital for a Machiavellian marketplace. However, I am finding myself increasingly leery of the ennobled purposes of dodging the conversation about creating jobs for youth.
So, what does that mean for my work? Well, literally it met that I've been a bit of an entreprenuer all my life, since I was 6 and made a sign for my advertising agency for the front door of the hotel room my family lived in at the time. I did the paper route and snow shoveling and lawn mowing and tried Junior Achievement and participated in an Urban League Young Financial Leaders course before I took my first "real" job when I was 14, when I was hired to teach in a program based on Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed. Ever after I've been involved in different social entreprenuership schemes, and at my last count I've began more than 50 youth-oriented projects. I've experienced more hesitation at doing this work as an adult than I ever did as a youth.
All that said, I'm about to start addressing ethically responsible ways to help young people meet their own economic goals, because I believe this is an essential consideration for social change led by and with young people. If you would like to help inform me as I move into this area reply to this post or send me an email to adam at freechild dot org.
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| March 23, 2009 | 10:03 AM |
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An Obsolete Society?
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"What appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other." - Gandhi
More than 10 years working in public education across the United States and Canada has taught me a few things. Sure, I figured out what works for me when I teach students and teachers and administrators, and sure, I learned about the pressures and realities of everyday school functioning. I have learned is that Bill Gates was right when he said back in 2005 that schools, as we know them today in general, are obsolete. Worse still, they are oppressive and compulsory, which has always been a dangerous ignitor among tinderbox nations with aspirational lower- and middle-classes.
But my conclusion may be a little more rough: Schools are just the part of the iceberg we can see.
Our society has relied on adultism to enforce adultcentrism for more than 100 years, and now the fruits of that labor is coming to bear. Child abuse, compulsory schools, the Draft, truancy laws, religious norms, policing practices, and a smear of other tools have been used consciously and unconsciously for more than five generations to oppress, suppress and otherwise keep children and youth "in their place," which has frequently been less-than-human, and is constantly less-than-citizen.
There are synchromonious emergences happening that will undo this negative reality: - Readily-accessible technology, including cell phones, laptops and the Internet
- Interactive Internet, including collaborative, distributive and generative activities
- Increasing socially estute teaching in schools, at home and throughout the community
- Vested adults who are concerned about adultism, youth rights and youth inclusion
- Powerful young people who are acting more assertively, pro-actively and consciously than all previous generations
This is the future of our country and our world, and whether or not we like it is largely irrelevant. The simple fact-of-the-matter is that young people possess more positive power than ever before, and as Gandhi's satyagraha taught us, there is no more powerful force than love and that positive power.
Let's embrace that power, and that urgency. We have to embrace that urgency.
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Inconvenient Youth Voice
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 When I was a teenager there was a powerful creative force in my neighborhood called the Scribble Crew. "Scrib" was this dude at my high school who had intense design aesthetic and who could pull together people around graffiti, if nothing else. The Crew's work was spread around my area of the city, with random gang tagging happening over and around it. Until I came along. When I was 14 I took the tag name "Paz", and at 19 I became Modem Chi. Now, I wasn't an accomplished artist, and I wasn't that prolific. But I had a little talent, and with some targeted art I made a little bit of a name for myself. Oh, in the late 80s I watched Wild Style and Beat Street, and took what I was doing seriously enough to practice in the back yard, on the margins of school books, and by doing tags of friends names for $.50 a piece for a long time. It paid for extra milk and candy bars at the pawn shop. I was into it. But I never got busted - I had teachers who suspected me, and people in my neighborhood who tried to catch me, and a girlfriend whose name I scrawled across more than one wall figured out my secret identity quick. But never once did the flashing lights catch up with me, and when the search beams peeled across our house they weren't looking for me.
Grafitti can represent one form of what I call "inconvenient youth voice." These are the voices of young people who are urgently struggling to be heard, and whether or not adults like or appreciate what is being said, these young people are going to be heard. The kid markering on the bathroom stall, that crowd outside the class complaining about how bad that teacher is, the girl who drops out because she hated school, and the dudes throwing bottles at the old church because they're pissed off at God are all examples of inconvenient youth voice. The youth member who says the "wrong thing" at the meeting, the young representative who brings 10 friends instead of one, and the 19-year-old who insists on starting that school despite being told no a million times... all of these are examples of inconvenient youth voice. I shared a lot of it myself when I was young, as we all did - because we all want to be heard. The general inconvenience of my youth was that I didn't believe I needed to be heard - instead, I just wanted to get the words or art or action out there, no matter what. Sure, some people spent time painting their personal property after I tagged it, and taxpayer dollars were spent cleaning up the streets I scrawled on years after I put it down. But I wasn't thinking about it - I was doing it.
People who are committed to the meaningful engagement of young people throughout society need to work with young people to find and create and explore and examine new ways to engage disengaged youth, and new ways to make inconvenient youth voice constructive, if not always appreciated or "appropriate."
The argument about the legitimacy of grafitti continues still today, more than 30 years after the art began in earnest. Luckily, some headway is being made. According to today's New York Times, recently in New York City, a strange collection of police officers and grafitti artists sat down for a conversation. Check that out. In the meantime, think about the ways you can embrace inconvenience, no matter what. That's our job.
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| March 21, 2009 | 11:03 AM |
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The Fierce Urgency of Now
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"We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are
confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life
and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still
the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with
a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood-it
ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is
adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled
residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, 'Too late.'
There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our
neglect." - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr in 1967. Wars, a sunken economy, increasing homelessness, fewer educational dollars, sicker people and worse crime than seen in a generation are making our world a perilous place to live these days. Yet I want to suggest that there is a problem more pressing than any of those, and that problem is one that, like the others, is ultimately solvable. That problem is one of age segregation. This is an age of engagement, when more than ever before young people have the opportunity to become engaged with themselves and their peers. Different from ever before they are growing up in peer networks and using forums for conversations that adults never before. They are exchanging stories and sharing insights and swapping advice and telling the truth in ways that previous generations never have - and never have been able to. Consequently adults are backing further and further away, letting children and youth to their own technological devices. And young people are showing this, friending in the 1000s, sharing music and clothing and culture online more than ever before. Simaltaneously, young people are still suffering the heinous indifference of adults towards the practical challenges they face right now: health care, education, afterschool programs, employment and recreation programs are the first getting cut in state Legislatures around the country. And the chasm built to enforce age-based segregation in our society grows, too, as more spaces are created to warehouse children and youth than ever before. This wholesale disconnection from adults comes as classroom sizes explode around the nation, as youth program staff are cut from already meager attempts, and as one organization is merged with another with the intention of cost-cutting, but the reality of lost outreach. When young people can't find belonging in those places they seek it elsewhere, in the comfort of video games, basketball courts, girlfriends' houses and the mall. Pity the community without those spaces, too, as youth will keep seeking to connect with their peers no matter what. In my workshop here at the CDC DASH annual meeting yesterday I began on this new note, one that is starting to elaborate on a newfound pulse that is coursing through me. I am an adult who is consciously committed to not standing aside while the world passes me by, bemoaning what is wrong. This is a moral and ethical awareness that I have felt lingering in me for years, but couldn't put words to until now. Dr. King's words have never felt more honest, more relevant and more vibrant to me, as I am no longer afraid or even hesitant to see the utter power, the phenomenom and the courage of the new relationships that are changing our world. These relationships are founded in the awareness of adultism, the acknowledgment of rights, and the power of deliberative engagement. Never again should a person be crammed into a cattle car classroom that is underfunded, overburdened and poorly staffed. Never again should a person be faced with the grim prospect of not finding work simply because they are young. Never again should a person not be allowed to shop with friends becuase they are young. Never again should a police officer incarcerate a youth for truancy. The kid unable to find a place to hang out, the young woman who can't find a contraceptive after she looked, the boy forced to tag light poles because there is no safe space to express his art, the young person turned away at the voting station, the candidate whose campaign is instantly dismissed because she's young, and all of this injustice is based on no discrimination more than AGE. And simply put, I will not accept anymore of it. Today I call on YOU, my comrades in thought and action, to step forward. Let your stance be known, and do not hold back. If you work in this everyday, change your actions. If you write about this everyday, change your words. If you dream about this every night, change your visions. I can no longer settle for half-baked, half-driven, half-done youth involvement ideas. From here out I stand for nothing less than complete equity between young people and adults, and even more: We are dealing with today's young people, for whom the future is not just a possibility - its a reality. Me and you, maybe not so much. We maybe well aware that our actions will affect another seven generations, but my daughter, the youth in your program, that student in your seat... these people are going to be alive in that future, and many more. We cannot continue to fail them. I cannot. Join me in moving forward and facing what that fierce urgency of now - the world can no longer wait.
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Democracy: Don't Just Learn It- Live It
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Its often been said that democracy has to be taught and learned by successive generations for fear that itd dwindle or die from ignorance. While I don't disagree with that idea, I think the way its being taught in schools and youth-serving orgs across the country is mostly wrong. First, let me answer the question of why we need democracy education. Democracy is the expression of an idea through action. Its the idea that every person has more than a role designated to them; they have a role they choose. If we choose to be couch potatoes, then that's our role; if we choose to be activistas, then so be it. If we choose to be one role on Monday and a different one on Tuesday, that is our choice to make. Democracy education should teach us about the advantages and disadvantages of each of those roles, and the many more. This is part of what is wrong with today's democracy education. Its too focused on the politicians and too focused on consumers, both of which are only small roles within democracy. We need an educative process that teaches young people about parenting, community leadership, business ownership, street sweeping, researching, doctoring... All these positions - as they relate to democracy. Another major disjunction in our democracy education programs, classes and schools is that we're too focused on teaching the formalities of the democratic process. Instead of voting, parlimentary procedure and other obtuse concepts that are marginally useful in daily living. Instead of that potentially alienating and disenfranchising experience - especially for youth - we should focus on developing the democratic attitudes and expressions of young people. What does it *feel* to be democratic? How do (lower case "d") democrats think? Let's focus on experiencing those realilities that can inform everyone's whole life, rather than what we have been. These are just some ideas on the outset of a much larger conversation - join me!
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