Youth and Inequality in Education

Global Actions in Youth Work

Michael Heathfield, Dana Fusco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317612827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

The transition to adulthood for many is mediated by class, culture, and local/global influences on identity. This volume analyzes the global injustices that create inequities and restrict future opportunities for young people during this transitional time, including poverty, unemployment, human rights, race, ethnicity and location. It critically examines global instances of youth discrimination, offering positive strategies and practices such as youth work that successfully remediate these injustices. With international contributions from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, England, Malaysia, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Morocco, Jordan and the U.S., this volume is particularly important to researchers and scholars in the fields of youth studies, education, and social work.

1 Youth and Inequality Weaving Complexities, Commonalities, and Courage

Michael Heathfield

DOI: 10.4324/9781315750668-1

Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous or honest.

—Maya Angelou (1928–2014)

Maya Angelou found the courage. After dropping out of school at age 14, she went on to courageously meet her potential, becoming a master of six different languages, a Civil Rights activist, a world-renowned poet, a recipient of a Presidential Medal of Honor, a recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Grammy Award winner, to note just some of her accomplishments. She went on to give to the world her gifts, even when the world was not so sure it wanted them.

It is both a complex and simple world in which we live. While some things remain much the same, other aspects of our world make rapid changes or illusionary shifts. There are global gifts and risks, but these are neither shared globally nor with much equity. Indeed, for some young people, real lives are constrained by circumstances beyond their control. The rich and powerful demonstrate increasing reach into everyday lives across the borders of simple geography, while surprising numbers of young people have never had the opportunity to leave their own neighborhood, village, or country, either physically or virtually. Alongside lack of opportunity comes self-doubt and loss of hope. Those who have, believe they deserve even more; those who don’t have, believe the world belongs to ‘others.’

Inequality is not an equal opportunity player. The warp and weft of inequality matches the complexity of our human tapestry and weaves an uneven cloth of diverse coarseness. As Stewart (2013) notes:

Race is the basis for clearly significant groupings in the United States and Brazil, indigeneity in Guatemala and Peru, religious differences in many Middle Eastern countries, and ethnicity and religion in many sub-Saharan African countries. Quite often multiple groupings are relevant in which case inequalities need to be assessed along these multiple demarcations—for example, religion, ethnicity and gender may all be highly pertinent groupings in some countries. (p. 15)

Diversity can be acknowledged and celebrated. Sometimes it is. Yet, it is also often the site of injustice and discrimination, the bedrock on which many inequalities are built. Human heterogeneity sources the social structures, the communal and personal capabilities, and the outcomes around which both social progress and vast arrays of inequalities coalesce in complex ways. Yet, it also strikes us that inequality has a consistency in the ways in which it impinges on lives in that inequality often resides in three locations: it can reside within, between, and across peoples. We have learned that often all three locations can be in operation at any one time. Inequality can reside within the self, and for many people a conscious and deliberative process is required to uncover, name, and guard against this enemy within. Internalized self-hatred is a subjugating force of considerable power and reaches into many lives in hugely differential contexts. In her essay, “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” Audre Lorde explores how racism, sexism, and homophobia have led to Black women “metabolizing hatred like daily bread” (Lorde, 1984, p. 152). Yet, our identities and experiences are rarely individual, even if that is how they are perceived, and most importantly, judged by others. Research that emphasizes “individuals’ experiences with these social identities, rather than the systems of power and oppression that shape these experiences” (Nunez, 2014, p. 85) has been sharply criticized for leaving a gap in our understanding of how hegemonic structures influence life opportunities.

Our lives are predominantly lived in relationships, making and sustaining connections that build our communal humanity beyond our own internal processes and biology. These connections between selves are a second site in which inequalities can thrive and wound, whether at the family, group, or larger social level where social capital is accrued (Putnam, 2001). Yet these social groupings can also sustain and visit injustice on their own people and those who are judged to be ‘other.’ Being both an outsider and insider is a common duality that resides within many. At the largest scale, injustices premised across selfhoods provide us with a human history littered with mass discrimination and oppression. In the early 1800s, the U.S. government enforced a westward march of 16,000 Native Americans known as the ‘Trail of Tears’ (Cherokee Nation, 2014). Thousands of people from numerous tribes had their ancestral lands taken from them; thousands did not survive the march to what is now Oklahoma, and the newly designated ‘Indian Lands’ provided an inhospitable home for the original Americans. Unfortunately, our human history is littered with parallel examples of mass subjugation and denial of rights and violence. Worse, many of these examples target and/or directly impact young people who then can never meet their potential even when they maintain, as Angelou inspires, their courage to be ‘kind, true, merciful, generous or honest.’

The weave of inequality, in both its complexities and its commonalities, needs to be deeply unpacked if we are to make any social progress henceforth. Multi-level analysis is critical, particularly in understanding relationships between inequality, poverty, oppression and violence.

The weave is thick, coarse, and not always put together in predictable patterns. For instance, we understand that violence and poverty are often intertwined. Yet, homicide is more closely associated with poverty and income inequality than rape and robbery are (Hsieh & Pugh, 1993). Further, we can find among the poorest of cities very low homicide rates, e.g., Kolkata in India (Sen, 2008). As Amartya Sen (2008) reminds: “Given the co-existence of violence and poverty, it is not at all unnatural to ask whether poverty kills twice—first through economic privation, and second through political carnage” (p. 8). Over a decade ago, Kenneth Maton, in his presidential address of the Society for Community Research and Action, stated: “The social problems of our day—violence, children living in poverty, children raising children, school failure, divorce, and demoralization—are each deeply embedded within multiple levels of the environment” (Maton, 2000, p. 26). To truly begin to understand the base of inequality requires consideration of multiple factors and identities, including understanding how social categories are interrelated given the multiple and sometimes fluid identities that people hold, understanding arenas of influence or embodied practices, and understanding the history of both (Nunez, 2014).

It is with this backdrop of understanding, as well as with courage and humility, that we approach this text, attempting to uncover the interconnected, intersubjective underpinnings of social injustice in the context of youth, youthhood, and social education practices with young people. In this opening chapter, we uncover for transparent interrogation our response to three questions: Why inequality? Why youth? Why now? Fusco will explore youth work in greater detail in a following chapter examining whether youth work is, has been, and can be a powerful response to youth’s location in inequitable social and economic arrangements.

Why Inequality?

Aspects of identity and social/cultural location provide the nexus for human growth and development. They are also key coordinates around which unequal treatment is intentionally and unintentionally focused. Inequalities founded around capital, gender and sexuality, ability, race, and ethnicity have taken much different journeys and traveled with uneven speeds. There have been substantial shifts around some fundamental inequalities, while others have moved at a much slower pace. Some of these shifts are transnational in their nature, while others are more clearly bounded by their specific geography and culture.

Unequal Capital

Beyond doubt, the most significant transnational shift has been the huge transfer of wealth from the poor and middle classes to an increasingly small financial elite. Breaking historic records, the top 10% of employees in the United States earned more than half of the country’s entire income in 2012 (Saez, 2013), with similar patterns in other westernized areas. The World Economic Forum (2014) predicted that widening income disparities was the second greatest worldwide risk in the coming 12 to 18 months. The startling headline of 2014 was that 1% of the world’s population owns almost half of global wealth.

Concentrated wealth has a dehumanizing impact on the minimal few who receive it and the mass of people who toil in its creation. This is a global pattern defining the nature of our globalized economy and the result of neoliberal policies that have found a welcoming home in many westernized democracies. They are also policies promulgated by financial institutions with transnational reach and are attached to Western capital when it is offered to support post-colonial countries seeking to grow their economies. Deregulated global markets have a deeply penetrating reach that disregards many notions of statehood and independence. The increasing wealth gap dominates all else because it is a key driver of many social ills and injustices. Much of the current societal ills are occurring in relation to policies and politics that privilege marketization over collective responsibility, purchasing power over distribution of power, and individualism over community and citizenship.

We are not alone in expressing concern for the lives affected by this relatively new and unprecedented shift in the global concentration of wealth. Global capital has always transcended the simple boundaries of geography and culture. But now the pace of wealth transfer to the very few is exponential. In 2014, the newly elected Pope spoke to his worldwide flock of some 1.2 billion Catholics, placing this income disparity in a religious frame in which a ‘new tyranny, is born from the ideologies defending the absolute autonomy of the marketplace. Whatever new religious messaging is now emanating from the Vatican, it is abundantly clear that the espoused ideology will have a sharper focus on poverty and inequity, wherever it is found. The impact of concentrated capital on poor communities and how highly contextualized social justice imperatives can both mediate and challenge injustice is a key concern for this text. Income inequality is a foundational issue, but it is always also entwined with other significant social factors that lend vital importance to the specific contexts and cultures in which people strive, thrive, or struggle to survive.

We often assume poverty is the cause of society’s ills: that those who grow up poor are more likely to become pregnant as a teenager, drop out of high school, have mental health issues, be obese and prone to violence. But, poverty is a proxy for a complex and interwoven tapestry of factors including lack of access to public transportation, affordable and safe housing, jobs, and the centrality of a quality education. As UNICEF data (2013) indicate, wealth is not the best indicator for predicting social wellbeing. This conclusion is consistent with other recent research that has revealed that negative social outcomes such as violence, drug abuse, and mental illness are most likely to occur not in poor countries but in less-equal ones, i.e., in societies with the largest gaps in wealth equality (Pickett & Wilkinson, 2011). However, we hesitate to rely on economic explanations alone.

Unequal Gender and Gender Preferences

A second marker of inequality that has also moved with unprecedented speed in some contexts is the legal and social recognitions afforded lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people. This is an inequality in which culture, context, and geography do indeed set boundaries that seem more impermeable. As a global inequality, framed through a lens of human rights, this issue has moved the arc of equality much faster in some democracies than any other social movement has achieved over much longer periods of time. In some corners of the globe, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights are on the agenda, but the agenda is one of state-sanctioned violence and the denial of the basic right of survival. Concurrently, we have nation states that have broken the monolithic power of heterosexuality to confer childrearing, pension, estate, and marriage rights to same-sex couples (The Guardian, 2014).

Inequalities around sexual identities are always enmeshed within patriarchy and the policing of highly gendered expectations, and we can see that both first-wave and second-wave Western feminism have impacted inequality in uneven and unexpected ways. America has yet to have its first female president, a gendered ceiling that has been broken in many countries and continents for some considerable time. Despite decades of equal-pay legislation, American women still earn considerably less than their workplace equivalent male counterparts, are under-represented in national government, and have barely penetrated the upper echelons of the business community. This pattern is also one that replicates itself across the globe. Sexual violence against women such as rape, gang rape, forced prostitution, and genital mutilation are global ills that tragically are still subject to male-dominated policing and judicial system prejudices that decimate the lives of victims for ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Section I Understanding Young People, Inequality, and Youth Work
• 1 Youth and Inequality Weaving Complexities, Commonalities, and Courage
• 2 Youth in a Global/Historical Context What It Means for Youth Work
• 3 History of Youth Work Transitions, Illuminations, and Refractions
• Section II Social Progress Through Youth Work: Welfare and Wellbeing
• 4 Intergenerational Partnership and Youth Social Justice in a Malaysian Fishing Village
• 5 Success Stories from Youth Suicide Prevention in Australia The Youth Work Contribution
• 6 The Istambays and Transition Crises Locating Spaces of Social Sufferings and Hope in the Philippines1
• 7 Youth Work in England An Uncertain Future?
• 8 The Scouting Experience and Youth Development
• 9 Aotearoa New Zealand's Indigenous Youth Development Concepts Explored in Practice Today
• Section III Social Progress Through Youth Work: Radical and Democratic Possibilities
• 10 Democratizing Urban Spaces A Social Justice Approach to Youth Work
• 11 Between Radical Possibilities and Modest Reforms The Precarious Position of Adult Allies in Youth Movements for Racial Justice
• 12 Co-Creating a Culture of Participation Through a Youth Council
• 13 Indigenous Youth and Higher Education The Role of Shipibo Youth Organizations in the Peruvian Amazon Region
• 14 Working for Justice in Chicago Public Schools
• 15 A Decade of Youth Civic Engagement in Morocco and Jordan
• 16 Paternalism in Educating and Developing Our Youth The Perpetuation of Inequality
• Section IV Themes and Conclusions
• 17 From Hope to Wise Action The Future of Youth Work and Other Global Actions in Education
• List of Contributors
• Index