Theory and Practice of Work with Young People

The pigeonholing constituted an open air society, a communal gathering which had great importance soci all(prenominal)y, culturally and economically. During to each one nightly meeting the teenaged consummationer, once fully integ pastured, listened, drumheaded, argued and received unaw atomic number 18s an in hurlal upbringing.. (Roberts in smith, 199824).Describing his stupefy of street groups in the azoic part of the twentieth century, Roberts practises the term liberal fostering to retrace the accidental discipline that took place as a direct result of the interaction between youthishish figure placeing men. and give the axe what we call idle education in the 21st century be set forth as accidental? Mark Smith argues that whilstLearning whitethorn at first seem to be incidental it is non necessarily accidental actions are taken with some heading. The specific goal may not be clear at any one time yet the process is deliberate. (Smith, 199463).Througho ut this assignment I shall be exploring the term informal education, examining its origins and meanings, its purpose and practice. Using historical information to examine the betimes grow of present day offspringfulness impart, I shall petition whether anything has corporeally changed in the past 150 days by exploring the issues that I face in my day to day practice as a youth and community subjecter.In 1755 Jean Jacques Rousseau published his work A Discourse on In satisfactoryity and argued that as civilisations grew, they corruptedMans immanent happiness and emancipation by creating artificial inequalities of wealth, power and genial privilege (Smith, 2001, www.infed.org/thinkers/et-rous.htm)In 1801 Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi published How Gertrude Teaches Her Children. akin Rousseau, Pestalozzi was absorbed with kindly justice and he sought to work with those he considered to be adversely stirred by hearty conditions, seeing in education an opportunity for impro vement. (Smith, 2001). In the first half of the 20th century John Dewey published three books that built on the earlier work of educationalists want Rousseau and Pestalozzi. These plant heavily orderd the growth of informal education as we know it directly since theyIncluded a concern with democracy and community with cultivating reflection and thinking with go to to experience and the environment.(Smith, 2001, www.infed.org/thinkers/et-hist.htmtheory).In 1946 Josephine Macalister Brews book Informal teaching Adventures and Reflections, brought informal education into the realm of youth work. This was followed in 1966 by The Social culture of the Adolescent by Bernard Davies and Alan Gibson. Since thence t here own been numerous works on the subject of informal education, to the highest degree notably, in relation to youth work, those of Tony Jeffs and Mark Smith.So what exactly is informal education? want many name in use today, it is widely apply to describe an enormo us variety of settings and activities. In 1960 the Albermarle Report used it to describe youth work provision asThe go along social and informal education of novel plenty in terms most likely to bring them to maturity. (in Smith, 1988124).Houle (1980) favoured the experiential definition of informal education describing it as education that occurs as a result of direct participation in the events of life (In Smith, 1988130), whilst Mark Smith s abet one way of thinking be quiet to informal education is as the informed use of the everyday in order to enable learning (Smith, 1988130).In 2001 Smith went further, describing informal education that* works through with(predicate) and is driven by conversation* involves exploring and enlarging experience* toilette take place in any setting(Smith, 2001, www.infed.org/i-intro.htm)And of its purposeAt one level, the purpose of informal education is no different to any other form of education. In one situation we may focus on, secern, healthy eating, in another family transactionhips. However, running through all this is a concern to build the salmagundis of communities and relationships in which volume can be happy and fulfilled. (Smith, 2001, www.infed.org/i-intro.htm).Whilst I would agree with Mark Smiths definition of informal education there is and has been an enormous diversity of opinions, theories and explanations of exactly what sort of community we need for throng to be happy and fulfilled. Smiths assertion that the role of informal educators is to work towards all concourse population able to share a common life with an emphasis onWork for the well-being of all, respect the unique value and dignity of each human being, dialogue, equality and justice, democracy and the ready pursuit of state in the issues that affect their lives (Smith, 2001, http//www.infed.org/i-intro.htm)involves a commitment to anti-oppressive practice that is expounded in more than of the literature skirt the field o f informal education. But this has not of all time been the case and can we hand on nubble honestly lay claim to practicing liberating education in our work today?Whilst Rousseau, Pestalozzi and Dewey all identified structural inequalities and countd that education is the vestigial method of social progress and reform (Dewey in Smith, 2001, www.infed.org/archives/e-texts/e-dew-pc.htm) the application of their theories were not al slipway applied to the work of those who first began providing work for young flock. Indeed early ventures into the field of youth work are often seen as pick upling not liberating and as overtly oppressive sort of of anti-oppressive.The early youth military service history in both England and Wales has been described as a time when work with young people was characterised by both appalling social and employment conditions and by rapid social and political change caused by the development of an industrialised urban society (Jones & Rose, 200127)It is within this context that intervention by snapper discipline societies and musical arrangements in the 1800s was seen to be necessary in order to rescue, take for and/or rehabilitate young, running(a) disunite people. Concern over the working conditions of children and young people brought into being an array of groups, clubs and educational work and policies designed to rescue and protect young people from the worst excesses of employment practices and the failure of working consort parents to provide a suitable and controlled home life. workings class adolescents were thought to be most likely to display delinquent and rebellious characteristics because it was widely assumed that working class parents exercised inadequate control over brutal adolescent instincts (Humphries 1981 in Smith, 19889)This moral underclass discourse lays the blame for social inequalities, mendicancy and disaffection solely on the shoulders of the working class themselves becauseThe problems f aced are then seen not so much as structural but as personal. The central deficit is often portrayed as emotional or moral (Smith, 198856).And it in like manner suggests thatTheir demeanour, without coercion and control, will mean that they will bear on unable to heart the included majority (Payne, 2001 handout)By the end of the nineteenth century, compulsory education and a exploitation number of eudaimonia statutes meant that youth workers focus shifted from welfare and rescue to a concern with the moral character of young people which was underpinned by the growing influence of Victorian family political orientation.The Victorian middle class had very definite ideas most the ideal family and the desirability of imposing such an ideal upon the whole of society. (Finnegan, 1999129)This wasNot just a family ideology but also a gender ideology. It was a careful and deliberate attempt to reorganise the relations between the sexes according to middle-class ways and values and t hen define the outcome as someway being natural (Smith, 19884)Thompson says of this viewTo describe, for example, the traditional male role of breadwinner as natural adds a false, pseudo-biological air of legitimacy. (Thomspon, 200128)This was at a time when the discovery of adolescence by Hall and Slaughter and a biologically determined explanation of human behavior meant thatThose who saw it as their duty or job to intervene in the lives of young people, now had a suitable vocabulary of scientific terms with which to carry forward their intentions (Smith, 19889)The Biological determination of human behaviour further justified differentiated gender roles within the family as well as creating anIdeology of adolescence marked out (by) a biologically determined norm of youthful behaviour and appearance which was white/anglo, middle class, heterosexual, able bodied male (Griffin, 199318)However, just as family ideology was a driving force in find social relations at the beginning o f the twentieth century it is just as powerful here in the twenty-first.Roche & Tucker say thatIt is through the use of the representations (discursive messages and images) contained within family ideology that social policies and educational and welfare arrangements are constructed and maintained. (Roche & Tucker 200194)Gittins agreeFamily ideology has been a vital heart and soul the vital delegacy of holding unitedly and legitimising the existing social, economic, political and gender systems. (Gittins in Roche & Tucker 200194)This is significant if Driver and Martell are correct in asserting that present day Labour increasingly favours conditional, morally prescriptive, conservative and private communitarianisms (Driver & Martell, 199727) which Etzioni believed would right the social problems of today that are attributable to the failure of people to exercise social and moral responsibility (Etzioni in Henderson & Salmon, 198822). Etzioni underline the role of the traditio nal nuclear family in inculcating in children the right moral standards and he described communitarianism facial expressionCommunitarians call for a peer marriage of two parents committed to one another and their children (Etzioni in Henderson & Salmon, 198822)Like the Victorians, present day government can be seen as equally keen to legislate into being their ideology of the nuclear family through the use of stricter divorce laws and punitive measures overthrowd on single parents. The decisiveness to cut lone parent premiums from income backup man and child benefit in 1998 are examples of a willingness to impose their ideology on society as a whole despite the fact that what they are proposing as normal or natural is not bourn out statistically.The ideological norm of the nuclear family is often presented as if it were a statistical norm whereas, in fact, only 23% of households follow the nuclear family pattern of biological parents with their unfree children. (Thompson, 20012 8)Michael Anderson also points out that despite the belief that the traditional family has only recently become fragmented, marital rest period up was a unfluctuating feature of 19th century Britain and is not peculiar to the 20th century. comparing marital dissolution caused by death in 1826 and by death and divorce in 1980, Anderson think thatThe problem of marital break-up is not then new (it) was clearly, statistically, an equally or even more upright problem (Anderson in Drake, 199473)However, this desire and determination to bring about a extra kind of society influenced by a set of morals and ideals is reminiscent of Mark Smiths definition of the purpose of informal education asA concern to build the sorts of communities and relationships in which people can be happy and fulfilled. (Smith, 2001, www.infed.org/i-intro.htm).The only real difference lies in the definition of what makes for community fulfilment and happiness. Smith says that informal educationInvolves sett ing out with the intention of fostering learning. It entails influencing the environment and is based on a commitment to certain values.. (Smith, 199919).It would not be difficult to describe the efforts of the middle class in the 19th century in such a way although with our 21st century eyes we now believe we can read the intended control and oppression of working class communities behind their ideals.But in the 21st century are we genuinely doing much better? If our suspicions concerning the intentionality behind the actions of Victorian middle class youth workers are correct, can we say our own intentionality is any purer?If intentionality can be understood as power as defined by Bertrand Russell when he says that power is the production of intended resolutions (in Jeffs & Smith, 19905), we could be accused of wielding power in order to bring out the sorts of communities and relationships in which people can be happy and fulfilled (Smith, 2001, www.infed.org/i-intro.htm), acco rding to our own philosophies, beliefs and current hegemonic principles, in much the same way that we accuse the middle class philanthropists of the 19th century. Is the ability to wield power to effect change in the lives of others conducive with a practice that has at its heart a commitment to anti-discriminatory practice whichMeans recognising power imbalances and working towards the promotion of change to redress the balance of power (Dalrympole & Burke, 200015).As professional workers we can also be considered middle class? All of which begs the question, have we more in common with our predecessors than we like to think?It is certainly possible that they too thought they were operating with the same moral authority that Jeffs & Smith describe as part of an informal educators role inBeing seen by others as people with integrity, soundness and an understanding of right and wrong (Jeffs & Smith, 199985)Especially in their desire to provide a strong guiding influence to lead them (young people) onward and upward socially and morally (Sweatman, 1863 in Smith, 198812).No doubt they would also have agreed with Kerry Youngs description of youth work as supporting young peoples moral deliberations and learning (Young in Banks, 199989).But early youth workers cannot be described as concerned with equality and anti-oppressive practice. On the contrary, their work wasContained within particular class, gender, racial and age structures a womans place was in the home, to be British was to be best, betters were to be honoured and youth had to earn its advancement and wait its turn (Smith, 198819)This made life extremely difficult for anyone who did not fit the stereotypic image of British youth. Tolerance and respect for other races and religious systems was not a feature of informal education and, for example, the estimated 100,000 Jewish immigrants that arrived in Britain between 1840 and 1914 had great difficultyMaintaining a distinctive culture in a climate of op pression and restriction (coupled with) pressures to acculturate to middle-class norms (Pryce, 200182)So what of my practice, of my intentionality? Do I run away from a moral underclass ideology that blames homeless young people for their situation or do I work from a redistributive discourse that sees the issue of poverty as central to the exclusion these young people experience? Can what I do in my day to day practice be termed informal education? Am I concerned with oppression and anti-oppressive practice?Much of what I and Nightstop as an agency do in our work involves enabling young people to live within a system that is discriminatory, unfair and biased towards a particular form of family ideology that suggests that young people should remain dependent on their parents until financially independent or aged 25 which means that they are empower to discredit rates of benefit. Even those young people who work find themselves living on lower profitss than their older colleagu es. Christine Griffin argued that the discovery of adolescenceEmerged primarily as a consequence of changes in class relations as expanding capitalist economies demanded a cheap and youthful labour force (Griffin in Roche & Tucker, 200118)Even today the notion that young people deserve less pay than their elders finds voice in the policies of the minimum wage which offers no restriction on wages for 16/17 year olds and a lower rate for those aged 18-22.Our continued involvement in teaching them to budget their reduced incomes could easily be described as an expression of an ideology that believes that it is the lack of skills these young people have that cause them difficulties in living the benefit and pay systems rather than a belief in the failure of the systems to provide adequate means of survival. And if this was all that we do we could not be described as informal educators if part of the formulae for informal education involvesEquality and justice, democracy and the active i nvolvement of people in the issues that affect their lives (Smith, 2001, http//www.infed.org/i-intro.htm)However, whilst enabling young people to develop the skills necessary to live independently we also encourage them to question the inequalities they face and the ideologies underpinning them. By lovely young people in conversation, which Jeffs and Smith say is central to our work as informal educators (Jeffs & Smith, 199921), and asking is that fair and why do you think that is we encourage them to question things they take for granted as normal and natural and involve them in what Freire described as problem-posing education which encourages people to critically examine the world so they mayPerceive the reality of oppression, not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform (Freire, 199331).I do not believe the same can be said for the work of early youth workers and much of the work they undertook can be understood as desi gned to maintain the status quo, to silence the witnesses to oppressive regimes and to control the the great unwashed that were beginning to organise themselves via the emergence of trade unions. Emile Durkheim described this type of education as simply the means by which society prepares, in its children, the essential conditions of its own existence (Giddens, 1972203), which can be understood as a form of social control. The process which enforces values and maintains order is termed social control(Hoghughi, 1983 in Hart, 2001, youthworkcentral.tripod.com/sean1.htm)Again the question arises, as informal educators in the 21st century are we doing much better? Sean Hart believes we may not.Social control within a context of community work may be regarded as a process of continuity. Indeed much community work, especially that of those with right wing political ideology, involves self- assistance and reservation the best of what you have. Thus, it could be argued that this kind of w ork reinforces the current hegemony and deflects from attempts to challenge the oppression it creates.(Hart, 2001, youthworkcentral.tripod.com/sean1.htm)The difficulty in this for my work is that the young people with whom I work must learn to make the best of what they have and the free-and-easy grind of finding enough to eat means that they have little energy left for level oppressive regimes.As Friere saidOne of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings consciousness (Freire, 199333).And as they struggle with meeting their most basic of needs I sometimes find it difficult to justify my continuing commitment to educate them about inequality when their overwhelming red is viewed from my comfortable, middle class life style. The inescapable ethical dilemma is very clear since their need pays for and justifies my existence as the manager of Nightstop. As Mark Smith says the we lfare professionsProvide a rich base of desirable jobs for members of elite and middle class groups where such groups can enjoy varying degrees of power, privilege and freedom in their work (Smith, 198858).And I certainly do have power, not only within my own organisation but within local government departments who actively seek my input on the development of services for homeless young people. But in order to ensure that I do not help to to maintain the system which supports (me) (Smith, 198858) I now encourage those systems to interact directly with the young people for whom services are being designed at the same time as encouraging young people themselves to play an active part in service development by helping them develop their social intelligence. This can be described asAn understanding of social rules which govern our interactions and an ability to follow or manipulate these to achieve our ends. (Graham in Hunter, 200175).and although this means that I favour David Clar ks model of community as a collection of social systems and of individuals in community as affected by different systems (Hunter, 200120) and of community development as opening systems up to each other (Hunter, 2001112) this does not fit with Freires view thatThe solution is not to compound them into the structure of oppression but to transform that structure so that they can become beings for themselves (Freire, 199655).However, I also believe that young people themselves have the ability to transform the structure by virtue of their active involvement within it since I do not see young people as incapable of making a vital and valuable contribution to their communities. In this I seek to avoid the care that I have a lack of confidence in the peoples ability to think, to want and to know (Freire, 199642).The same cannot be said of the youth workers in the early 20th century who felt it necessary to improve young people but without the welfare and rescue focus open up it necess ary to have other ways of encouraging young people to attend. This was resolved in so far as young people were to be attracted by waste opportunities whilst support from the ruling classes could be enlisted via the aims of moral improvement so close to their heart. Baden-Powells identification of citizenship as an answer to problematic youth in 1907 enabled him to offer up scouting and its emphasis onObservation and deduction, chivalry, patriotism, self-sacrifice, personal hygiene, saving life, self-reliance, etc (Jeal, 1995382)Claiming this would produce a new generation of young people who would fit more closely the ideals sought. In other words he described his practice in terms likely to fit the dominant ideology of the day in order to secure the support he needed to continue the work. Again reminiscent of today sinceAttempts to attract changing sources of living have usually been accompanied by promises to elicit from young people whatever behaviour was demand by the particu lar funding body (Young in Banks, 199978).I encounter the dilemma between the needs of my organisation for funding and the desire to end the stereotypical classification of homeless young people on a regular basis as I am frequently required to describe homeless young people in terms that are labelling and oppressive in order to meet the criteria and therefore the ideology of funders which suggests that young people should be capable of independent adult life but whose efforts are actually consistently thwarted by (their) relegation to the status of a dependent underclass (Henderson & Salmon, 198830).The new youth service of 1900s found thatWhile clubs have exploited the need for recreation among working class adolescents, and combined this with their being vehicles for a conservative ideology, they did not necessarily attract large numbers (White early 1900s in Smith, 198814).Concern with the numbers of young people attending youth provision is no less today than it was then. The continued need of sponsors, whether statutory or voluntary, for statistical information concerning the use of facilities and opportunities, means that we are ever pushed towards quantifying our work for evaluation purposes instead of concentrating on the quality of provision. Mark Smith says thatPart of the reason for the failure to attract working class young people lies in the tension between social provision and improving aims (Smith, 198814)and although he was describing the dilemmas of early youth workers I believe this is also present today. If informal education has purpose then it cannot be anything other than improving, even Jeffs and Smith say that informal education works to the betterment of individuals, groups and communities (Jeffs & Smith, 199983).And if we are not honest and open about our improving aims, can young people be said to be participating voluntarily from a position of informed consent?The need to improve and socialise young people has continued to be a re curring theme throughout the 20th century within government policy. The Education Act of 1918 gave Local Education Authorities the power to spend money on the social genteelness of young people (Smith, 198834). beak 1486, In the Service of Youth (Board of Education, 1939) which said that youth services should have an equal status with other educational services (Nicholls, 19978) talked of the disruption the 14-20 age group had suffered in its physical and social development (Smith, 198834).Circular 1516, The Challenge of Youth said the aim of an LEA should be to develop the whole personality of individual boys and girls to enable them to take their place as full members of a free community (Nicholls, 19979) whilst Circular 1577 (Board of Education 1941) required young people to register with their LEA and be interviewed and advised as to how they might spend their leisure time (Smith, 198835).In 1960 the Albermarle Report portrayed the main job of youth work as being to help young people to become healthy adults (Smith, 198849) although Mark Smith argues that the second element of Albemarles vision for the youth service (was) the containment and control of troublesome youth (Smith, 198871). In 1966 the Home Office Childrens Department began planning Community Development Projects to aid work preventing family breakdown and juvenile delinquency (Nicholls, 199720) which effectively takes us back 100 years.Informal education since then has taken on many guises, from concern about dwindling numbers of young people attending provision, to a growing awareness that there are young people who do not attend at all, the unattached youth. However it is the continuing response to a problematic discourse that has characterised the series of moral panics about young people that has in the past and continues today to shape youth work.ConclusionAlthough a growing political awareness of the needs of young people who have been marginalised and excluded by society because of their race, gender, disability, sexuality and class etc., led to targeted work that was and is issue based, youth work has, throughout the past 150 years, maintained its associational character (Smith, 2001). However, recent work has begun to concentrate more on the individual than the social groupwork (Smith, 2002, www.infed.org/youthwork/transforming.htm) Smith says is fundamental to informal education.The linking of the youth service to the Connexions Strategy with its emphasis on surveillance, control and containment, coupled with an individual, case work emphasis will mean thatThe concern with conversation, experience and democracy normally associated with informal education is pushed to the background(Smith, 2002, www.infed.org/youthwork/transforming.htm)Working to state led objectives and targets that are fed by a communitarianist ideology that focuses on the family mean that what informal educators do in the twenty-first century does not differ greatly from the work undertak en in the 19th and the assumption that adults have a right to intervene in the lives of young people, from a variety of clandestine agendas and purposes continues unchallenged. In 1944 Paneth askedHave we been intruders, disturbing an otherwise happy community, or is it only the bourgeois in us, feeler face to face with his opponents, who minds and wants to change them because he feels threatened? Or do they need help from outdoor(a)? (Paneth, 1944 in Smith, 198837).