Reality and Falacies of Child-Youth Participation in Contemporary Society

1. Reality and Falacies of Child-Youth Participation in Contemporary Society To be protagonists in “liquid” (Bauman ) dimension of postmodernity

2. 1 A socio-historical framework: pathological schizophrenia among masked antitheses • We could be related to those last Japanese soldiers who continued fighting in the jungle, not knowing that the war had already ended 20 years earlier. To talk about child-youth participation in an era in which adult protagonism of any form appears to have disappeared seems paradoxical. The pervasive dominion of “tekne”, and the empire of “money” as the sole symbolic generator of all values depicts a very sombre scenario. The “Matrix” seems to have definitively won the game. A healthy and humble exercise in pessimism is therefore necessary, as is a degree of Cartesian doubt, or, alternatively, as Dos Santos’ prudently stated: protagonism is “solid” and post-modernity is “liquid”, so it is not an easy task.

3. Island children and youth • The exasperated institutionalisation of childhood and youth, and the prominence of virtual reality together create separated and self-absorbedlife experiences, a destiny of sociological “extraterritoriality” that, in the antithesis between the crowd and the sect, overcrowding and loneliness, overcrowding and individualism, produces a confined, artificial and often “un-exportable” form of “protagonism”.

4. Generational cannibalism • In Italy there is an excess of gerentocratic dominion that, in contrast with trends favouring child and youth participation, in fact highlights the “greed” of groups of adults and the elderly who don’t want to share their privileges or their power. Children and youth, as a quantitatively inferior group, are handicapped in terms of civil rights. They lack public arenas in which to present their interests, and this represents a conflict which results in true “intergenerational inequity”.

5. Adultisation of the child and infantisation of the adult • In contemporary society, the determinism of age succession, which until now has also been a circular sequence of roles, responsibilities, duties, rights and social status, has been surpassed. Today we are witnessing an ever moving puzzle of advances, delays, and schizophrenic synchronicities. This tendency can, at times, phenomenologically assume the appearance of a new protagonism, although it is almost solely limited to the areas of consumerism-oriented technology that is governed from the outside by a superior control source. In any case, it creates a deep crisis of identity and of the different forms of social integration, undermining the very conditions necessary for authentic participation.

6. Consumeristic bulimia and emotional anorexia: fat bodies and skinny souls • “To have” predominates over “to be”, things predominate over people, youth are obese from material wellbeing and are reduced to begging for mental, emotional, social and spiritual health. Spaces for participation are being reduced to mere decorative tricks, baroque decorations of a reality that is increasingly encaged in obsessive market manipulation. We speak of participation while the process Marxist memory overflows from the factories, flooding the entire social arena.

7. The technological child and youth: when the means replace the ends • Kant said that one of the primary categorical moral imperatives is the following: Always treat man as an end, and never as a means. What is left of such an elevated ethical message for children and youth? Eduardo Galeano answers: “Our world corresponds increasingly to one in which the ends have been usurped by the means, in which we are instruments of our system. This is as true of Europe as of any other place. The car drives you, computers program you, the supermarket buys you, and the television sees you. We are instruments of our instruments.”

8. Temporal tachycardia and the dominance of urgency over importance • Our society is dominated by rush, hurrying and speed combined with discontinuance, which are the typical characteristics of a consumer-oriented and competitive culture, while participation is a process that requires slowness, reflection and deliberate learning. Time required for democracy does not coincide with time required for blatantly instrumental efficiency that segments children’s lives into an accelerated sequence of alienating frenzy.

9. The oxymoronic abyss: having everything and the risk of nihilism • “We know the price of everything, but the value of nothing”: O. Wilde’s aphorism that well depicts a world in which children and youth drown in a sea of objects, and at the same time die of thirst for values and ideals, or at least some minimal ethical direction. Here is the risk of a new nihilism, the mute guest of souls, which unsettles, hurts and often kills the body and the spirit. In this sense, “participation” is not just a behavioural issue, but a downright philosophical one rooted in an existential precondition that is increasingly at risk in post-modern society.

10. Cheap substitutes for “power” • Apparent consulting, learning and participation processes have practically become the fashion, mythologies of the “politically correct” on the issue of children and youth. Count de Salina said, “Something has to change for things to remain the same”. In many cases, said “good practices” are simply cheap substitutes for the power that those that have it don’t really want to share. They are mere symbolical charity, a donation that are insufficient to reach the profile of citizen’s rights.

11. This is to show that, despite all of the speeches and good intentions, the socio-historical conditions of childhood and youth in Italy in no way favour the development of participation, and much less that of protagonism. This should not promote pessimism, but “prudent thought” regarding the cheap and superficial optimism of certain participatory “styles”.

12. 2 Example of child-youth participation in Italy • City “Friends of Childhood” in the context of the Charter of Alboorg • Children and youth in different institutional contexts • The youth "caravan" in the fight against the mafia. The "Libera” Initiative • The new "civil service" within the framework of the transformation of the job world

13. The complex world of social and international volunteering • The “temporally extended” family and decision-making processes • Itineraries of “governance” and non complex forms of children and youth representation • The “facilitator” of dialogue between adults and children as a “guarantee of method” • Participation in schools, student provincial coordinating committees and regional parliaments • Hearing of children and youth in the judicial context

14. An appraisal of these experiences must overcome the double obstacle of destructive criticism that is made and is without appeal. It must also avoid the risk of superficial exultation of those who consider that a revolution in ways to integrate children and youth en decision-making processes and sharing of power has already begun. These experiences can be considered within a framework of merely symbolic and decorative representation. They could become important seeds for a future authentic form of participation if they only could generate forms of authentic antagonism, which breaks with superficial, stereotyped humanism. They must gain the profile of a true protagonistic social movement, that is therefore in conflict with established social relationships.

15. 3 The “negative” protagonism emergency, or the risk of an alienating “protagonism” oxymoron • “Protagonism” and “participation” are continually mentioned as if they were always positive phenomenon. In reality, it depends on how and where protagonism comes about. It could acquire decidedly negative and alienating characteristics. This is even more true in a society like ours, in which so-called participation that is conceded to youth is actually manipulated from the sidelines by market mechanisms and political control.

16. Emotional - protectionist protagonism “... the great use of the child as a narcisistic container of their fathers… (F. Mancuso)

17. Consumer-oriented protagonism “... trusting perhaps in this desert of values , in the only symbolic producer of all values that in our culture is called …” (U. Galimberti)

18. Mass-media protagonism “…in this way a lot of young people confuse their identity with the publicity of the image and in this way that metamorphosis of the person who no longer searches himself but the publicity that forms him is produced...” (G. Blath)

19. So-called deviation protagonism “... a cosmic fool, imaginative and egocentric,that represents the ideal incarnation of the malfactor , without any scruples, but fair, surpassing good and evil…” (F. Blask)

20. 4 Some final reflections • This presentation’s intention was not to share a negative or negating view of the debate on child and youth participation, which is one of the most innovative and important phenomenon of the last few decades. However, precisely due to its historic importance, we must avoid uncritical enthusiasm, or the superficial adoption of improvised conventions. Prudence and utopia, concrete empiricism with an ideological horizon, critical severity and enthusiasm with solidarity, do not exclude, but complement each other.

21. The risk of “de-politicization” of the debate and practise of participation • In order to “de-politicize” the debate and the practise of participation one cannot think that authentic “participation” can be reached only through behavioural change, or constitutions “granted”, or some democratic form of charity. On the contrary, the issue of participation requires confronting the radical problem of unjust age relationships, which originate due to a combination of interests and power relationships that answer only to the principles of dominion and exploitation. Any form of “participation” that does not provide for change becomes a historical falsehood, which ends up playing, not only a conservative role, but also a decidedly reactionary one.

22. Another note on “nihilism” • While we are busy celebrating the new generations’ form of participatory protagonism, I hope we won’t fail to notice that these same youth are the privileged victims of postmodern “nihilism”. In a horizon made of materialism, reification and manipulation of ethics and all existential direction, they are losing a sense of the world and life in it. What proposals do we have to fertilise this arid terrain? How can we heal these wounds of the soul that dry up, immobilise, standardise, alienate and petrify? This is why the debate and practise of participation must be based on the ambitious utopia of a new humanism, whose profile is still in its fetal phase, and which commits us to a very elevated and risky philosophical profile and antagonistic form of project-making.

23. From the “ethic of territory” to the “ethic of the traveller” : beyond Itaca • There are no more definite, established territorial limits, and this is true geopolitically as well as existentially. Globalization is re-drawing up land maps as well as people’s spirits. Postmodernity’s “liquidity” can be understood as the inconsistence of a context in which everything disappears; but it could be the element from which youths can raise their anchors and discover new worlds. We must decide whether to bound them again to rusty old values and paradigms, or to accept this emerging “ethic of the traveller”, in which fear associated with risk is combined with the enthusiasm and surprise of discovery. This means that child-youth protagonism does not take place near the shore. The time has come to undo the sails and enter into open sea. It is perhaps the only way to penetrate into the heart of a possible form of child and youth protagonism.

24. Thank you very much indeed