We went to the Lost Generation? Recession and the young talk at the RSA last week, where economist David Blanchflower warned of the “lull before the storm” in youth unemployment. Currently, 1 in 5 young people are out of work and this is set to rise. Blanchflower predicts this could leave permanent social and economic damage on an entire generation. Youth guru Ruby Pseudo aka Jenny Owen, challenged this view, arguing that the world of work needs to adapt to a generation with a different skillset. It’s not just a question of job creation (as Miles Templeman of the Institute of Directors, put it in the post-talk discussion), the old jobs are going, and they’re not coming back. The challenge now is to find new, flexible, engaging employment and education designed for the next generation.

As Jenny Owen, speaking on behalf of young people, put it:

“We have the tools; the abilities; the knowledge, to succeed in an increasingly digital world – we are fast thinking, forward thinking, adept and mobile. We are the net generation and, by that, the most powerful generation ever [and we’re the ones that are in trouble?!]“.

All this sounds good, but something’s not right. Last week we spent a couple of hours talking to 16-year-olds from local Hackney schools. None of them had a clue (or much interest) in what happens when school finishes – let alone any ideas about the future. These are the kids that the President of the National Union of Students Wes Streeting, focused on during the talk. The ones at risk of real, lasting social exclusion, drug and alcohol abuse, etc.

When we asked them what would be their ideal job, there was a pretty clear answer: testing computer games. It made me think of Steve Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good For You. The technology/media/culture environment young people are growing up in is teaching them to new cognitive skills – skills which aren’t being engaged by the world of work.

If the way that young peoples’ minds work is changing, shouldn’t the world of education change with it? Instead, we have an epidemic of Ritalin prescription in this country, in some towns, as many as 1 in 7 children under 16 are prescribed Ritalin. This is the lost generation: thousands of young people being pathologised for the convenience of doctors, teachers and parents.

It’s the good old Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants generation gap. It’s not just the world of work that needs to change; the world of learning does too. As the US group Partnership for 21st Century Skills puts it, “Today’s education system faces irrelevance unless we bridge the gap between how students live and how they learn”.

Source


Image credit: RSA


Thanks to Jon Miller for this story. Jon recently remembered why he doesn’t discuss politics with his parents – his mum wants Joanna Lumley to be PM, and his dad thinks it should be Simon Cowell.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 6:29 am and is filed under One to Ponder. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.