Youth, civics, and our futures
After a year working with young people through outdoor education as well as through a middle school civics pilot program, I reflect on some lessons learned and ideas for what may lie ahead.
Tags: Rethinking with Alex Torpey
This post is a summary of a posted episode from my podcast series. You can find the full episode and additional resources wherever you listen to podcasts or at rethinkingwithalextorpey.com.
Before I jump into a few thoughts about youth, civics, and our future, I wanted to reflect for a few minutes on my context, why and how I was thinking about the last year. If you want to skip that, feel free to go forward a bit, but I think it’s helpful background, and generally worth being aware of the context of folks that share information or ideas with us. Episode #8 on my series goes into a bit of my background if you want more information.
Last year (2021): Towards the end of April, I had a lease that was up, in where I was living in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, I was coming to the end of the semester for the course I teach in Seton Hall University’s MPA program, as well as the end of a consulting project I had been working on for the prior year with Sustainable Jersey called the Public Information and Engagement Technology Assessment.
At the time, I was looking to buy in the Trenton, NJ area, and the housing market was awful in April May of 2021. With clearly misguided hopes that the market would improve, it seemed like the perfect time to hit the road for a few months or so, work on my science fiction novel, work on this podcast/series, and work on a few projects that I was doing, such as some work with the NJ Municipal Management Association. And to get some really great time with friends and alone, including some seriously unplugged time of nearly a week at a time, to reflect on my values and goals and plans. This is something I do at least once a year in a very intentional way, but the prior year or so had been so crazy, with COVID and my experience working in Lambertville and growing frustration with some of the let’s call it “politics,” in New Jersey.
Over the next few months I visited about 15 states, at least the same number of national parks and forests and put 15,000 miles on my truck (woohoo, almost at 400,000!). I decided to end the trip towards the fall (rather than continue on for another few months). I was considering coming back to New Jersey and splitting my time a bit, something I have wanted to do more of - between being outdoors and not on a computer and everything else I was working on (at a computer and sitting down). A program staff opening was available at Fairview Lake YMCA in Stillwater, New Jersey (where both my sister, and I, and many kids from Maplewood/South Orange spent summers). Working there a few days a week, I would get to spend some time outside, being more extroverted than I usually am, playing in the dirt with kids learning about ecology, and have some time to work on my projects, enjoy living steps away from the Appalachian Trail and unpack some of the reflections from my traveling sabbatical the prior year. The time there and experiences left a bigger impression than I was expecting. It all played a direct role in where I am right now, having recently moved to New Hampshire to serve as the Town Manager in Hanover, a wonderful small college town in the Upper Valley, home of Dartmouth College and 120 miles of trails within our municipal borders alone. Largely the experiences that informed these thoughts over the last year was 1) Teaching outdoor education at Fairview Lake and 2) Designing and implementing a civics pilot program for Unity Charter School in Morristown, New Jersey.
I’ll summarize some thoughts below, but you should check out the full episode available wherever you listen to podcasts to hear more about those projects, what we included in the civics cirriculum, and some takeaways for what we might do going forward.
As a culture, society, or world, there is a lot of stuff that feels like apathy, exhaustion, or exasperation, among many different demographics and age groups, especially for young people.
For example, I Just read an article recently about how the way many adults talk about climate issues, to try and use language that exaggerates the consequence of something because of its importance level to the speaker, a very common problem with how people express issues that are important to THEM, that there are kids who, mistakenly, believe that the world is going to literally end from climate change in the coming decades. Like, that the planet will be destroyed or an uninhabitable wasteland. I don’t think that’s what most scientists are saying, rather that it’s a serious set of challenges we face that requires some pretty big actions to address. But imagine what young kids are surrounded by today: The violence they see in their schools, the totally unclear economic outlooks for their futures, our currently insane and unproductive political system, outdated ideas about economics and institutions, bad mental health resources in a world that is organized around feeding personal attention to advertising brokers who shroud their unprecedentedly invasive data collection and psychological manipulation in slick feeling products…. It’s easy to understand why they might feel overwhelmed or not bought into traditional systems, or just weighted down with anxiety. Consider how many adults we probably each know (if not ourselves) who too feel so weighted down by anxiety or fatigue as to be unable to email or text their friends back, or to get out of bed, or who are struggling with depression. Just imagine how much worse these conditions are for young kids.
Yet, there is hope, and I wanted to share a few things have sort of jumped out at me:
1. We don’t really appreciate how plugged in young people are to this really crazy world right now, how much information they have access to, and what their perspective and context is compared to what it was like even for my millennial generation to grow up, which felt expansive to us compared to prior generations. And that was time where we could chose between using the phone or accessing the internet through AOL’s endless mailing of free trial CD-ROMs. Yeah CD-ROM, that’s how old that was. Kids growing up today are far more plugged in than most people over 25 or 30 years-old are, and I don’t think most people who don’t interact with kids regularly really appreciate this. I know I didn’t. But they are highly engaged and cynical in a way that most of us were not at that age. And this is an impactful dynamic.
2. This use of the phrase “plugging in” extends to how literally plugged in kids are to technology, whether in school, at home, with friends, or anywhere else. If you don’t have kids or aren’t around kids, just try to search online for services like Discord, Twitch and TikTok or games like Minecraft to get a taste of how enveloping some technology use is, and how much time some kids spend in virtual environments. And remember, these kids went through an insane tech-adoption in the last few years during COVID too, with kids as young as 8 or 9 years old glued to laptop screens all day. Though funny enough, I reflect on my experiences of spending many hours at a time outdoors with kids without any technology, where they seemed better adapted to that than many adults were. Who are the bad habits really coming from?
3. As I’ve talked about in previous posts, we give incredibly insufficient attention to mental health dynamics in our world, and identifying more sustainable values, especially when we think about personal growth and leadership is critical. Resilience is lacking in many kids, who were never given the proper support, time, or resources to adapt the craziness in the world we are bringing them into. We allow companies with ulterior motives to run their lives, we skimp on mental health resources in schools and workplaces, make purchasing insurance vastly more complicated than it should be, and generally, don’t prioritize meta-skills in our education. Meaning, we don’t connect kids to values that help support lifelong learning and personal growth, rather focusing on often pointless “academic” activities that have little personal or real-world value. Although I’ve worked with a lot of different leadership and life values in my past work, some of the most interesting insights have some from several different indigenous sources, such as the Teachings of the Seven Grandfathers from Ojibwe cultures that I learned about while discussing these ideas with folks on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation in North Dakota and from a few books since then.
4. Although there is widespread support for civics education, it is not only not available to adults broadly speaking, it’s not being provided to most kids. Many schools I’ve interacted with don’t even have outdoor recess anymore. Civics education isn’t for the purpose of converting kids to a particular political or social viewpoint, rather, it should be to equip them with the skills and tools to think for themselves and navigate a blindingly complex world of information and emotional pressures, and to be able to feel like they have agency in making decisions that impact their own lives, and those of their communities and country.
5. Lastly, we should give much more consideration to what kind of narrative we are creating for young people. For better or for worse (probably for worse), up until the last ten or twenty years, and really for the decades and centuries before that, the cultures of development in the US that came from European influence have treated the land and natural resources around us as an unending resource with plenty available for the unmoderated taking. Of course this was never the case, but now almost the opposite mindset exists, in some ways. What kind of narrative does this create for young people already who feel so left behind by traditional economic and political institutions that really don’t serve their interests in many cases. We’ve ripped sense of community and humanity out of so much and don’t really consider what it means for young people to be growing up in the world that so many adults, especially in more economically advanced cultures, are struggling to cope with.
My final conclusion, if there is any, for this post, is that my experiences interacting with thousands of young people over the last year has given me tremendous hope, but there is a caveat. I don’t think we are helping prepare young people for the world we are leaving them with. They have the capacity, but not really the platform or training. If all of us can’t do a better job addressing some of the challenges around us directly, can we at least commit to better equipping young people with the confidence, skills, and feeling of agency they will likely need so at least they can navigate it themselves?
Check out Episode #26 of “Rethinking with Alex Torpey” wherever you listen to podcasts to dive more into these topics and contemplate a few things we might be able to do to help support young people to the best versions of themselves, and help us move the world towards the best version of itself.