Category: Youth Work

From the In Defence of Youth Work archive: Were we being precious in 2009?

On By Tony TaylorIn Children and Young People, Education, History, Politics, Youth WorkLeave a comment

This is another historical piece lifted from the In Defence of Youth Work [IDYW] archives that may be of some passing interest.

This post contains an exchange between myself and Ravi Chandirimani, then the editor of CYPN. It dates from May 2009. He advised those involved in IDYW to embrace pragmatism. Being pragmatic has certainly done him no harm. He sits today on the Mark Allen Board of Directors. Fair enough. Does the success of his individual pragmatism expose the naive preciousness of the collective, that was the IDYW? Or, ironically, given the failure of IDYW to organise a successful resistance to the behavioural capture of youth work, what has been the price of the victory of Ravi’s pragmatic advice?

The links in the following paragraph do not work. Evidently, CYPN and its owners, the market-leading brand, Mark Allen Holdings don’t do history.

The debate about youth work values and core principles continues on the pages of Children and Young People Now In the article ‘Are government policies chipping away at youth work values?’ Janaki Mahadevan collects together the views of ‘a panel of experts’. Now being dubbed an expert does my head in, but we’ll leave this contemporary obsession with experts to another day. Whilst in a related Opinion piece ‘Youth Work must avoid isolationism’ Ravi Chandiramani advises us ‘to be pragmatic, not precious’.

Ravi Chandirimani

His argument unfolds as follows:

Youth work must avoid isolationism

De Montfort University’s inquiry on the impact of government policies on youth work has added to the sense of unease expressed in Tony Taylor’s open letter, In Defence of Youth Work, that its core principles are under threat.

This week we ask a number of experts to evaluate these concerns.

The anxieties themselves derive partly from the fact that the more eye-catching, headline-grabbing – and crucially, properly funded – initiatives that involve youth workers target certain groups of young people deemed to be “troubled”, “vulnerable”, “at risk” or whatever administrative label is the flavour of the month. Our feature this week on non-negotiable support offers one such example of these initiatives. Such targeted youth support defies youth work’s cherished value that the relationship between a young person and youth worker is voluntary. It may not be youth work in its purest form, granted, but targeted support calls on a number of youth work skills to build relationships with young people.

The anxieties are fuelled also by requirements for youth work nowadays to demonstrate accredited outcomes and the feeling that these are dictating practice. However, as London Youth’s Nick Wilkie states, it is entirely reasonable to assess youth work’s impact on young lives, particularly since cuts in public spending are forcing all children’s and youth services to prove their benefit.

What we have at the moment is a bit of a stand-off between policymakers and some sections of the youth work community. From the government, amid initiative after initiative targeting the country’s problematic youth, what is missing is a clear articulation of support for youth work in its purest sense: as voluntary, informal, providing young people with someone to talk to, somewhere to socialise, and activities that boost young people’s confidence.

That said, youth workers have to accept reality. Other professions in the children’s sector – teachers and social workers among them – have had to adapt beyond their core skills base to ensure the young get the services and support they need. At a time when youth workers are being given the opportunity to play a more central role through the youth professional status, some risk becoming isolationist, and marginalising themselves from the Every Child Matters agenda, which has plenty to commend it. They should defend their turf, by all means, but now is a good time to be pragmatic, not precious.

I have responded in the following vein:

Ravi

This is a curious piece. In order to make your case you are forced to create a Strawperson: a precious youth worker refusing to face reality, devoid of pragmatic intuition, marching off into splendid isolation. Now the DMU Inquiry is not the work of such a fictional character. Bernard Davies and Brian Merton have laboured seriously for decades in both a pragmatic and principled way in support of process-led, young person-centred voluntary youth work practice. If there is a stand-off between policymakers and the likes of Bernard and Brian, it is a situation of the policymakers’ making. It is down to the bureaucracy’s failure to enter into an authentic dialogue with the folk who understand and do the job. Of course, I accept that I might be identified as an out-of-touch maverick. However, the contradiction is that the Open Letter is not at all a personal statement. It is an effort to distil the mood and thinking of a diversity of practitioners with whom I have been closely involved in recent years. Within the missive, we use the idea of ‘democratic and emancipatory’ youth work to describe the form of youth work we favour and wish to defend. Myself, unlike some of my closest friends, I have no desire to claim that what is going on under New Labour is not Youth Work. My problem is that it is a form of Youth Work that is imposed, prescriptive and normative, which doesn’t mean that the people doing it are evil and nasty. It does mean that those, going along with its agenda, have accepted that the purpose of Youth Work is control and conformity.

And it is the question of purpose which is at the heart of the resurgent debate about Youth Work. It has little to do with your confusing reference to skills. If teachers and social workers have ‘adapted beyond their core skills base’, it is not so that they can become better at working with their students and clients, but rather that they become better at form-filling and the like. What has been altered is the focus of education and social work: away from educating a child for life towards a narrow vocationalism, away from social welfare to social punishment. Increasingly within these professions, people are protesting that enough is enough. And so it is within Youth Work. Our desire is to contest the meaning imposed on our engagement with young people.

I will outstay my welcome if I respond properly to the mythical idea that the quantitative amassing of accredited outcomes gives some ground-breaking insight into the impact of youth work on young people or that it provides some ‘robust’ defence against public spending cuts. So let me close on the question of pragmatism, which has never been in short supply within Youth Work. In my own case, you don’t hold down jobs in senior management in Youth Work for 20 years without sadly having to be pragmatic. But it’s one thing being pragmatic as a necessity in specific circumstances, it is quite another to make of pragmatism a virtue, or even a philosophy. For pragmatism suffers at heart from a lack of vision and imagination.

Ravi, I think your advice is wide of the historical mark. With politicians and policymakers on the run, spewing in their breathlessness chunks of rhetoric about democracy, the devolution of power and the crisis of the body politic, our arguments about the need for an open, democratic and pluralist youth work will not isolate or marginalise us. More and more folk are saying similar things about their particular turf in all parts of the State and civil society. Now is a precious time, not to be wasted, to be principled and imaginative, not passively pragmatic.

Tony

As ever your criticisms and comments are welcomed. Are we in danger of being isolated?

Talking about Authoritarianism in a quiet, idyllic Greek village

On By Tony TaylorIn History, neoliberalism, Politics, Youth Work1 Comment
A recent painting of a village house by Marilyn

A couple of days ago I gave a talk initially entitled ‘Sleepwalking into Authoritarianism’ in the surreal setting of a sleepy Greek village. As is my wont I had made heavy weather of putting together the presentation. Even the day before the event the floor around my desk was laden with discarded attempts to write something worth hearing.

Amongst the many considerations influencing my weary way – I still handwrite and forever return to my varied beginnings to start afresh – were two in particular.

  1. I felt overwhelmed with information. I didn’t view this mass of opinion as misinformed, disinformed or whatever. It was simply stuff I had to scrutinise to the best of my ability and in the full knowledge of my own ideological disposition. Somehow I had to pull something together that reflected my sense of what’s happening in society without boring folk to tears.
  2. And the folk in question, so it proved, were a motley bunch with no shared background, expertise or experience. Even if a majority were retired immigrants from the UK, others present were younger, alongside those for whom English was a second language.

In the event, it seemed to go well. I was forgiven for my age-old habit of preparing flip chart prompts, only to overlook them completely. There was exquisitely timed melodrama. As I uttered the exclamation, ‘all hell was let loose’ a plastic chair, not for the first or last time on Crete, collapsed under poor Ralph sitting in the front row. He went down with quite a wallop, his coffee flying in all directions. As ever in such circumstances hilarity mixed with concern. However, Ralph quickly regained his composure, aided by the provision of two chairs in one. In accord with the adage, the show went on regardless. I hardly had time to take a breath.

In truth, if I dare use such an abused phrase, this lively moment was probably a blessed relief, given the doom-laden content of much of my offering. Nonetheless, a number of people responded positively to the idea of a monthly discussion group, to the opportunity of meeting regularly to converse critically about what’s going on in the world.

Thus I will write up my notes under the changed title, ‘Authoritarianism: Chains Loosened, Shackles Tightened’. and incorporate some of the telling points made in the Q&A end to the morning. Hopefully, I’ll sort this out in the next fortnight. All being well we will meet in the week beginning Sunday, March 19th. Further details will be circulated soon.

Thanks to all who came, to the committee of the Kalamitsi village for the use of the Old School and to Phil and Fran [Kalamitsi Arts Group] for the arrangements.

The Inextricable Relations of the Struggle around Class, Race, Gender and Sexuality – the example of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners

On By Tony TaylorIn History, Politics, Youth Work2 Comments

When I first discovered left-wing politics or more precisely Trotskyism in the early 1970s there was growing criticism that Marxism in practice prioritised class struggle above all else. The typical class militant was seen as telling women, black people, gays and lesbians that they must wait upon their demands till after the revolution. I was fortunate to join the Marxist Worker Group [MWG], a tiny organisation based in the North-West of England. Therein the question of women’s liberation was central. Within the group, we read and discussed passionately the works of Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zeitkin and Alexandra Kollontai, along with contemporary figures such as Sheila Rowbotham, whose groundbreaking book, ‘Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World’ was published in 1974. Over the decades I moved slowly and contrarily away from Marxism’s certitude towards Anarchism’s uncertainty. However, I will remain forever grateful to the members of MWG, such as the formidable Eileen Murphy for an argumentative, challenging beginning to my political life in which class, gender, race and sexuality were inextricably intertwined.

Thus, over the decades, I have sought to argue for this crucial intertwining in both practice and theory. In the Community and Youth Workers Union, along with Roy Ratcliffe himself a leading figure in MWG. we gained majority support in 1981 for a constitution, which placed the right to caucus at the very heart of the union’s democracy, emphasising the interrelatedness of class, gender, race and sexuality.

Ironically, given my opening remarks, as the years passed by, I found myself lamenting the disappearance of a class struggle analysis from both the professional and political spheres. For example, I wrote a piece for Youth & Policy’s History series, ‘Youth Work and Class: The Struggle that dare not Speak Its Name’, which argued at one point:

In focusing on a notion of the Class Struggle and its absence from Youth Work discourse I risk being seen as a geriatric Leftie, trying stubbornly to resurrect the discredited idea that class is primary, relegating the significance of other social relations. This is not at all my desire.  My point is no more and no less than that the political struggle for equality, freedom and justice must have a rounded and interrelated sense of the relations of class, gender, race, sexuality and disability.  None of them makes proper sense without reference to each other.  If this inextricable knot is recognised, the silence about class within most Youth Work is deeply disturbing.

As best I can see and my glasses may need more than a cursory clean the outlook of the contemporary Left and its base in the professional classes is dominated by a version of ‘identity politics’, within which the inextricable knot is utterly undone. Identities compete rather than cooperate. Over forty years ago Heidi Hartmann worried about the unhappy marriage of Marxism and Feminism. She argued for a more progressive union. Today we witness a clash between trans and feminist politics that seems to defy any idea of reconciliation. In this context to ponder a relationship between trans and class politics seems to be off with the fairies. Whilst I am aware that trans activists have influenced the policies of trade unions, to what extent have they captured the hearts and minds of the memberships? On the ground the going might well be tough I remember the rows between women and men at one of the first 1984 national miners’ demonstrations in Mansfield. The miners were taken to task for chanting, ‘get yer tits out for the lads’. The women, the feminists didn’t write off the blokes. They argued their corner and, to use a trite phrase, good things happened. Perhaps I’m out of touch but as much as ever we need to renew a questioning yet forgiving dialogue across the identities. Such a culture of openness requires time, patience and guts. If we take courage, the rich need take care. For now, the ruling class remains delighted by our divisions, both feeding and feeding off our estrangement from one another. Certainly though, we can all, whoever we are, draw strength from the inspiring intervention in 1984/85 of the group, ‘Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners’. I can vouch for the impact of its courageous intervention upon the consciousness of both the men and women of the mining communities in Leicestershire and Derbyshire, where I was a committed activist.

Grateful thanks to Working Class History for reminding us of the following.

Yesterday, 11 February 1987, Mark Ashton, Irish communist and co-founder of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, died aged just 26. LGSM raised huge amounts of money for Welsh miners during the great strike of 1984-5, and both brought the ideas of the workers’ movement to the gay community and brought the idea of gay and sexual liberation to the workers’ movement.

Ashton died of complications related to AIDS, at a time when the UK government had failed to take action to combat HIV.

His friend, LGSM co-founder Mike Jackson, stated at a memorial event: “To this day, Mark’s loss remains deeply felt by so many family members and friends… Driven, principled and charismatic, Mark would have achieved so much more if he had not died so young.”

The group, and Mark, were immortalised in the fantastic 2014 film, Pride.

Learn more about LGSM and Mark, in our podcast episodes 27-29 with participants. Find them on every major podcast app or on our website: https://workingclasshistory.com/…/e23-25-lesbians-gays…/

FROM THE IN DEFENCE OF YOUTH WORK ARCHIVE – Lenny Sellars on THE GREAT YOUTHWORK© HEIST

On By Tony TaylorIn History, Politics, Youth WorkLeave a comment

I’ve copied this from the In Defence of Youth Work website, which I still maintain. It may be of interest to some.

Months ago I promised that I would begin retrieving posts from what we dubbed the IDYW archive. It is belated but hopefully, this is a start.

The challenging piece, ‘The Great Youth Work Heist’ appeared on the IDYW website in January 2010. I had come across the author Lenny Sellars on a youth work forum hosted to its credit at that time by the magazine, ‘Children and Young People Now’, a commitment to debate long past. However, I knew Lenny only by his pseudonym, ‘God’s Lonely Youth Worker’. We bumped into one another in the bar at the November 2009 Federation of Detached Youth Work conference held in a miserably wet Wigan. My recollection is that we were a mite uncertain about one another, our opening exchanges somewhat stilted. We did discover though a common bond from outside youth work, namely the pits, appropriate seeing we were sat at the centre of the once vital Lancashire coalfield. We were both from mining families. Lenny had worked down the pit and out of it during the historic NUM Strike of 1984/85. My dad was the last Taylor to go underground but I had been a committed activist in Leicestershire and Derbyshire during the dispute. Stories swapped we warmed to one another.

Lenny became very involved for some years in the IDYW Campaign. For example, he led a discussion on ‘Where Are We Up To?’ and ‘Where Are We Going?’ at a December 2012 Seminar in Manchester. I reported.

The opening contribution to the first session around the Campaign’s sense of identity and purpose was led by the self-styled ‘raggedy-arsed’ Lenny Sellars from Grimethorpe, home of arguably the greatest colliery brass band formed in the revolutionary year of 1917. His forthright challenge might be summed up as follows:

  • Has our commitment to defending democratic youth work been compromised by our involvement in the wider campaign to defend jobs and services in their increasing plurality?
  • Are the omens for the development of IDYW good or bad?
  • With the demise of New Labour, our initial foe, who or what is today’s nemesis?
  • Is IDYW failing to widen its support because it is viewed as too political and/or too intellectual?

Lenny kept true to this line of questioning and in the end felt that IDYW had lost its way. We parted company on the best of terms. We were poorer for his absence from our ranks.

The following has lost none of its necessary provocations.

THE GREAT YOUTHWORK© HEIST

So… I attended the Federation for Detached Youth Work Conference at Wigan in November last year and I must declare that I became increasingly charged throughout the weekend with a delightful positivity and felt an unusual level of intense inspiration from the radiant enthusiasm and passion of the guest speakers and other attendees. And then Tom Wylie spoke. He charged youth work purists with being hopeless romantics and scoffed at the thought that there was any value in the convivial relationship between youth worker and young person. My positivity plummeted and my hope wilted with every word that fell from his lips. There seemed to be a cruel irony in that a conference with the theme “Positive About The Street” should end with such a negative tone. Nonetheless, I took a lot from the conference and have managed to recoup some positivity by exorcising all those nagging despondencies by writing them down on a sheet of paper (or three) and sharing them with some poor recipient who probably doesn’t deserve the burden. It’s a lengthy diatribe and the first page of overcast reflection was written about 6 months ago so I’m actually recycling despair.

Lenny up a hill if not a mountain

I get the feeling that I’ve been climbing a mountain for fifteen years only to find that the architects of social policy have built another mountain on top, twice as big and twice as steep. Metaphorically the mountain represents the daily grind of wading, chest-high through the formalised social control that is currently trading under the title of youth work©. I’ve got my own vision of the summit and the clarity is startling. But that’s just a vision. The reality is a jumbled mess of strategic clichés.

There’s an enthusiastic buzz in the conference rooms about a new youth initiative. It sits well on the handouts and the power-point presentation is dynamic. The power suits love it. They are impressed. Eagerly they display their new buzz-words and acronyms like kids display the labels on their designer clothes. I look forward to the meeting in 2 months’ time when we hear the feedback that despite the fact that they displayed the posters, posted the leaflets, spent £200 on a buffet, £80 on renting a room and £100 on hiring a scratch DJ… no one turned up. I could tell them now but that would seem arrogant, negative and curmudgeonly.

So I’m looking up at the mountain. The lofty peaks of middle-class strategy; the precarious ridges of output driven work; the sheer-face obstacles of tedious bureaucracy; the harsh climate of prescribed funding…. and I think, why can’t someone just give me the money and the resources to continue delivering the effective, front-line, needs-led work that I’ve been practising for the last 17 years?

Does it sound treacherous to declare my contempt for the Every Child Matters agenda and everything it stands for? I have to be careful about this. I feel as though I’m offending the deeply religious principle of some deeply religious disciples.

Something’s got to give. I’ve been at odds with the system for the past 15 years. In fact, we now seem to be walking in opposite directions. I’ve tried to push against it but it’s too big. I’ve even tried to ignore it but it owns the tools that I need to do my work. The system also seems to have become much more aggressive over the years. It wears an imperious sneer as it keeps wasting vast amounts of money on initiatives that defy logic and this is where I am defeated because I have one of those heads that refuses to engage with the illogical. So it isn’t that I won’t play it’s more that I can’t play.

I think one of the main problems we now have in reclaiming effective youth work© is that it has been (and still is as I type) travelling in the wrong direction at 100 mph. And to be honest, there’s little left to reclaim. The bureaucracy fears innovation because innovation is unpredictable. Face-to-face youth workers seem to be judged on their ability to gather information and on how much bullshit you can fit on a monitoring sheet. youth work© is aspiring to the same dizzy heights of the Social Services – losing connection with the world outside whilst wallowing in the esoteric ambience of Über-professionalism.

It’s a pretty simple diagram. The more you get involved with the strategic levels the further away you move from the reality of your purpose. The closer to front-line delivery you work, the more ridiculous the strategic aims look.

My own experience has shown me that pre-determined outcomes imposed on youth work© have created a culture of disingenuous motivation, which has also promoted the inevitable course of dishonesty. My heart sinks when I begin to imagine the percentage of accreditations which have been frantically forged by the pressurised youth worker with a target to meet. When you introduce a formal target into an informal methodology you’re bound to create a tension and you will also generate a fear of the consequences of failing to meet these targets. And it is under these conflicting conditions that youth workers start feeding the system with irrelevant and often imaginary outputs.

Prescribed outputs frequently require systems and procedures which have a detrimental effect on the values of youth work©. Youth work© is based on specific values and if you strip away those values in pursuance of achieving outputs then you should not describe it as youth work©. I have lots of personal examples of how this imposed cosmetic formality and tokenistic accreditation has frustrated the youth work© process and jeopardised the effective relationship we build with young people.

History has demonstrated that effective outputs will always occur as a result of organic youth work© processes. So who is really at fault here? Is it youth workers’ inability to define the value of youth work© or is it the inability of the bean-counter to understand it? Why persecute the youth worker for not being able to translate something organic and unpredictable into business language. We sow a seed in a young person’s head and it stands to reason that sometimes the youth worker may not even be around when the seed eventually blooms – a real and meaningful output which will be lost and unrecorded and unquantifiable but will still have a significant impact. It isn’t always possible to predict the outcome of genuine youth work© and it isn’t always possible to measure the true impact because some of the most valuable outcomes don’t always manifest for many years.

Youth work© will always be vulnerable and exposed to the people who seek to bureaucratise it and once youth work© is bureaucratised it becomes something else. And so the very thing that makes it effective will also, in the end, destroy it. There is no room for informality in a social structure dominated by bureaucracy. We satisfy the needs of the systems of bureaucracy rather than addressing the needs of young people. Servants of bureaucracy rather than a practitioner of this cherished craft.

What I value most in the relationships we create through effective Youth work © is the bridge that it builds between marginalisation and the mainstream. The bridge we create is the value of our work. A young person steps on this bridge as soon as you contact them and they walk its span when you engage them in activities and it is this “distance travelled” that I cherish.

You need compassion, empathy, realism, and a good degree of common sense to truly understand the value of real youth work©. I can’t give the bureaucrats any of these qualities and therefore I can’t help them to understand how they are contributing to the demolition of an essential social provision. I think you need to digest and internalise the values of youth work© to actually understand its true worth.

What is the way forward? Well, having travelled this path of disenchantment for about 10 years I have something of a vague bearing.

And so, to the notion of creating a parallel youth service which engages with real young people with real issues leaving the more functional kids to the existing youth service. They can wallow in accreditations and create school councils for every day of the week. I wish.

Youth work© still exists in little pockets scattered around in places where the influence of national strategy can’t corrupt it. I believe the thing to do is to defend the spirit and the name of youth work© by vigorously asserting our heritage. I regularly ask youth workers not to use the term youth work© when they are discussing practice which clearly isn’t youth work©. Not much in the great scheme of things I know but it does help me to preserve the integrity of my profession. I also know many dedicated youth workers who feel the need to override bureaucracy by delivering meaningful youth work© covertly – outside and beyond the remit of their prescribed targets. However, I believe that “youth work© by stealth” just allows the system to take the credit for the work delivered which ends up fuelling its performance indicators. You can’t expose the wrongs by hiding the rights. Documenting examples and statements of disenchantment is essential. If the current path of youth strategy is lined with false and tokenistic outcomes then its malignant structures will be strengthened.

I know in my heart that the proposed services will fail to have a sufficient impact on the young people who need the most support. But this is irrelevant to the bureaucrat. As long as services can feed the bureaucratic machinery with the right buzzwords and numbers that “add up” then the machinery will run smoothly. The machinery is concerned with breadth and not depth and it has no empathy with the disaffected and no sympathy with the front-line worker.

What to do? I seriously don’t believe there is any mileage in trying to stop the machinery. We cannot defend Youth Work© in a language that the machinery understands. Youth Work© has been condemned as being too ethereal for the harsh reality of our current social administrative structure and the scope for delivering effective Youth Work© is diminishing.

In real terms, if we are pushed into systems of social control then we must stand up and be counted and speak out and say “I will do this because it is a directive from my employer but I will not call it youth work© and I will not recognise myself as being a youth worker.” I would never call myself a counsellor before, during or after a one-to-one discussion with a young person.

It isn’t easy to be oppositional in this culture of new managerialism. The bravest in this campaign will be the local authority youth workers who are trapped within a system that suppresses and prohibits the freedom and creativity to travel their true paths. But I suggest that instead of trying to chip away at the immovable force of what youth work© has become, we actually support this doomed vessel along its journey towards the iceberg. By all means criticise and expose it but don’t attempt to stop it. It will eventually crash and sink.

Lenny Sellars
[God’s Lonely Youth Worker]

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Thinking about the Past, Present and Future of IDYW

On By Tony TaylorIn Children and Young People, Education, History, neoliberalism, Politics, Youth Work3 Comments

For the sake of some sort of continuity I’m publishing here my final post from the In Defence of Youth Work website. It contains themes emanating from the authoritarian imposition of the COVID measures, which I will continue to take up in one way or another on this blog.

Below you will find the lead contribution I made to the final IDYW Steering Group meeting held on Friday, October 8th in Manchester. As it was the train of my thought was often, necessarily and fruitfully interrupted by the musings and memories of those present. These interventions made for a challenging yet always supportive critical, collective conversation. Unfortunately I can’t do justice to that process. Hence you are getting no more than my opening and closing remarks. The substance of my offering was an effort to trace major events and significant themes in the life of IDYW since 2009. These are to be found, now archived on this site.

A group discussion at our fifth national conference in Birmingham

Thinking About the Past, Present and Future of IDYW.

Opening Remarks

I’m anxious about this bit of an opening presentation, which might well seem ridiculous. I long ago gave up paid work, selling my soul to the State with all its attendant tensions. Why the disquiet!? The principal reason for my apprehension is that I’ve scoured back through all the IDYW website posts since March 2009. I stopped counting at 1500 plus. What riches, what a turmoil of contradictions, hope and despair and what a plurality of offerings. I was bemused. How could I possibly do justice to this fascinating potpourri? My confusion was not eased in finding myself listening to the videos of the first National Conference in February 2010 – Janet Batsleer welcoming us to an ‘unauthorised space’, Kev Jones introducing my rant, Tania de St Croix warning about surveillance and Bernard Davies making the youth work case. Thoughts and sentiments that would not be out of place today. In thinking about the inaugural Conference I remembered also meeting Sue Atkins on the Didsbury campus in the dark the night before. We had something to sort out. I remember not what. It might well have been 20 years since we’d last crossed paths. A tear in our eyes it was as if we’d never been apart.

So forgive me if my recollection of IDYW’s history is riddled with absences. If there isn’t a book there is certainly an MA, even, a PhD to be found in the IDYW archives. Although on second thoughts a PhD collecting dust on a shelf would hardly move us forward.

So why did IDYW emerge in late 2008 on the back of the Open Letter I penned. It ventured:

Thirty years ago Youth Work aspired to a special relationship with young people. It wanted to meet young women and men on their terms. It claimed to be ‘on their side’. Three decades later Youth Work is close to abandoning this distinctive commitment. Today it accepts the State’s terms. It sides with the State’s agenda. Perhaps we exaggerate, but a profound change has taken place.

The shift has not happened overnight. Back in the 1980’s the Thatcherite effort via the Manpower Services Commission to shift the focus of Youth Work from social education to social and life skills was resisted. In the early 90’s the attempt to impose a national curriculum on the diverse elements of the Youth Service ground to a halt. However, with the accession of New Labour, the drive to impose an instrumental framework on Youth Work gathered increased momentum. With Blair and Brown at the helm youth workers and managers have been coerced and cajoled into embracing the very antithesis of the Youth Work process: predictable and prescribed outcomes. Possessing no vision of a world beyond the present New Labour has been obsessed with the micro-management of problematic, often demonised youth. Yearning for a generation stamped with the State’s seal of approval the government has transformed Youth Work into an agency of behavioural modification. It wishes to confine to the scrapbook of history the idea that Youth Work is volatile and voluntary, creative and collective – an association and conversation without guarantees.

Of course, the idea of the Letter did not spring out of the blue. It was not at all my individual creation. The inspiration for challenging the neo-liberal consensus goes back for me to the late 1960s. I want to argue that IDYW was but a particular expression of a post-war liberal/social democratic belief that education ought to be child/young person-centred, process-led, holistic and questioning in its desire. IDYW was born too out of a frustration that this humanistic perspective had struggled to dent a behavioural tradition focused on social control and conformity. In my own experience back in the late 1970s, Roy Ratcliffe and I were disciplined for supporting the autonomous voice of an embryo Youth Council. We wrote about this setback and the lack of support from fellow professionals in a piece to be found within the Inner London Education Authority’s ‘Schooling & Culture’, entitled ‘Stuttering Steps in Political Education’. As the Youth Service Training Officer in Wigan, I fought a bitter battle with Youth Service officers and workers to rewrite a part-time youth worker training course that sought to introduce Carl Rogers to Karl Marx, to question liberal taken-for-granteds by way of socialist and feminist understandings. Over in the newly created Community and Youth Workers Union, the Women’s Caucus emerging from the social movements turned the organisation upside down, Stimulated by the sisters Roy and I (in perhaps the best thing I’ve ever done) drafted a member-led and democratic constitution which directly challenged in practice both hierarchy and bureaucracy. Yet despite the radicalisation of full-time training courses, behaviourism was reasserting itself by the late 1980s as the servant of neo-liberal ideology. Indeed some former advocates of a radical grass-roots agenda were to the fore in advocating the managerial imposition of its tenets.

To say the least, this analysis is sweeping. I’ve always tended to be that way inclined. Yet, as an example of the shift, when I went in 1990 as the Wigan Chief Youth Officer to a Confederation of Heads of Youth Services national conference with perhaps 100 managers in attendance I sat in a corner over a drink with at most half a dozen fellow travellers. The majority embraced prescribed outcomes and the accumulation of data as the only way to save the Youth Service and Youth Work.

As it is I fled the scene at the end of the 1990s because of Marilyn, my wife’s serious illness. However, I was not quite finished. With Malcolm Ball, Steve Waterhouse (tragically both no longer with us) Deb Ball, Tim Price and Steve Monaghan we formed the minuscule Critically Chatting Collective, continuing to question what was going on through a website and tiny gatherings. For example, I remember back in 2005 Bernard Davies addressing a central London meeting of no more than six people – hardly an indication of mass support for our meanderings. Be that as it may, this continuation of a critical perspective was essential to my subsequent scribbling of the Open Letter which was rejected by the National Youth Agency’s organ, ‘Young People Now’ as being too heavy for its readership. I declined the offer to rewrite.

Thus we circulated the Letter at the 2009 Youth & Policy History Conference in Durham, knowing that Y & P itself stood for an open and serious appraisal of the State’s relationship with young people. I have failed to track down the place where the signatories are housed, well over 700 as I remember. In short, the Open Letter opposed the behavioural and instrumental, the imposition of rules, norms and outcomes upon practice. As I argued, “we described a clash between the process of ‘becoming a person, individually, socially and politically aware’, which held good for ourselves and young people and neoliberalism’s desire to manufacture self-centred conformism and unquestioning obedience to the status quo amongst both ourselves and young people”.

All of which preamble leads to a specific engagement with the history of IDYW itself. As I have more than hinted there is a book to be written. I will have to content myself with a limited number of memories.

At this point in my contribution to the meeting, I began to explore all that we had done across the life of IDYW. In this context to do so here would come across as a list with little in the way of explanation and exploration. Hence, for now, I can only ask the reader to interrogate for themselves the IDYW archive. For my part I am committed monthly, if not more frequently, to post afresh gems from the archive and hope you might keep your eye on their appearance. Amongst the themes I touched upon were:

The Annual Conferences
The Regional Seminars
The range of questioning articles and books produced by IDYW activists
Our unstinting support for wider initiatives, exemplified by our involvement in Choose Youth and ‘Is the Tide Turning’
Our input into the European Youth Work debate

Concluding Remarks

Given I’m somewhat retired from the fray I don’t want to overstay my return to a discussion about IDYW’s future or indeed claim that my finger is on the pulse. My piece on ‘Resistance in a Climate of Anxiety’ conveys still much of my perspective.

Firstly, IDYW was born out of a spirit of resistance to and dissension from the mainstream behavioural narrative besetting our relations with young people.

Secondly, therefore, my question is whether IDYW remains a critical voice, given that the formalisation of the informal within Youth Work has continued apace? Or has it been slowly sanitised, swallowed up safely into the mainstream as symbolised by a Facebook page dominated by exchanges and requests far removed from the philosophy and politics of the Open Letter?

Finally, in my opinion, neither Youth Work nor IDYW itself can sidestep facing the implications for both young people and society as a whole of the consciously created COVID pandemic. As best I can see the profession meekly and unquestioningly complied with a flagrantly undemocratic, disgracefully unethical, utterly one-sided governmental response to a virus which, if placed in context, has been far from the 21st-century Great Plague predicted by that methodological absurdity, the Science, its cynical experts and obedient stenographers. We witnessed the overnight abandonment of a holistic, measured, informed Public Health Policy and the character assassination of those brave souls, who pointed this out.

In particular, youth workers and education professionals as a whole ought to examine on what unevidenced grounds they cooperated with the closing down and stifling of children and young people’s provision and ask themselves to what extent they were complicit in the transmission of the fearmongering propaganda disseminated by the behavioural psychologists and their ‘nudge, nudge’ advertising arm? For what it’s worth, even if this emergency dies down and the covid zealots retreat, I don’t think it’s possible to proceed as if not much has gone on, to accept their New Normal.

The logo of our friends at the now defunct National Coalition for Independent Action

Above all, a supposed democratic and emancipatory youth work is now put to the test in terms of its own integrity. Is it possible to abandon the pursuit of truth and critical reflection with hardly a whimper, then as the dust settles, claim to be its principled advocates? I ask this with some pessimism as more than ever in the light of the pandemic I believe that the struggle to defend and extend the power of the people against the technocratic authoritarianism of the ruling class and its supporters on both the Left and Right is now the overwhelming political struggle of our time. Indeed it is a struggle, which transcends simplistic political categories. It is a struggle, within and without youth work, which demands a renewed critical dialogue across a veritable diversity of voices. IDYW in its time sought to do so but fell short. Crucially we never developed a vibrant, living network of local and regional IDYW support groups. It falls upon a younger generation in particular to revive the spirit of its intent.

IN DEFENCE OF YOUTH WORK CLOSES ITS BOOKS IN SADNESS BUT WITH MUCH PRIDE

On By Tony TaylorIn Children and Young People, Education, History, Politics, Youth WorkLeave a comment

Some readers of this blog will know that I penned the Open Letter, which initiated the Defence of Youth Work campaign in early 2009. For a decade I coordinated the campaign and maintained its website. It took up a big chunk of my life but I was privileged that it did so. By a twist of fate, I had the time and space to do so. I stepped down from my leading role in 2019 but no one was able to fill the gap. No one had the time and space. I cannot escape from the fact that my withdrawal in part sapped the energy and slowed the momentum of the campaign. As it was the restrictions on social existence imposed in the name of COVID brought things almost to a standstill. Thus on Friday, October 7 the Steering Group agreed to bring IDYW’s life to a close. Below is the Steering Group’s statement, first published on the IDYW website. More thoughts to follow.

The original IDYW logo

IN DEFENCE OF YOUTH WORK CLOSES ITS BOOKS IN SADNESS BUT WITH MUCH PRIDE

At our very first national conference in 2009, Janet Batsleer welcomed us to an ‘unauthorised space’. Her eloquent words ring down through the years.

In Defence of Youth Work as a campaign and critical forum is no more. At an Open Steering Group meeting held in Manchester on Friday, October 7th, amidst smiles, frowns and tears, it was agreed that IDYW had run its course, having lost its impetus and energy. In exploring why this was so and where we were up to, it became plain we had much of which to be proud. The evidence for this assertion is to be found on this website with its 1500+ posts recording our collective activity since our appearance in early 2009. We are committed to preserving the website as a historical archive and as a testament to the impact of our small ‘unauthorised’ and independent group, ‘punching above its weight’, upon the national and indeed international youth work scene.

One of Jethro Bryce’s striking illustrations from our book, ”This is Youth Work’

Whilst IDYW will cease to be an organised presence in the youth work arena, it is vital to recognise that its existence was always of its time. It was no more and no less than a particular expression over the last thirteen years of a centuries-old struggle for a truly democratic and ‘popular’ education. Without questioning, democratically inclined citizens, young and old, there can be no democracy. In this context, the humanist philosophy and practice of a secular and religious disposition that inspired IDYW’s resistance to the behavioural and instrumental neoliberal agenda remain a universal treasury of hope. The ideas live on. In the face of an increasingly technocratic and authoritarian capitalism, we hope that our endeavour will be taken up afresh and reimagined by a new wave of workers and activists. We hope too that the archive of our efforts will provide a moment or two of inspiration.

Gathering our collective thoughts

For now, we will take a deep breath, tinged with sadness, bursting with pride. In the coming months, from time to time, we will highlight anew memories worth remembering. Tony Taylor at tonymtaylor@gmail.com has agreed to be a Keeper of the Records, to use an old-fashioned title, and will welcome approaches from students, academics, researchers and practitioners seeking to explore our ‘books’.

Hopefully concentrating on a speaker’s provocative insights!

A Pragmatic Postscript

Over the years our Facebook page has taken on a life of its own. At this moment it boasts 6,800 members. It has become the go-to place for sharing information and ideas about youth work in general. In many ways, the page has lost touch with its original purpose of encouraging debate focused on IDYW’s cornerstones. Nevertheless, it is clearly an important resource and a marketplace for youth workers and projects. Respecting this our moderators will continue to keep watch on its contents and are considering ways of perhaps filtering the daily waterfall of varied material.

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES LA LUTTA CONTINUA Ο Αγώνας Συνεχίζεται

Remembering Steve Waterhouse – A youth worker’s youth worker

On By Tony TaylorIn Children and Young People, History, Politics, Youth WorkLeave a comment

I can’t believe it’s six years since my dear friend and comrade, Steve Waterhouse died so tragically. By chance, a week or so ago, sifting through old boxes, I came across this photo of Steve and I demonstrating in Chesterfield against the privatisation of the NHS. Taken in the late 1980s we were marching particularly in support of the striking Scarsdale Hospital cleaners. Ironically, the government of the time was not calling on us to save the NHS, its policies being to the contrary.

Then I realised that although this blog is dedicated to Steve, along with Malcolm Ball, the obituary I penned at the time for IDYW has never appeared here. Hence I’m taking this opportunity to put the record straight. I think the piece still resonates.

RIP Steve Waterhouse : A youth worker’s youth worker

Steve W

I first met Steve Waterhouse in late 1984, drawn together by both youth work and the Miners’ Strike.  He was a part-time youth worker in Shirebrook, a pit village at the heart of community resistance to Thatcherite violence. I was the newly appointed District Community Education Officer, ostensibly his boss. Steve was a young, fresh-faced, passionate anarchist with a marvellous gift for relating to people, already a significant figure in the local music scene and co-founder in 1983 of a jobless youngsters’ Open Shop. I was a more wrinkled, yet passionate socialist, not keen on management’s right to manage. We hit it off right away. Indeed we got closer on our train journey to the Department of Education and Science, where I had to convince a panel that Steve was a diamond, despite having a trivial conviction for cannabis possession. They were suitably impressed, which thankfully meant that later Steve could pursue a full-time qualification.

We became fellow Bolsover Bucket Bangers, the name our diverse Community Education team adopted in the face of criticism that we took the progressive policies of the Derbyshire County Council too seriously. Steve was not interested in pretence. He was committed to what in those days we called a radical youth work praxis, opposed to exploitation and oppression in all its forms.

Crucially, though, and this is reflected across his whole career, he never sought to convert a young person to his way of seeing the world. He wanted simply, but not so simply, to be in a questioning, always respectful conversation with young people, which was lightened at every turn by his quick-witted sense of humour. That this was so is reflected in the outpouring of grief and love from hundreds of those he touched across thirty years of work with young people. Time and time again we read messages on Facebook that say, “Steve and I hardly ever agreed with one another, but he meant so much to me”.

SteveDawn
Steve and Dawn 1987 supporting Silentnight workers

He was deeply involved in the Community and Youth Workers Union and in our Socialist Caucus through the late ’80s, into the ’90s. I remember us arguing the toss about the nature of the capitalist state in the back garden of the Exeter Community Centre. Reluctantly I confessed to him that I thought he was much closer to the truth than my dogmatic assertions allowed. He didn’t hold it against me. As I left Derbyshire under a cloud, pursued by leading figures of the Council, he was my supportive case-worker as Audit sought to find transgressions within my travel claims. His faith in my integrity saw me through.

His move to Liverpool saw him become the key youth worker at what was to become the highly regarded Interchill Project. A comment from one of the original members says a great deal.

A guy walks into the interview room at Interchill and sits down confidently although slightly nervous. His name was Steve Waterhouse. Being Interviewed by a group of teenagers wasn’t what he was expecting. But we wanted to pick the right person ourselves to manage our youth facility. Needless to say, regardless of his dodgy socks 😂 Steve was our man. And the service and inspiration he went on to provide for the young people of Speke & Garston over the years will never be forgotten. It is with great sadness and disbelief to hear of his recent passing. A true peoples person and a father figure and advisor to so many. Steve you will be sadly missed.

Steve canoe
Steve canoeing. Ta to Tracey Ramsey

With Interchill falling foul of cuts, he moved over into the Liverpool Youth Service, where his outstanding endeavours were rewarded with an award for his dedication. As you might expect Steve was embarrassed by the attention.

In the early days of the In Defence of Youth Work campaign, Steve and I were reunited in the struggle to defend a young person-centred, process-led youth work. In retrospect, though it’s clear that the assault on open youth work, on his beliefs and values, was taking its toll on this remarkable bloke. It’s easy to say, but I don’t think he realised how much he had influenced young people’s lives.

Listen to just a few of the moving comments made:

I can’t believe this news. He was an important person to me. He changed how I felt about so much. Inspirational is just a word, but he changed my life and so many people around him. He loved people and wanted the best for them. The world has lost a fantastic human and I will miss him so much. Xx

I remember first meeting him at Interchill when I was 16 and being amazed at the set up. How he inspired young people to take control of their own services and supported them while maintaining excellent relationships. He was always warm, engaging and funny and such an integral part of my early youth work experience.

A few years ago Steve stayed with me on holiday and we had a surreal discussion on the terrace at the back of our house. In the teeth of all his own practice, Steve was arguing that youth work was just a job.  Hardly able to believe my ears I responded that he didn’t really believe this, that the youth work, we believed in, was closer to something we might dub a calling.  Given our atheism, this was not a calling from a deity, but a calling from all those past and present, who have sought in concert control over their own lives. It seemed to me that Steve’s denial that night of his own commitment was an expression of the mental and physical exhaustion that can accompany always giving of yourself, expecting little back in return.

To return to Facebook with all its contradictions this is where young and old have returned their love and gratitude, however belatedly, to a very special bloke. And, I don’t think Steve would think me opportunistic in saying to politicians and management alike, ‘if you want to grasp the significance of youth work, bin your manufactured outcomes and read the reactions of people to Steve’s passing. Take a breath and have the vision to see beyond tomorrow’s soulless data’.

Let me finish by saying that Steve’s way of being with young people was rooted in his anarchism, in his rejection of imposed authority and his belief in the creativity of those written off by the system. If Steve had faith, dented though it might have been, it was in our ability to create a more just and equal world. Together we could never accept that the present state of play is the best that humanity can come up with. I can but shed a tear at realising that we will never chat critically again; that we will never link arms again in the struggle against injustice; that we will never again laugh together at our pretensions. He was a dear friend and comrade or as one message defined him, ‘a youth worker’s youth worker’. Like so many others I loved him and I regret not conveying this enough in recent years.

Our best tribute to Steve’s memory is to continue defending the tradition of improvisatory and empathetic youth work he symbolised – a way of being with young people that is ‘volatile and voluntary, creative and collective – an association and conversation without guarantees’. But a way of being, as many have testified, that brings enormous rewards; that truly has an authentic impact on young people’s lives.

I’ll sign off, Steve, in our time-honoured way.

In love and struggle,

Tony

What about Children and Young People? Are they no more than collateral damage?

On By Tony TaylorIn Children and Young People, Education, Politics, Youth Work2 Comments

“We are engaged in a war against the virus”- Boris Johnson

” In this fake war children are set to be vaccine fodder” – A concerned parent

From the very beginning, March 2020, of the utterly undemocratic imposition of COVID-inspired sweeping restrictions on social existence I feared for children and young people. Perhaps this was a knee-jerk response. After all, I have spent the last 50 years conversing with and about them – as a teacher, youth worker, lecturer and, latterly, a commentator-cum-spectator on the sidelines. Indeed in late 2008, I penned an Open Letter, arguing that youth work should side with young people and not the State; that it should not assume it knows what’s best for young people; that it should be in a critical conversation with them about how together we see the world; and that it should aspire to be ‘volatile and voluntary, creative and collective – an association and conversation without guarantees’.In short it ought, first and foremost, to be a democratic practice. On the back of this missive, a campaign, In Defence of Youth Work [IDYW], emerged.

Against this history, given these commitments, I was perplexed from the outset at what has seemed to be the absence of debate and the utter lack of opposition to the demanded closures of children’s and young people’s provision – from playgrounds through schools and youth facilities to universities. I am being diplomatic. I was pissed off and angry. It was plain that such draconian, disproportionate action would be deeply damaging. The belated acknowledgement in the summer of 2021 that the lockdown was creating serious mental health issues for the younger generation, crocodile tears, merely confirmed my angst. Then, a humble breath taken, I recognised it was easy for me to be so moved. If I was still a practising youth worker. teacher or lecturer what would I have done during the last two years?

Thanks to medicalnewstoday.com

I find it difficult to imagine that, as a youth worker I would have caved in without protest as the youth centre was boarded up or that on the streets I would insist the young people be masked or else. I find it difficult, as a former primary school teacher, to believe I could cope with imposing upon children, I knew well with all their idiosyncrasies, the general requirement to don face coverings and keep their distance from each other and me. I find it difficult to accept that as a lecturer teaching upon a course committed to vibrant argument I would have meekly capitulated to the assault on critical thought, the depiction of the campus as a theatre of contagion and the arrival of on-line learning. As far back as Spring 2019, a modicum of independent research would have shown that masking was about obedience rather than transmission and that children/young people were in little danger from COVID and little danger to anyone else.

Of course, I’m probably deluding myself, thinking I would have swum against the conformist tide. The calculated campaign of fear disseminated without demur by the mainstream media has known no moral or ethical bounds. Management and trade unions in the public sector, along with the caring professions, armed with the ideology of ‘safetyism’, which in a trice provides both explanation and justification, have all embraced the dominant narrative with at times a nauseating pomposity. If you want to follow the unfolding of this smug self-righteousness delve into the archives of the Guardian.

Hence, where would I have found support in desiring to resist – certainly not in the trade union. little chance in the staff team and, to my chagrin, not through In Defence of Youth Work? In this context, speaking up might well have meant losing my job. However, deep in my decaying bones, I want to believe that there has been guerilla activity, which by its nature is underground. In my pretentiousness, I want to believe that with others I would have sought somehow to bring these guerillas together in some supportive form of solidarity – see the history of the Socialist Caucus and Critically Chatting Collective. You might well say, ‘dream on,Tony, dream on’.

Insofar as there has been debate in the world of youth work IDYW did organise a Zoom seminar on the theme of Resistance in November 2020, which spawned the following pieces.

Resistance, rebellion, revolution! – Sue Atkins

Our fears and resistance to working collaboratively – Ruth Richardson

Youth workers’ every day marvels… when does persistence become resistance? – Janet Batsleer

In particular, Janet’s eloquent, positive portrayal of youth workers amidst the turmoil via the Citizen Enquiry in times of COVID is the counter to my perhaps ignorant negativity.

Certainly in the coming weeks, as the pandemic narrative unravels, it would be revealing to hear the thoughts of UK youth workers, teachers and lecturers about their sense of the impact upon children and young people, upon themselves of the two years lost.

As a stimulus to reflection, I’m reposting this moving and stimulating article by a Canadian teacher, which appeared on Common Sense, one of many alternative news sites that have sprung up during the pandemic. This outlet seeks to situate its politics as rejecting both the hard Left and the hard Right. Classically it seeks to find the middle ground with all the contradictions therein. To my mind, the very categories of Left, Centre and Right are in such a state of meltdown that the vital thing is to be aware of one’s own prejudices and history, to explore expansively, be open to critical dialogue and committed at every turn to the democratic process in the struggle against authoritarianism.

I’m a Public School Teacher. The Kids Aren’t Alright.

By Stacey Lance 

I am proud to be a teacher. I’ve worked in the Canadian public school system for the past 15 years, mostly at the high school level, teaching morals and ethics.

I don’t claim to be a doctor or an expert in virology. There is a lot I don’t know. But I spend my days with our youth and they tell me a lot about their lives. And I want to tell you what I’m hearing and what I’m seeing.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, when our school went fully remote, it was evident to me that the loss of human connection would be detrimental to our students’ development. It also became increasingly clear that the response to the pandemic would have immense consequences for students who were already on the path to long-term disengagement, potentially altering their lives permanently.

The data about learning loss and the mental health crisis is devastating. Overlooked has been the deep shame young people feel: Our students were taught to think of their schools as hubs for infection and themselves as vectors of disease. This has fundamentally altered their understanding of themselves.

When we finally got back into the classroom in September 2020, I was optimistic, even as we would go remote for weeks, sometimes months, whenever case numbers would rise. But things never returned to normal.

When we were physically in school, it felt like there was no longer life in the building. Maybe it was the masks that made it so no one wanted to engage in lessons, or even talk about how they spent their weekend. But it felt cold and soulless. My students weren’t allowed to gather in the halls or chat between classes. They still aren’t. Sporting events, clubs and graduation were all cancelled. These may sound like small things, but these losses were a huge deal to the students. These are rites of passages that can’t be made up.

In my classroom, the learning loss is noticeable. My students can’t concentrate and they aren’t doing the work that I assign to them. They have way less motivation compared to before the pandemic began. Some of my students chose not to come back at all, either because of fear of the virus, or because they are debilitated by social anxiety. And now they have the option to do virtual schooling from home.

One of my favorite projects that I assign each year is to my 10th grade students, who do in-depth research on any culture of their choosing. It culminates in a day of presentations. I encourage them to bring in music, props, food—whatever they need to immerse their classmates in their specific culture. A lot of my students give presentations on their own heritage. A few years back, a student of mine, a Syrian refugee, told her story about how she ended up in Canada. She brought in traditional Syrian foods, delicacies that her dad had stayed up all night cooking. It was one of the best days that I can remember. She was proud to share her story—she had struggled with homesickness—and her classmates got a lesson in empathy. Now, my students simply prepare a slideshow and email it to me individually.

My older students (grades 11 and 12) aren’t even allowed a lunch break, and are expected to come to school, go to class for five and a half hours and then go home. Children in 9th and 10th grades have to face the front of the classroom while they eat lunch during their second period class. My students used to be able to eat in the halls or the cafeteria; now that’s forbidden. Younger children are expected to follow the “mask off, voices off” rule, and are made to wear their masks outside, where they can only play with other kids in their class. Of course, outside of school, kids are going to restaurants with their families and to each other’s houses, making the rules at school feel punitive and nonsensical.

They are anxious and depressed. Previously outgoing students are now terrified at the prospect of being singled out to stand in front of the class and speak. And many of my students seem to have found comfort behind their masks. They feel exposed when their peers can see their whole face.

Around this time of year, we start planning for the prom, which is held in June. Usually, my students would already be chatting constantly about who’s asking who, what they’re planning on wearing, and how excited they are. This year, they’ve barely discussed it at all. When they do, they tell me that they don’t want to get their hopes up, since they’re assuming it will get cancelled like it has for the past couple of years.

It’s the same deal with universities. My students say, “If university is going to be just like this then what’s the point?” I have my own children, a nine-year-old daughter and a seven-year-old son, who have spent almost a third of their lives in lockdown. They’ve become so used to cancellations that they don’t even feel disappointed anymore.

I think all of my students are angry to some degree, but I hear it most from the kids who are athletes. They were told that if they got the vaccine, everything would go back to normal, and they could go back to the rink or the court. Some sports were back for a while but, as of Christmas, because of the recent wave of Covid-19 cases, club and varsity sports are all cancelled once again. A lot of the athletes are missing chances to get seen by coaches and get scholarships.

I try to take time at the beginning of class to ask my kids how they’re doing. Recently, one of my 11th grade students raised his hand and said that he wasn’t doing well, that he doesn’t want to keep living like this, but that he knows that no one is coming to save them. The other kids all nodded in agreement. They feel lied to—and I can’t blame them.

What’s most worrisome to me is that they feel deep worry and shame over the prospect of breaking the rules.

Teenage girls are notoriously empathetic. I see that many of my students, but especially the female ones, feel a heavy burden of responsibility. Right before Christmas, one of my brightest 12th graders confided in me that she was terrified of taking her mask off. She told me that she didn’t want to get anyone sick or kill anybody. She was worried she would be held responsible for someone dying.

What am I supposed to say? That 23 children have died from Covid in Canada during the whole of the pandemic and she is much more likely to kill someone driving a car? That kids in Scandinavia, Sweden, and the Netherlands largely haven’t had to wear masks at school and haven’t seen outbreaks because of it? That masks are not a magic shield against the virus, and that even if she were to pass it along to a classmate, the risk of them getting seriously sick is minuscule?

I want to tell her that she can remove her mask, and socialize with her friends without being worried.

But I am expected to enforce the rules.

At the beginning of the pandemic, adults shamed kids for wanting to play at the park or hang out with their friends. We kept hearing, “They’ll be fine. They’re resilient.” It’s true that humans, by nature, are very resilient. But they also break. And my students are breaking. Some have already broken.

When we look at the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of history, I believe it will be clear that we betrayed our children. The risks of this pandemic were never to them, but they were forced to carry the burden of it. It’s enough. It’s time for a return to normal life and put an end to the bureaucratic policies that aren’t making society safer, but are sacrificing our children’s mental, emotional, and physical health.

Our children need life on the highest volume. And they need it now.

———————————————————————————————–

When will the Masquerade come to a close?

On By Tony TaylorIn Children and Young People, Education, Politics, Youth Work1 Comment
Thanks to evolve-entertainment.co.uk

Anyone who has followed my scribblings knows that I approach behavioural psychology with extreme caution. This concern predates COVID by decades – see Outcomes, outcomes, outcomes for something written in the last decade. In previous posts, I have voiced my concern at the explicit and conscious stoking of fear fuelled by the SAGE Behavioural Group in the UK. At the heart of its cynical propaganda has been the mask. A month or so ago I ended a section on masks as follows:

In essence, the mask seeks to muzzle us into obedience. It confirms that we are in dire danger. It demands that we police one another into compliance. It is the visible expression of the desire to divide us from one another, to undermine our humanity. It is about social and political control. It serves no other purpose.

The Mitsotakis government in Greece is determined to keep us in our place – at least until the tourist season starts. Thus, as I write, we are under mandatory manners to wear face coverings inside [preferably duplex] and in the great outdoors. There are heavy fines to pay if we are disobedient. Pragmatic contempt is to be seen. No masks in the villages, masks worn or in readiness in the big towns. And, as for out in the olive groves, foothills and mountains we are at one with nature and humanity, looking each other in the eye.

Thanks to etsy.

Nevertheless, I was thinking of rehearsing the arguments once more but I’ve been saved the trouble by a challenging piece, composed by Gary Sidley, a retired NHS consultant clinical psychologist and a founder member of the Smile Free campaign to remove all mask mandates. It poses disturbing questions for the trade unions, the bureaucrats and the members, together with educators on the ground, be they, lecturers, teachers or youth workers.

Let’s face it -Governments use masking to force compliance, not fight viruses

Searching for Understanding in the face of Power and Propaganda Part Five [i]: The Impossible Dream

On By Tony TaylorIn Politics, Youth WorkLeave a comment

Searching for Understanding in the face of Power and Propaganda: The Impossible Dream

Ta to greekcitytimes.com

I had a dream last night. Hardly newsworthy but personally troubling. In truth my sleep is often disturbed by nocturnal neurosis. I’m forever anxious in the scenarios summoned up by my unconscious, forever forgetting, forever failing to fulfil tasks or promises, forever letting myself down. Now and again the tales are so real I awake suffused with dread about my comeuppance, thankfully followed by a huge sigh of relief as reality sets in. This feeling of release is almost worth the worrying somnolent journey.

Last night’s dream was a warning. Indeed it was stuffed full of shots across my bow. Friends, comrades and acquaintances, old and new, offered their advice in a variety of styles from a concerned Rogerian whisper to an insistent authoritative instruction. Their recommendations were mouthed in a diversity of settings – a staff meeting, a conference, a trade union demo, the pub or indeed the living room. The message went along the lines of ‘keep your counsel’, ‘best to let all this go’, ‘would be wiser to keep a back seat’ and ‘just shut up about it’. ‘It’ was questioning the COVID narrative.

Unravelling why I was thus reprimanded hardly needed a psychoanalyst. Yesterday I was messing around with a couple of interrelated bits of writing focused on the benefits and deficits of pandemic-led social policy. In particular I was looking at the impact upon children and young people of the closure of schools and youth provision. All the more so as UNISON had underlined in its call for the return of face masks in secondary school classrooms and the reintroduction of “bubbles” the deeply problematic character of the regimes being imposed even when schools are open. As I scribbled, a long-standing trade union activist I was very conscious of treading on thin ice. The more I mused the more critical I became of the stance of both UNISON and the National Education Union [NEU], which seemed to be profoundly at odds with a commitment to pupils and students. I was feeling nervous about how I was going to explain my disagreement.

Then, despite my effort to ignore the news, my Chromebook threw up a notification of the latest SAGE doom-mongering modelling. Reluctantly I visited the Guardian web site to read.

The scale of the threat posed by the Omicron variant was laid bare by government scientists last night as they warned that there are now hundreds of thousands of infections every day. That daily number could reach between 600,000 and 2 million by the end of the month if new restrictions are not brought in immediately. broad

The government’s SPI-M-O group of scientists, which reports to the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), also warned that, based on their modelling, hospitalisations could peak between 3,000 and 10,000 a day and deaths at between 600 and 6,000 a day.

I bridled at their stupefying arrogance in claiming that a speculation of ‘between 600 and 6,000 deaths a day’ was somehow scientific. A soothsayer could hardly do worse. I felt anxious and hopeless. The spectre of authoritarianism was returning to haunt both the present and the future.

The advisers suggested reintroducing measures “equivalent to those in place after step 2 or step 1 of the roadmap in England”. Rules at that time included the “rule of six” and just two households meeting; they also barred holidays abroad, while care-home residents were allowed only one regular visitor.

Reviving its role as the Ministry of Fear SAGE marketed a return to a Stage 1 clampdown by suggesting that ‘infections could be limited to between 200,000 and a million a day. Hospitalisations could run at between 1,500 and 5,000 admissions a day and daily deaths would be 200 to 2,000′.

The size and scope of this propaganda stopped me in my tracks. As ever the tame media obeyed the whip, trotting out the cliches – tidal waves and avalanches of cases. Is it any wonder there are a lot? This last week 9,390,590 tests were carried out. Of these 513,574 tested positive, which as we know doesn’t tell us a great deal in terms of the severity of the symptoms. An alternative headline could be ‘almost 9 million people didn’t have COVID’ but that’s hardly the issue. More to the point is that on the back of very limited early data on the OMICRON variant we rush to impose restrictions that have still not been tested for their effectiveness.

Now and again I wake from a dream gasping for breath, believing I am being smothered. I felt something similar, a tightening chest, as I took in the long queues for the all but mandatory booster, reflecting that they were less than likely to be consulted before being jabbed. Wondering too, on what basis have so many embraced apparently the oft confused and inconsistent hegemonic narrative? Matthias Desmet, the Belgian Professor of Psychology at Ghent University advances the notion that those supportive of the dominant version of events are in a state of collective hypnosis. My intuition is to resist such a sweeping generalisation about why people think and act in the ways they do. I am more sympathetic to his view that in an individualistic society bereft of a vision for the future even the imposition from above of a sense of solidarity has furnished a collective purpose, a reason for existence. As of now this an important discussion for another day.

Back to last night I found myself in the wake of the media storm, embarrassed to be thinking, “perhaps I’ll leave posting these thoughts till after Xmas, to when things die down a little.” ‘Why,” I asked myself guiltily? “What on earth are you bothered about?” Weary I retreated to my bed, to be beset therein by the troubling dreams.

This morning, having walked our Glyka and, for her, made the porridge, glistening with honey, I discerned the wood for the trees. The questions asked of me by my ghostly friends were but my own to myself. One in particular leapt out, voiced in the dream by a close comrade of many years. The interlocutor began by pointing out that across fifty years in the youth work world as worker, manager, lecturer and activist I had achieved a decent reputation. Yes, I was seen as something of a radical maverick but a likeable one at that. My friend’s tone altered. Didn’t I realise that challenging the lockdowns, the vaccines will be regarded as siding with the Right, worst of all as abandoning all you have stood for? They warned, if you go any further down this path, you will be cancelled.

Knowing this was in fact what I was thinking myself when I sought sleep last night felt sobering and liberating. Reputations, intact or tattered, are the province of the beholders. Across the last 20 months men and women, high and low, have risked their careers and livelihoods to speak out against tyranny. Proof of the tyrannical nature of society today is the suppression of the ideas and the assassination of the characters of those in opposition to what’s going on. In this context my overnight self-centred anxiety is pathetic. However in its ordinariness it does reveal the obstacles we face in mounting resistance to the creeping toralitarianism, which threatens to be the new norm. There will be so many, who disagree with the present state of affairs but who fear for their jobs and families, scared to speak out.

For what it’s worth, settling my debts, at least for now with my debilitating dream means I will risk getting on the wrong side, being on the wrong side.

More than ever I think we are at a pivotal moment in history.

As I finish this quasi-confessional, Austria has rendered ‘vaccinations’ mandatory with Germany about to follow in its neighbour’s footsteps. The new German Chancellor is quoted as saying, “for my government there are no more red lines as far as doing what needs to be done.” ‘Covid passes’ have been approved in France and the UK. Here in Greece ‘unvaccinated’ pensioners will be fined directly by reducing the amount of their state-pension payments. Whilst in the Victoria State of Australia ‘unvaccinated’ teachers will not be paid during the summer holidays and will be sacked in April if they do not comply with compulsory inoculation. Perhaps I should compile a more extensive account of the heavy-handed measures being taken across the globe. The list goes on….

Democracy faces Dictatorship

Humane, emotional, spiritual and intellectual freedom faces Inhumane, cold, mechanical and behavioural slavery.

For what it’s worth I’ll keep going on about ‘IT’ – in spite of the voices in my dreams.