The ‘problem’ of youth work
The starting point for this exploration was a number of reflections and questions originally arising out of my work in road safety/young road user education, an area I’ve worked in for over two decades. While on the surface a prosaic, straightforward and rule-bound subject, in my experience the questions and ethical considerations that are raised in the context of discussions with young people about road safety have led me to think about road safety education as a form of moral education, dealing with questions relating to ‘self’ and our relationship to others; personal values, decisions, how we act, and see ourselves in the world. We (Peter Kelly and I) explored these concerns in great detail in our 2016 book Young People and the Aesthetics of Health Promotion: Beyond Reason, Rationality and Risk.
Road safety is also indissolubly situated in our car/roads economy and culture, and in turn inevitably intersects with questions of our impact on the environment, the consumption, plunder and exploitation of the Earth’s resources, and our conception of ourselves as outside/above nature.
Because my experience has also led me to questions about the ethics of practice within the discourse of ‘responsibilisation’ of young people, and the shift of the burden of responsibility for social problems such as road trauma, to individual young people, I have been interested in the limits as well as the possibilities offered by philosophy, more specifically moral philosophy, as a foundation for practice with young people.
Youth work and philosophy
Philosophy as a resource for thinking through questions of youth work has been recognised by a number of youth work writers, who have undertaken a conscious, theoretical engagement with philosophical ideas to inform practice, and the investigation of new possibilities for translation to practice, drawing for example on philosophical concepts, particularly in moral philosophy, to explore questions relating to the central purpose of youth work.
Aristotelian traditions in particular have opened up productive avenues for thinking about the purpose, and the doing of youth work. While there has been an occasional reference to other traditions, for example Buddhist, Confucius/Confucianism, the Chinese philosopher Mencius, (and recognising that there is a rich tradition of youth work with/in indigenous and other culturally relevant traditions), the ‘philosophical turn’ in youth work literature has been fundamentally grounded in the concepts, methods and language of the Western philosophical tradition.
The promotion of philosophical approaches to youth work has also been focussed on their application to practice with young people, with Seal and Frost (2014) arguing that we should
‘value philosophy and … recognise what it has to offer us in our day-to-day practice’.
Kerry Young (2006, 2010) refers to youth workers as ‘moral philosophers’ and argues that a key feature of youth work is the possibilities it offers (and, it could be said, the obligations it carries) to explore with young people questions of the Good, living well, how one lives a good life – all of which are central concerns of virtue ethics.
Connected with implications for direct practice with young people is the broader question of ‘the kinds of ethical ideas that might inform youth work.’ (Bessant 2009). Judith Bessant (2009: 436) argues that Aristotelian virtue ethics is
‘directly relevant to modern youth work because it identifies and specifies the nature of the goods, and provides a relevant vocabulary and a framework of thinking about good practice’.
The western privileging of the individual encompasses an understanding of ‘man’ as captured in philosopher Iris Murdoch’s (1993) description of the:
‘free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy’.
The individualism entrenched in the Western philosophical tradition creates a tension for the philosophical foundations of youth work. Youth work writers Mike Seal and Simon Frost (2014:114) recognise this conflict, noting that ‘we exist in a society that privileges individuals’, while youth work sees humans ‘as best fulfilled through the collective’. They conclude that ‘we . . . have a duty to look at how we talk about notions of self and individuality with young people’.
While the Western philosophical heritage has provided fertile ground for the exploration of ideas about the ‘Good’, virtue ethics, human nature, life and purpose, there are limitations that are, in part, a product of this tradition. Seal and Frost (2014: 155) identify three dominant social constructions that constrain ethical practice and that need to be contested.
First, there is a consequent moral stance that independence and self-reliance are the highest virtues, as opposed to, say, interdependence and collectivism.
Second, individualism underpins many political initiatives, or policy considerations for young people and communities.
Third, there is an assumption that liberal capitalism, politically, and the market, economically, best serve the individual.
Seal and Frost locate this privileging of the individual in the contemporary social, economic and cultural relations of neoliberal capitalism. There is powerful evidence that the conditions of late capitalism have accelerated the transformations from collective, communitarian organisation of social relations to a heightened individualism (and ‘responsibilisation’). Richard Sennett (2012) expands on this in Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation.
The western philosophical tradition, some writers have argued, has shaped the patterns of thinking that are characteristic of western culture, and have ultimately laid the foundations for the crises of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene (see for examples Merchant 1983; Plumwood 2002; Nelson 2016; Lent 2017; Mathews 2023).
In contrast, at the core of Chinese philosophy is an understanding of humans as interdependent and contextual—there is no such thing as abstract ‘human’, outside their context and sets of relationships. The assumption of our interconnectivity and the ‘interdependence between entities or individuals’ (Lai 2008:8) that underlies and permeates Chinese philosophy and culturally embedded worldview stands in contrast to the idea prevalent in Western thinking of the isolated, immutable self that is separate from nature and independent of others.
A hundred schools of thought …
As one contribution to the efforts to integrate diverse and rich philosophical traditions to re-think the search for meaning and ways of being in the world, in this series of blogs I explore possibilities for a creative reinvigoration of approaches to a philosophy for/of youth work. I suggest that there is great potential for expanding the ‘thinking tools’ and enriching the philosophical foundations of youth work and youth studies in the Anthropocene by opening up a dialogue with Chinese philosophy.
https://humanjourney.us/ideas/axial-age-thought/the-hundred-schools-of-thought/
My first encounter with Chinese philosophy was as a (very ordinary) undergraduate student of Chinese language. During my degree I undertook a semester of classical Chinese, largely consisting of deciphering and learning paragraphs from the Daoist classic the Zhuangzi, in the original classical Chinese (very different from modern Chinese), with the teacher providing dubious assistance, as he spoke mostly in Chinese with only occasional brief explanations in English. I never grasped very much, but the tales of the philosopher Zhuangzi stood out, seized my imagination. Several of these stayed with me over the years, serving as an anchoring point, a place to return to, to check my thinking, my assumptions, my motivations, my desires, against the often overwhelming tide of social, work and family expectations and general confusion of life.
Over the following years and decades I was exposed to the usual smattering of references, allusions, and borrowings from Chinese philosophical traditions that appear in popular culture. Terms such as ‘yin-yang’, ‘qi’, and ‘flow’ had entered the Western vocabulary. Indeed, Western interest in Chinese philosophy had extended back to polymath philosopher Leibniz in the 17th century, through to key figures in philosophy and psychology such as Wolff, Voltaire, Hegel, Heidegger, Fromm.
I learned to appreciate, and return to, the wisdom contained in those stories, and in the Daoist classic, the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching). I also moved from my uninformed impression of Confucianism as a repressive, proscriptive dogma, as it was prone to become when it became embedded as the state religion, to develop a more nuanced appreciation of its significance as a humanist philosophy. Gradually I have been able to place these impressions within the context of the history and development of Chinese philosophy, and Chinese cultural traditions, belief systems and world-views.
A note of caution
Some caution is required when delving into a complex philosophical territory that is contested, open to a thousand different interpretations, and, perhaps, insufficiently understood.
Mike Seal and Simon Frost (2014: 155) warn against the danger of becoming ‘cherry-picking charlatans’. However, if we see philosophy as a resource, a method of thinking deeply – ‘the unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly’ as William James described it (Hall and Ames 1995: 29) – other philosophical traditions may illuminate different ways of seeing, and thinking through, questions that matter.
In some respects recent ‘turns’ in Western philosophical and scientific thinking have led (back) towards cultural foundational ideas/world views of other philosophical and cultural traditions.
Taking a cue from philosophers Peter Hershock’s and Roger Ames’ (2021) invitation to ‘take advantage of all our cultural resources to creatively respond to the challenges of the modern world’, and encouraged by the open, pluralistic character of Chinese philosophy, I suggest we may profitably adopt a similar openness and curiosity in exploring the potential for Chinese philosophy to contribute to the development of a philosophy of youth work that is relevant, and capable of responding to the challenges of work with young people in the Anthropocene.
In the following blog I provide a brief background to the development of classical Chinese philosophy, and outline some key ideas that I will draw on in later discussions.