What Do Young People Learn in Formal Settings of Youth Participation?

Pais, Alexandre (2022) What Do Young People Learn in Formal Settings of Youth Participation? In: Youth Participation and Learning: Critical Perspectives on Citizenship Practices in Europe. Young People and Learning Processes in School and Everyday Life, 7 . Springer Nature, pp. 139-149. ISBN 9783030925147

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Abstract

Formal settings of youth participation such as youth and student councils aim to educate young people into models of citizenships and mainstream politics. The activities developed in these spaces are framed in a way as to allow young people to develop learning activities that enhance their participatory skills and competences. These activities however can result in a set of unintended outcomes, where young people end up learning more than the officially recognised skills and competences. In this article, I use elements from the PARTICISPACE project to illustrate how despite the good intentions surrounding the framing of formal spaces of learning, these spaces can function as a mean for the reproduction of political models of participation that do not only fail to challenge the status quo, but in fact create the kind of citizens that enjoy the cynical and bureaucratic political participation that characterises late capitalism.