Apathetic or Activist? Young People, Citizenship and the Public Sphere

Abstract

This chapter will present the alternative view about young people; that is, that young people have also often been described as apathetic or ignorant. They have also been rather unfairly homogenised. To do this, I will cite examples such as the Lowy poll, and explore these studies that show there has been a decline in faith in democracy and increased preference for more autocratic regimes. I will develop this idea and identify the growth of such regimes. This chapter will also engage in a discussion regarding whether this represents a lack of faith in democracy, or simply in the forms of representative democracy that are common and instead a preference for more direct participatory democracy. In addition, I will also discuss some of the examples of civic action taking place currently in Australia and around the world, with a specific focus on those that relate to young people. The purpose of this will be to draw out key commonalities in these experiences: for example, mobilisation that is broader than political parties, the existence of more single-issue approaches and the use of technology to organise diverse groups.

Research Portrait Two: Theme Song

Many schools in Australia are multicultural, especially in Western suburbs of Sydney. McCarthy College (now Penola College) in the suburb of Penrith is an exception, having mostly white students, many of whom can trace their heritage back to Irish settlers or First Fleet convicts. This means the school has limited cultural diversity.

Penrith, though, is gradually changing from a semi-rural location to one that is more urban, with business developing and high-density housing under construction to meet the demands of the increasing population that includes Chinese, Filipino and Sub-Saharan African migrant families.

Tadi and Panashe are first-generation immigrants from Zimbabwe whose parents have high expectations of them, wanting them to go to university to become engineers or project managers or something similar. As a teacher at McCarthy, I was troubled by their isolation from the rest of the student body. Perhaps because of this isolation they embraced Hip Hop clothing styles and language, trying to wear baseball caps instead of the school uniform, and listening to American rap music rather than the music chosen by their fellow students.

When McCarthy College was given an opportunity to work with Dr. Akesha Horton in 2012, a Fulbright Scholar from the US, in an innovative Hip Hop for Social Justice program for disaffected students, I leapt at the chance. By this time, I had already started my doctoral work, and I was particularly interested in the intersection of citizenship, social justice and technology. This seemed like an ideal learning opportunity for both the students and myself. Dr. Horton and I worked with a group of 12 students, from years seven to ten, who were selected either by teacher nomination or self-nomination. These students were removed from normal classes for four sessions, each lasting two hours. During this time, they examined Hip Hop culture from around the world, blogging about their experiences and using translation software to identify some of the common themes in Hip Hop music from Ghana, France and Romania. They also brainstormed about important social justice issues in their local communities, before writing a Hip Hop song and recording it at a local studio that had donated the time and the services of a sound engineer.

The Hip Hop program had limited success. Most students wrote their lyrics, performed their songs and mastered the recordings, but they played them once or twice to their friends and then seemed to forget the whole project. I saw no changes in their participation in social justice and the local community.

This wasn’t true for Tadi and Panashe, however. For them, the Hip Hop for Social Justice program was an unqualified success. These young men were engaged in something they could relate to, and it seemed to pay dividends. At one point, late in the project, when it looked like we might not be able to go to the studio, the other students shrugged their shoulders, but Tadi and Panashe would meet me every morning in the schoolyard, ask for updates and suggest other studios we could contact.

Ultimately, they wrote a two-minute rap song called ‘Six Hours of Pain’ that highlighted an issue they felt was important in school—the fact that they had to have the school-issue backpack, rather than a backpack of their choice. It is a densely packed recording, full of clever wordplay and allusions to other songs and important people in their lives. Perhaps the highlight for me was how Tadi and Panashe used the motto of the school, ‘Integrity, Justice and Peace’ as part of their song, and challenged the school to treat them with the equality they felt they deserved. They introduced biblical allusions, likening students walking to school with these heavy backpacks to Jesus carrying his cross. Finally, they poked fun at other music and dance styles, singing that they looked like they were ‘shuffling’ under the weight of these heavy bags.

Overall, the work was incredibly intelligent and mature. Although Tadi and Panashe were not the highest academically achieving students at McCarthy, the lyrics from ‘Six Hours of Pain’ clearly demonstrated that they had a critical and cultural literacy that is not often recognised in schools.

In addition to recording the song, the highlight for Tadi and Panashe was meeting the Hip Hop artist L-Fresh, a young man from South Western Sydney and a Street University Ambassador, who had agreed to work with the students on the process of writing. L-Fresh is only a few years older than the students in the Hip Hop program, and the atmosphere in the room changed when he started speaking. This was an important point of reflection for me: while I might gain the grudging respect of the students as a teacher, L-Fresh was accorded respect because he was involved in the industry. The students were rapt when he agreed to ‘freestyle’ for them.

I was initially disappointed at Panashe’s and Tadi’s choice of subject matter; to me, school bags didn’t seem like a suitable social justice topic, and I remember trying to encourage them to write about something else, like racism or refugees. I realise now that I was trying too hard to impose my concepts about social justice onto them, and not allowing enough time for the process to work. The following year, when we ran Hip Hop for Social Justice a second time, Tadi and Panashe wrote their own individual songs, each with powerful lyrics about what it was like being a young black man growing up in a predominantly white culture.

This episode was important to my future work for two reasons. First, I realised that while a lesson may not have reached the end point I intended, it won’t have necessarily failed as a learning experience for the students; Panashe and Tadi’s learning was evident, despite my beliefs about what they should have focused on. Second, I realised it was inappropriate to expect students to develop a critical consciousness in the space of a couple of hours. That such development requires long periods of growth and reflection was exemplified by the way Tadi and Panashe had matured as artists and songwriters between the first and the second Hip Hop for Social Justice courses at McCarthy. Both students took part in the Justice Citizens program that I ran later that year. Panashe especially, because of his experiences with Hip Hop for Social Justice, was a big supporter of the project and was able to use the skills he had learnt during Hip Hop for Social Justice to help his group during Justice Citizens.

My experience with Tadi and Panashe was instructive for another reason. I had begun the Hip Hop project with some clear ideas about suitable topics for young people to be socially active about. For the most part, these were weighty matters that dominated the news cycle at the time, for example, domestic violence, refugees, and substance abuse. Instead, the students wanted to write, sing, perform, and make films about topics that were vitally important to them but I thought were ‘small’ or limited.

This reaction exemplifies one of the main fissures in civics and citizenship education today. Some scholars have adopted a Habermasian notion of the public sphere, and the modernist notion of idealised public discourse. From this frame, citizenship should be about weighty issues of public thought, with other topics seen as trivial, commercial or unimportant. More recent postmodernist scholars have argued that this trivialisation of the public sphere is not necessarily a bad thing; it reflects a broadening of the public sphere to include diversities of viewpoint that were previously ignored and unheard.