Young people need new kinds of work, not just education to boost the present economic system

Another post with my thoughts on issues raised by the new Spanish social work journal, Azarbe.

This article also notes the ‘invisibility’ of young people’s needs in the Spanish welfare state: this must be a big issue for many European countries when there are high rates of youth unemployment. When I worked on unemployment projects in the last financial crisis of the 1980s, there was a real concern for young people’s life chances, even if the projects were a bit self-serving for the organisations providing them.

But do we really think that just having some work experience or improving people’s education is enough. I think we need to develop new kinds of work that allow young people to make a contribution to their society, not just improve their education to fit our current economic models. After all, young people’s education has been strongly targeted in developing countries on the assumption this will strengthen those countries’ economies, but the result is that many African countries have a lot of highly educated unemployed young people. Education doesn’t develop economies without government and entrepreneurs developing activities in the economy that can actually employ young people.