Located as we are in a global predicament of intense and multiple emergencies, now manifested most by the COVID-19 crisis, and with the imminent collapse of ecological and economic systems that global warming/climate change forebode, we must accept that new economic-ecologic-social-political systems are now inevitable. If all these issues must be addressed and if the worth of education as learning and enabling must be revived, it is imperative that we deploy imaginaries that challenge many of our accepted and institutionalized criteria and yardsticks. As targets of the expanding capitalist market, youth have been rendered more consumers than citizens, more a submissive and pliant audience to mass media than active agents of their own destinies. The summative results of intense and prolonged disembedding of youth from their original provenances, life-worlds, and organic inter-subjectivities are to be seen in the extent to which members of disadvantaged societies are now marked by deep “erosions.” 5 Such erosions include the loss of local knowledge and skills, the sense of belonging to specific communities and locales, the resilience and rejuvenation abilities to tide over catastrophes, and the social capabilities to discern and choose between long-term and short-term goals and values. 3 The onset of a collective amnesia of languages and cultures and the subsequent dysglossia of several long-evolved cultures and life-worlds must also be laid at the door of mass, formal education. All of this is capped by the spread of “epistemicide” or the death of epistemologies of the South, which remains the hidden and unregistered reason for the widespread disorientation and disarray that one sees among the “educated youth” of marginalized and disenfranchised communities. Worse yet, the cultural vacuum and the social dissimulation that poorly conceived education triggers among youth are issues that have become serious social challenges in many societies.Īs precariats in the global economies that have been unraveling over the past decade, youth now bear the biggest burden of failed economic, social, and political agendas.
The rise of criminality, corruption, and violence among even those burdened with the tag of being the “educated unemployed” can be seen as both fallouts and survival strategies to which the disadvantaged resort-in order to tide over poverty and the multiple disadvantages. 2 India’s youth who subscribe to right-wing and religious fundamentalisms, Nigeria’s extremist and violent outfit that has come to be labelled as “Boko-Haram,” and the large number of armed youth militia groups in various parts of the world bear testimony to the compounded failure of the political economies of several countries and their mass higher education systems.
Reports from Africa and South Asia highlight how vast masses of youth now crowd into ever-expanding cities and form a large restive population as their formal education assures them no appropriate employment.
Within this, youth are now subjected to processes of alienation, humiliation, and violence that render them either invisibilized and disenfranchised citizens or violent anti-state and anti-social actors. In a context where the expansion and legitimization of capital in all spheres and the subsequent disembedding of societies have become all too common, there is now a global population that consists of an over-privileged transnational class versus a large mass of disempowered populations. Mainstream approaches that call for enabling education so that the “global village” and the “connected society” can be realized or promoting “education as a public good”-without attendant and relevant structural support to realize this-make a mockery of conditions where there is extant destruction of local dwelling places, villages, and societies. Stephen Sterling’s note and the subsequent comments raise key concerns about the challenges of education for a new future.
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