Recently I was asked to contribute a ‘Think Piece’ to an international event organised in conjunction with an ongoing project designed to explore intragenerational relations. The preamble to the event suggested these relations might be viewed as “powerful potential spaces of learning and conviviality”, capable of “questioning discriminatory assumptions about age, capacity, and how intragenerational activity matters”. The key concepts would seem to be age and ageism, which are of interest to many, including those studying children’s philosophies or working with older and elderly people. The aim of the project is to consider “creative lifelong learning in order to reframe and enhance the educational and social inclusivity of intragenerational relations, human and more than human.” I interpret this as recognising that intragenerational relations are not always what they might be, and much can be done to improve them, not least holding onto the related concept of intergenerational relations as a useful provocation for examining what goes on within (the intra) through the prism of between (the inter). And recognising also that when we talk about such relations intra and inter are equally applicable to relations we have with non-human world.  

What follows is the substance of my contribution.

Arguably, to have concern for relationships between different generations is to concede to the belief that borders exist between them. It is also to question the presumed rarity of both intra and intergenerational learning. Believing this is likely rooted in the dominance of formal education, where particularly intergenerational learning is indeed rare. Thinking otherwise starts with observing life outside school, and reflecting on our everyday experience, interaction and engagement with people of similar ages but also those different. Certainly, there are many interactions in informal settings, as there are within wider, diverse age, familial networks. And then there are the many local interactions young people might have, with adult neighbours, bus drivers, doctors and so on. The point is these interactions are themselves informal rather formal. Notwithstanding, it’s entirely reasonable to be concerned that these experiences are waning, that many things happen to dissuade, particularly, intergenerational engagement.

I think of what is for many children the first ‘lesson’ on entering school, at age 4 or 5: the lecture on ‘Stranger Danger’. My own sons expressed confusion at this as I had always taught them not to be afraid of strangers, rather to talk to them on the basis that there are many interesting people out there, whom we might learn from, but who will also likely help us if needs be. A related anecdote of mine is of taking the bus with my eldest, then six. I told him to take a seat whilst I bought the tickets. I turned to see him sitting next to a confused elderly man, who happened to be the only person on the bus.

But then I am a community educator by profession, and perhaps even instinct. Which may be why I also purposefully didn’t intervene when an adult chastised the same son one day when he dropped litter. It takes a village to raise a child and all that. This is in contrast to my experience of doing the same only to be damned by the adult accompanying that young person: “who are you to say anything to my child?” It might be easy to conclude, as I have said in many a speech, that “we are fast approaching a situation where the only people who speak to children (beyond family) are those paid to do so.”

I offer these comments as a provocation designed to suggest our philosophical enquiries into intra, and inter, generational relations must reflect upon these sociologies and geographies … and the politics that influence them.

What then can we learn from these informal spaces and places and the activities of the educators who inhabit them? A number of things: firstly that voluntary association is implicit and highly valued, particularly as it focuses the minds of educators on the intrinsic motivations of those they are working with. Which further implies a concern for mutuality and conviviality, the demonstration of which facilitates access and inclusion. In sum, social context is in sharp focus and influences greatly the practice of informal and community education. And it’s worth noting such geographies make impossible the power dynamics that validate exclusion elsewhere, as in school; you can’t exclude someone from the street. Dialogue and negotiation are literally the only ‘behaviour management’ strategies available to practitioners. Which suggests all educators have something to learn from ‘the street’.

And yet policy makers typically view these geographies with distain, such is their presumption that public space is indivisible from ‘anti-social behaviour’, and the wider threats invoked by the Stranger Danger propagandists. Any sense of the street being a positive place of intergenerational interaction is consigned to history, a faint memory of a time when the views of urban anarchists and radicals were influential.

Invariably these prejudices are levelled at young people; the assumption is made that antisocial behaviour and young people’s behaviour are inseparable. And that intervening in social situations is not something for the public to get involved in; rather, this is the preserve of a growing band of state sponsored authoritarian and semi-authoritarian actors.

Others, with different inclinations, are subject to incorporation: street-based youth workers are expected to ‘divert; young people, ‘move them on’. When those workers resist, when they ask what the young people are doing that’s causing upset, all too often the response is “well nothing really; I simply don’t want them outside my house.” Presence, it seems, is the problem: yet another manifestation of an adult-centric, childist world view complicit in the marginalisation of young people, targeted at their intragenerational pursuits. Sometimes it seems we have gone from ‘children should be seen and not heard’ to ‘not seen and not heard’.

The ‘antisocial behaviour agenda’ is intrinsically linked to the wider youth justice agenda, itself increasingly premised on a similarly discriminatory view of young people as potential miscreants and criminals. Therein a temporal logic, rationalised and validated through the prism of ‘risk’. Young people are viewed as ‘at risk’, which might sound benevolent but is rooted in policy makers’ belief that, subject to having sufficient data about them, future problematic lives can be predicted, headed off, prevented. Which ought to give us pause for thought whenever we hear folk going on, and on, about ‘prevention’ and ‘early intervention’. One more prejudice then; a pre-judgement thatI call ‘at risk-ism’?

With this social context in mind, some years ago I embarked on a three and a half year project which aimed to tackle ‘anti-social behaviour’ through philosophical interventions. Which is to say (and this is a point I always make about philosophy: it cannot flourish, even exist, without dialogue, without social interaction) that this was more an exercise in encouraging pro-social behaviour.

We facilitated many intergenerational enquiries, particularly (early on) into the concept of antisocial behaviour. Beliefs crumbled under investigation, to be replaced by an appreciation of wider social ills, not least the impact of austerity on leisure services for all. Those involved shifted from wanting to stop things to wanting to create them; the focus moved from prevention to intergenerational social action.

There was new learning. We found the presumption that older and elderly people wanted to ‘help’ young people was nuanced; many stated they had little if any contact with young people and felt life was impoverished because of this; they were the ones benefitting from intragenerational relationships. Economic drivers were identified; people forced to move to find work, to realise opportunities. Families became fractured. And many adults were so busy working to pay the bills that they had little or no time to engage across the generations, or even within family life.

Our enquiries revealed older and elderly people often felt discriminated against, de-valued, subject to ageism and assumptions about what they are capable of, their behaviours surveilled and policed. Just like young people. A strange solidarity between the generations emerged; inter-generational dialogues provoked others ‘intra’, both young and old took new perspectives into their own conversations.

More followed; a contestation of the presumption of vulnerability. A dialogue nourished by Kate Brown’s powerful theory of ‘vulnerablisation’, as an identity imposed on some, by others, without regard for reasonableness. And which surely constrains agency and autonomy. Other theory helps too; Philippe Merieu speaks of the importance of these other geographies for young people’s intragenerational relations:

It is so important that teenagers are able to live elsewhere, in places where they can escape both family constraints and those of the systematic learning of rationale. In truth, it is this participation in social life within frameworks that are relatively free from the family and school sphere that guarantees the gradual emergence of autonomy in adolescence.

And then there’s ‘play’, another site of intragenerational dialogue. Whilst the Dobson report (now nearly 20 years old) defines play as ‘freely chosen’, the more recent articulation of ‘Positive Activities for Youth’ seems to infer it’s up for discussion as to what ‘positive’ is. And we know what happens then don’t we: adults will decide, rather than young people? Is play to become an historical artefact too?

Concern for decision-making takes us the popular narrative of ‘participation’ and ‘youth voice’. Philosopher types are inclined to talk of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ versions of concepts. Community educators were forever schooled in a thick version of participation; a favoured definition revolves around the argument that ‘when decisions significantly affect people they have a right to be involved in the making of those decisions’. Yes, a right. It always seemed to me that ‘voice’: simply letting people speak exemplified a ‘thinner’, impoverished, version, more in-line with simply taking part. So, I’m not sure we have made much progress there’ those disposed to democratic education have a great deal to do. Of which, there’s always been plenty to learn from John Dewey. Relevant to both the discussion on intra and inter-generational relations is Dewey’s observation that a unique and defining feature of school is age-segregation, which few register. For this reason, our experience, whether we are young or old, of informal and community education may be vital as these practices deliberately set out to disrupt and dissolve this segregation. For example, young people of different ages learn together and often also engage in intergenerational activities with older and elderly people in their communities. Which reminds me of the visits I’ve made to Scottish community education centres with English youth workers. Almost always they ask: “Isn’t there conflict between different aged users?” To which the host workers reply: “Yes, great, isn’t it?” A nod to a philosophy that believes even tense moments of interaction can and should be viewed as sites of intergenerational learning.

These are not ‘pupils’, arguably a label applied to young people to validate the systematic temporal discrimination meted out in school, with its bell and ‘clock time’, that asserts beginnings and endings regardless of anything they might say. Conversely, in the education that takes place in civil society settings these are, simply, young people. Time is negotiable, works differently. These are places where ‘Age-related expectations’ are regulated, ignored. Which is a world away from school teachers reflecting on the pressures they are under, and citing ‘ARE’ targets as the worst of the lot. Which is why it’s worrying that many seem immune to the irony of the question: ‘What if these young people simply had more time?’

All this is to repeat that in ‘generational’ matters the essential point is to critically examine the temporal and spatial aspects of what’s going on.

You want more? What of the physical abuse of ‘Finger Gym’ that conflicts with millennia of evidence about infant child development, the deliberate attempt to accelerate children’s fine motor skills so they can write at an earlier age, all in the name of ‘getting ahead’? What they really need is a temporally-appreciative education premised on ‘present-tense functioning’, rhythm and pace. Which might also challenge the recent emergence and ubiquity of ‘trauma-informed practices’ that implicitly look back, relying as they do on the presumed latency of adverse childhood experiences, to bring, it is argued, a benevolent spin to ‘behaviour management’. In practice though this seems, again, more concerned with headingoff the assumed ‘risk’ of ‘negative futures’, a position that tends to degrade that other temporal phenomena, hope.

In sum, this is an education sans murs – without walls, that brings the outside in, that re-imagines ‘school’ and ‘teaching’ and ‘education’ in contesting (and often turning on its head) the conceptualisation of informal and community learningas second class, at best alternative, complementary and compensatory. What comes to the fore are relationships and relationality; social relations, within and between the generations, are ‘normalised’, valued. It requires a preparedness to acknowledge that to be human is to be social, in the widest sense of the word, demanding engagement with the diversity of the world that is human but also that that is not. It should be the focus of any educational activity in pursuit of democracy and intra and intergenerational justice.