On Doing Democracy in “Third Places”: Youth Citizenship Education

Anthony Bernier, Project Director, YouthFacts.org | August 2025 

Among the vast numbers of books and articles published each year touting youth and promoting youth organizations, rarely is there anything new. Indeed it is all too expected to read cliches about building agencies and creating spaces in which youth “participate.” Certainly, public libraries have engaged in this rhetoric for decades. 

But for all our claims about being youth “advocates,” “partners,” and “allies,” for all the conference presentations and annual book awards, for the decades of institutional visibility of “youth services” in national and state-wide organizations, one finds the appearance of libraries in non-library literature absent. 

While libraries proclaim we’re the “heart of community youth experience,” few others studying youth feel the same. Even in a collection of writings advocating youth in multi-generational democratic spaces, “libraries,” predictably, do not even rate mention in the index.

How could issues of youth and democracy and society press more urgently than now? We’re going to need people who remember valuing these things.

Library rhetoric aside, organizations committed to quality youth experiences can engage a fitful debate about what it takes to build with youth rather than upon them. 

In their newly edited collection, Canadian ethnographers Stephanie Gaudet and Caroline Caron, both full professors, pose the best articulation to date about how young people experience democratic education in organizations actively promoting and teaching with them. The work offers 3 distinct parts: one on theories of youth as citizens; one on educating youth into participatory democracy, and a final section examines case studies of youth making meaningful contributions to public (read “civic”) action.  

Authors offer responses about why so many organizations come up short with respect to youth and what they can do to get better. In analyzing 7 partner organizations, Doing Democracy in “Third Places:” Youth Citizenship Education (2025, University of Ottawa Press) offers much for organizations to learn. 

I hope libraries listen closely.

Among the collection’s most valuable contributions is a critique of the century old “youth development” paradigm as applied to field practice. Social theorists, sociologists, historians, anthropologists among others have criticized youth development for decades. But it is a rare and altogether overdue moment to see that critique finally “land” in the world of professional practice. Certainly, it would be a fool’s errand to search for professional publications that do not worship at the altar of youth development theory. 

This collection, at long last, challenges essentialist assumptions about young people and “adulthood” that informs nearly all professionalized youth services (in the disciplines of social work, education, law, certainly psychology, and librarianship). Further, Gaudet and Caron argue passionately for a view of youth citizenship that “rejects adult norms by dissolving the boundaries by which minors were historically viewed as ‘citizens in the making’ – in the name of a prejudice that presumed their age limited their intellect and autonomy.” (p. 42). 

For Gaudet and Caron and their co-authors, progressive organizations, inspired by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children (long ago adopted by all 196 countries, except only the United States and Somalia), envision a multi-generational approach characterized as “civic citizenship” in which adult allies plan initiatives for youth contributions before implementing them to check the exercise of too much adult influence. Achieving greater youth autonomy, they argue, requires practicing youth autonomy to a much greater extent than generally observable. 

There are other moments of sophisticated argument not commonly found in writing about youth organizations. Authors offer signpost warnings for youth to be skeptical and distrustful of adult power, (i.e.,“It’s like they were using students to promote their image” [p. 164]). Authors also warn about insensitivity to degrees of privileged youth (an all too rare critique in the U.S. of social class distinctions between youth) – something akin to both what I and our YouthFacts Principal Investigator, Dr. Mike Males, and I have called “Teen Panel Syndrome,” in which youth are “cherry-picked” to advance adult agendas.

Another all too rare focus advocates for programming outcomes (things that youth find actually changed for them), rather than organizations simplistically counting attendance or “sign-ups” as “success” indicators. Such outcomes include youth valuing new social connections with peers and adults, discovering new interests and finding new motivations, and contributing to meaningful projects. 

Still another very provocative insight offers how professionally trained and credentialled adults, in interposing their own learned practices, assumptions, and methods, often appear trained into poor listening and, inadvertently or not, enacting patronizing behaviors toward young people.

Ultimately, Doing Democracy in “Third Places” argues for what one contributor characterizes as “horizontal relationships” between adults and young people in which power relations, identities, and status roles become more flattened out rather than institutionally stratified in static professional hierarchies. Gaudet and Caron offer a simple aspiration: organizations must actively build for and value youth contributions not mere “participation.” 

At a time when the democratic sensibilities of the adult world appears wobbling on its axes, Doing Democracy in “Third Places” holds out hope for preparing young people to put it right.