YALSA, too, continually and cynically \u201cpunches down\u201d on young adults.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been doing some cherry-picking of my own. The same deficit vision of young people on display in ALA Direct<\/em>reappears in YALSA\u2019s new \u201cSummer Learning Approach.\u201d This new programming recommendation indulges curricular goals unsuited for public libraries along with the always ill-defined \u201cconnected learning\u201d agenda, as well as the desperate and equally specious \u201csummer slide\u201d clich\u00e9 that remains contested among researchers. Further, a critical review of the association\u2019s Core Professional Values statement yields the same deficit-based assumptions about youth: \u201cresponding to teen needs,\u201d <\/em>\u201cbuilds and maintains knowledge of teens\u2019 social, emotional, mental, and physical development\u201d etc., etc., etc.<\/p>\n For all the professional capacity represented in these institutional <\/em>documents, there is no attention to end user value. Moreover, the association\u2019s current \u201cRe-envisioning YALSA to Support Our New Mission\u201d (see YALSA Blog 3 November 2016) reproduces what YALSA usually does \u2013 and says nothing about value for young adults.<\/p>\n But YALSA\u2019s cynical punching down on youth gets worse than mere institutional aspirations. From another official blog post, we learn about \u201cBullying Prevention Month.\u201d The cynicism is so deeply ingrained in this discourse that the conversation assumes only youth-on-youth bullying.<\/p>\n Teen birth rates have plummeted, crime rates are at all-time lows, and graduation rates are at all-time highs. Yet official<\/em>YALSA blog posts continue to sound the alarm about these tired moral panics. Some teen girls do get pregnant. But teen moms gave birth to both Bill Clinton and Barak Obama. Can\u2019t YALSA at least acknowledge<\/em>\u00a0that the rate has dropped?<\/p>\n Such official statements are not simply meaningless. They produce a dire, misleading vision of increasingly dangerous youth, self-destructive, and\/or deficient \u2013 requiring all manner of \u201cpreventions\u201d that libraries cannot prove they meaningfully address.<\/p>\n Why ALA and YALSA feel compelled to constantly regurgitate the \u201cteen problem\u201d wrapped in the same-old prevention talking points we\u2019ve heard from pedestrian sources for decades is beyond me.<\/p>\n Imagine talking about any other social group this way.<\/p>\n Why don\u2019t librarians just Google<\/strong> any of the thousands of sites dispensing these worn-out homilies over the last quarter century?<\/p>\n Librarians are supposed to be better<\/em> than that. YA librarians, in particular, should be up in arms protesting<\/em> anti-youth bigotry, not reproducing it!<\/p>\n Library professionals need to model using the best<\/em> information, advancing innovative and critical thinking, not recycling clich\u00e9s, stereotypes, and phony moral panics.<\/p>\n The most recent flavor of privileging youth incapacities appears in this November\u2019s YALSA Town Hall summons. Come one, come all! Hear about how libraries can assuage the kiddies\u2019 hurty feelings about what the adult <\/em>electorate did to the country! Partisan politics aside; I can\u2019t fathom YALSA calling a Town Hall had the other candidate won!<\/p>\n What evidence connects library service to demonstrably<\/em> \u201chelping youth cope with the challenges, stress, and even threats,\u201d election or no. Further, the Town Hall promises resources to \u201cbuild empathy and understanding among youth\u201d \u2013 all easy to measures, right?<\/p>\n Wrong. Libraries are not positioned or prepared for these things. Nor do young adults\u00a0need fixing from libraries.<\/p>\n Rather than chasing these indefinable emotional concerns or electoral politics, what if Town Halls punched up instead and developed audiences of professionals concerned with the widespread poverty more and more youth live in since 2008? What if YALSA concerned itself with collecting information for teachers about how schools and the FBI are eroding their students\u2019 civil rights and intellectual freedoms? What about fortifying local organizations with information regarding youth immigration policy or defending religious minority rights?<\/p>\n Youth don\u2019t need another do-gooding adult agenda punching-down on them.<\/p>\n Have you seen <\/em>the news? From coast to coast youth are organizing in middle and high schools, in churches and synagogues, they\u2019re marching in the streets and in the hallways, they\u2019re on the radio and all over the Internet in creative and innovative ways connecting through their own interest groups \u2013 be they age, race, social class, sexual orientation, religion, or region.<\/p>\n
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