Anthony Bernier, Project Director, YouthFacts.org | August 2025\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n 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 \u201cparticipate.\u201d Certainly, public libraries have engaged in this rhetoric for decades.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But for all our claims about being youth \u201cadvocates,\u201d \u201cpartners,\u201d and \u201callies,\u201d for all the conference presentations and annual book awards, for the decades of institutional visibility of \u201cyouth services\u201d in national and state-wide organizations, one finds the appearance of libraries in <\/span>non-library<\/span><\/i> literature absent.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n While libraries proclaim we\u2019re the \u201cheart of community youth experience,\u201d few others studying youth feel the same. Even in a collection of writings advocating youth in multi-generational democratic spaces, \u201clibraries,\u201d predictably, do not even rate mention in the index.<\/span><\/p>\n How could issues of youth and democracy and society press more urgently than now? We\u2019re going to need people who remember valuing these things.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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 <\/span>actively<\/span><\/i> 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 \u201ccivic\u201d) action.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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, <\/span>Doing Democracy in \u201cThird Places:\u201d Youth Citizenship Education<\/span><\/i> (2025, University of Ottawa Press) offers much for organizations to learn.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I hope libraries listen closely.<\/span><\/p>\n Among the collection\u2019s most valuable contributions is a critique of the century old \u201cyouth development\u201d 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 <\/span>critique finally \u201cland\u201d in the world of professional practice. Certainly, it would be a fool\u2019s errand to search for professional publications that do not worship at the altar of youth development theory.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This collection, at long last, challenges essentialist assumptions about young people and \u201cadulthood\u201d 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 \u201crejects adult norms by dissolving the boundaries by which minors were historically viewed as \u2018citizens in the making\u2019 \u2013 in the name of a prejudice that presumed their age limited their intellect and autonomy.\u201d (p. 42).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For Gaudet and Caron and their co-authors, progressive organizations, inspired by the United Nations <\/span>Convention on the Rights of Children<\/span><\/i> (long ago adopted by all 196 countries, except only the United States and Somalia), envision a multi-generational approach characterized as \u201ccivic citizenship\u201d in which adult allies plan initiatives for youth contributions <\/span>before<\/span><\/i> implementing them to check the exercise of too much adult influence. Achieving greater youth autonomy, they argue, requires <\/span>practicing<\/span><\/i> youth autonomy to a much greater extent than generally observable.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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.,\u201cIt\u2019s like they were using students to promote their image\u201d [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 \u201cTeen Panel Syndrome,\u201d in which youth are \u201ccherry-picked\u201d to advance adult agendas.<\/span><\/p>\n Another all too rare focus advocates for programming <\/span>outcomes<\/span><\/i> (things that youth find actually changed for them), rather than organizations simplistically counting attendance or \u201csign-ups\u201d as \u201csuccess\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Still another very provocative insight offers how professionally trained and credentialled adults, in interposing their own learned practices, assumptions, and methods, often appear <\/span>trained into poor listening<\/span><\/i> and, inadvertently or not, enacting patronizing behaviors toward young people.<\/span><\/p>\n Ultimately, Doing Democracy in \u201cThird Places\u201d <\/i>argues for what one contributor characterizes as \u201chorizontal relationships\u201d 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 <\/span>and Caron offer a simple aspiration: organizations must actively build for and value youth contributions not mere \u201cparticipation.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n At a time when the democratic sensibilities of the adult world appears wobbling on its axes, Doing Democracy in \u201cThird Places\u201d <\/i>holds out hope for preparing young people to put it right. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Doing Democracy in \u201cThird Places\u201d: Youth Citizenship Education Anthony Bernier, Project Director, YouthFacts.org | August 2025\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,8,7,9],"class_list":["post-161172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-citizenship","tag-democracy","tag-youth","tag-youth-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=161172"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161174,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161172\/revisions\/161174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=161172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=161172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=161172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}