Professionals whose mission is to accompany young people are confronted with crucial situations forcing them to reexamine their practices, their working methodologies and even their mission. This is a statement with which Alain Ruffion agrees and if in most of the history of humanity, education has consisted in transmitting traditions, modern societies have oriented the educational mission differently.
They have demanded that education should prepare rising generations to adapt to the social transformations generated primarily by the economy. Despite some ideological shocks in the 1970s, it can be said that until recent years “economism” has prevailed in education in the form of values such as the primacy of having over being, of competition over solidarity, of the present over the future, of the individual over the community, of the virtual over the real, of the sign over identity, of the image over the very thing. When serious problems, such as lack of employment and AIDS, brutally upset the usual data of education, professionals found themselves confronted with the failure of a model and a system of values.
An alarming observation
For several years now, we have observed in our training practice of actors in the educational and social field that they are seized by a side-effect of astonishment resulting in the emergence of counter-attitudes towards their audiences. Faced with feelings of failure, powerlessness, uselessness and even social guilt, adults who intervene directly with young people express their fear of being caught at fault; of not being able to provide them with concrete answers: “We have nothing to offer them and we don’t know what to say to them”. In this respect, the recent social events linked to the IPC and the day of 7 April devoted to AIDS clearly showed us to what extent the superimposition of two speeches made to young people on employment and sexuality (the two major modes of emancipation of youth) could, if we were not careful, close off all possibilities of project and future for them. It is as if all the speeches made to young people meant in hollow: “Everything stops with you”.
But precisely nothing stops and history has shown us that speeches of despair or even compassion, instead of facilitating change and evolution, rather encourage regression, rigidity, archaism, the transformation of victims into scapegoats and violence of a sacrificial nature. Also at a time when everyone agrees on the need to enter into dialogue with young people and the importance of setting up expression and discussion groups, there is an urgent need for institutions and professionals to reinvest their symbolic function, their place and their role. It is on this condition that these groups of expression and speech will be able to be of some use, because the first thing you need when you speak is to be heard. The urgency here is not to be preoccupied primarily with what we can respond well, but to create the conditions for an elaborate listening process.
