Once again, Sven has got me thinking. His most recent post deals with the history of youth rights, and he mentioned an interest in writing something on the topic. The history of our movement is a topic that I find endlessly fascinating. I know deep in my gut that what we are doing is incredibly important, and some day when the unborn school children of generations yet to come sit down in their autodidactic learning centers and pick up a history book the figures and stories and organizations I work with now will be written down there.

Since I’ve always had an interest in history that exists outside of my passion for youth rights, a union of the two is even more fascinating. To better understand who we are as a movement and where we are going we need to learn where we’ve been. Something that is all the more difficult when we don’t have powerful leaders who stay in charge of a movement for 50 years to tie everyone together. For better or worse our movement is too transitory (or dynamic if you want a better spin). Up to this point at least leaders have come and gone, groups have come and gone, and often each group doesn’t know of or feel connected to ones that came before.

I’ve attempted to bring people together with the creation of the Youth Rights Leader’s List, an awesome though under-utilized e-mail list for folks who were part of the movement back in the ’70s, and those who are part of it today. In theory at least it serves as a place for a wide range of individuals to discuss the wide brush strokes that govern the over-arching vision of the organization, and to connect the present with the past.

I’ve also created the Youth Rights Network, a wikipedia style resource meant to be a dynamic, collaborative, living history of our movement. Written as its happening, not decades later. A lot more needs to be done with it and a lot more needs to be filled in, sadly some original sources I really wanted to use to fill it in are not being made available to me which is quite frustrating, but I press on.

I think the Youth Rights Network is a good model for creating our history. Writing a book is a largely exclusive method, usually one, sometimes two or three, sit down and write a book, and when they are all done allow others to see it. Rarely can an entire community contribute, rarely can anyone see it until its fully finished. If Sven and other youth rights history buffs like Scott are willing, I’d very much like to make youth rights history a serious effort of the movement. A broad, genuine, youth & adult written history. Full of primary material and perspectives from participants in their own words, all put up on the web for everyone to use and access.

We can certainly seek to publish it at some point too, but for now I think the YRN would suit our purposes greatly.

As Sven notes, children’s rights and youth rights are linked. To do, as he says a complete taxonomy of the movement requires inclusion of the more protectivist strain of our movement. Women’s rights had different, sometimes opposing ideologies, and we do as well. I think it helps to better define who we are to have good knowledge of who we aren’t, namely children’s rights groups.

The focus I believe should be on the more liberation minded youth rights groups, and there are a good number of different branches that should be included. I think it would be fascinating to see how everyone came to the same conclusion from different places. Tie everything together and perhaps show the subtle difference we all bring to the table based on our own experiences and backgrounds.

For example, we typically think of history as a continuum. Someone creates something which is built upon later, and that is built upon later, etc. But it doesn’t always work that way. I don’t think NYRA can trace its roots back to John Holt, Richard Farson or Ann Arbor Youth Liberation. Its entirely possible that the folks who founded NYRA had never even heard of the movement in the ’70s, yet we carry on their legacy.

Can it be said we are influenced by them? I don’t know. I think we are definitely unique from the movement in the ’70s. Close enough for us to widely recognize we are part of the same thing, but not enough I feel to say we are directly or indirectly influenced by them. In many ways the movement of the late ’90s reinvented the wheel. We can trace our roots back to the ASFAR mailing list and the Y-Rights mailing list and the discussions that emerged from those. Yet at the same time there are links. Individuals such as Matt Walcoff and Keith Mandell were members of the National Child Rights Alliance. Heck even I was a member of it (I signed up just a few months before it disbanded in 1999). Susan Wishnetsky, of ASFAR, was a member of a youth liberation group back in the seventies, the Three O’Clock Lobby. But she didn’t found ASFAR nor had as much of an impact on its path as other members. So everything is a complicated web. A fascinating web. Something I’d like to put on the web.

Not only do we have to consider different time periods and different ideological bents (children’s rights vs. youth rights), but different areas (education reform vs. legal rights vs. parenting), and additionally different places around the world. North America is just one part of the youth rights movement. What about KRATZA in Germany? Or Taking Children Seriously that formed in the United Kingdom? Plus, by saying the movement began with John Holt & Ann Arbor, what about all the movements before that to lower age restrictions in the late ’60s? Can we make any claims on the hippies? Or the Free Speech movement in Berkeley? When the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1971 and drinking ages were lowered to 18 in all sorts of states in the ’70s, how do we account for that when they weren’t at all connected to Ann Arbor Youth Liberation? What of the “youth voice movement” that talks about adultism and bigotry toward youth, yet doesn’t adopt the more radical objectives that more proper “youth rights” groups adopt? Do we count them as part of our movement? What are their roots?

What about the whole education reform movement? What about Sudbury Valley and Summerhill? Where do they fit in our understanding of the movement? What of all the free and democratic schools that emerged over the last 30 years? Are they tied together or distinct? Are some in and some out? Where do we draw the line?

This is the benefit I think of having a website as opposed to a book. We can include everything in a website. We don’t have a page limit. Plus we can more plainly show the connections between everyone with the handy-dandy link feature. Wikipedia thrives on creating a web of knowledge with constant references to other articles and link to others and keeps readers bouncing between many subjects. I think its a fascinating format and one we should use to its fullest extent.

Books by their nature are linear. It is the curse of paper. There is a beginning and an end, and to make the whole product coherent you have to structure it in such a way (except of course Choose Your Own Adventure books, which are fucking awesome). Websites need no such constraints. They are a web, not a path. At times they can be linear and at times not. Just like history. This project is very important, and very needed, and very far reaching. I know I can’t be the only one out there who gets excited about it, and I know I can’t do it alone.

So who’s with me?

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 15th, 2005 at 11:19 am and is filed under Youth Rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.