Youth Workers as Character Builders: Constructing a Socialist Alternative

Abstract

The rhetoric of youth work for two decades has proclaimed the death of character building as the guiding principle for work with young people, its traditions buried alongside Lord Baden-Powell and the end of the British Empire. Thus, at the beginning of this chapter, the reader might be preparing for a smug and sarcastic reflection on the eccentricity of a past practice, where young men were fighting fit, keeping their hands well away from their genitals and young women were busy preparing to be mothers, fit for little else. Indeed, within the serious attempt of Butters (1978) to analyse the historical development of the Youth Service he declares that a traditional leadership model has been transcended. Into its place of predominance have surged the person-centred and community-orientated perspectives fostered by Albemarle (HMSO, 1960) and Milson-Fairbairn (DES, 1969). Character building is dead, long live personal growth! And yet, if one works within and makes pilgrimage around youth work’s historic sites of coercion and compliance, the real world tells a different tale.