Abstract
This essay opens in a dorm room where high school students are getting to know one another and the staff at the Youth Theological Initiative, which brings together a diverse group of young people for three intense weeks. In this particular room, four young women and an adult staff member adopt a storytelling practice that facilitates a trusting and respectful relationship. Corrie argues that this kind of relationship-building between youth and adults is counter-cultural and yet central to peacebuilding. The work of teaching conflict transformation with youth begins with a commitment to create subcultures that resist the larger social forces that impact the relationships among youth and between youth and adults.
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Notes
- 1.
I have changed the staff member’s name in order to protect.
- 2.
Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 24. Wink refers particularly to Eph 3:10; 6:12 and Col 1:15–20.
- 3.
Wink, 29.
- 4.
YTI Handbook, 2012 edition, 4.
- 5.
I derive this phrase from the recent documentary, The War on Kids (2009), which pulls together many of the points I suggest in the discussion that follows. The film focuses on the US context, including federal and state education policies, current trends in adolescent mental healthcare, and the juvenile justice system. Cevin D. Soling, The War on Kids. DVD. (Bronx: Spectacle Films 2009).
- 6.
John Paul Lederach, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2003), 14.
- 7.
David F. White, “Social Construction of Adolescence,” in Awakening Youth Discipleship: Christian Resistance in a Consumer Culture, eds., Brian J. Mahan, Michael Warren, and David F. White (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008), 14.
- 8.
Ibid., 4.
- 9.
White points to G. Stanley Hall’s seminal 1904 work Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education as the beginning of the invention of adolescence as a distinct phase of psychological development marked by “storm and stress” that must be contained and redirected for the good of youth and society. According to Thomas Hine, this theory became a useful tool in winning the case for compulsory attendance in high school. The high school was thus conceived as a “holding tank” for youth, and as such has developed into a highly regimented, adult controlled space that often abstracts youth from meaningful work and moral agency. See Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager: A New History of the American Adolescent Experience (New York: Perennial, 1999), 162. Others recently have extended this argument to take note of the role of student loan debt, zero-tolerance school policies, the overuse of ADHD medications and the pacifying effect of media and advertising. See Juliet B. Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (New York: Scribner, 2005); Henry Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? (New York: Palgrave, 2009); and Bruce E. Levine, “8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance,” AlterNet, July 31, 2011, accessed August 20, 2014: http://www.alternet.org/story/151850/8_reasons_young_americans_don%27t_fight_back%3A_how_the_us_crushed_youth_resistance.
- 10.
The film Race to Nowhere (2010) documents the increasing stress young people face trying to stay competitive for college admissions. Maimone Attia, Race to Nowhere. DVD. Directed by Vicki Abeles and Jessica Congdon (Lafayette, CA: Reel Link Films, 2009). For a critical assessment of the value of homework, see Alfie Kohn, The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing (Philadelphia, PA: DaCapo Press, 2007).
- 11.
Hine, 162.
- 12.
Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society, 102. See also pp. 69–107.
- 13.
Victor M. Rios, “The Hypercriminalization of Black and Latino Male Youth in the Era of Mass Incarceration,” in Racializing Justice, Disenfranchising Lives: The Racism, Criminal Justice, and Law Reader, ed. Manning Marable, Ian Steinberg, and Keesha Middlemass (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 17. Also, Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society, 93.
- 14.
In my view, the Black Lives Matter movement is revolutionary both in its ability to identify the complex dynamics of the “principalities and powers” that dominate their lives, but also because it is conceived and led by young people. See http://blacklivesmatter.com and http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/make-it-right/meet-the-woman-behind-black-lives-matter-the-hashtag-that-became-a-civil-rights-movement (accessed June 27, 2015).
- 15.
Hine, 254, 269.
- 16.
See, John Taylor Gatto, “The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher,” in Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (Gabiola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2005), 1–19, particularly 5–6.
- 17.
See Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1993) and The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999).
- 18.
Chap Clark, Hurt 2.0: Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011).
- 19.
Clark, 25.
- 20.
Giroux, “The Demonization of Youth,” in Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today’s Youth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 37, 40. See also Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society, 91.
- 21.
Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society, 51. He quotes Madeline Bunting, “In Our Angst over Children We’re Ignoring the Perils of Adulthood,” The Guardian/UK (November 13, 2006).
- 22.
Hine, 11.
- 23.
Hine examines the contribution of young people to the American Revolution, the First and Second Great Awakenings, the Civil Rights Movement, and the anti-Vietnam war movement. Cf. Hine, 76–137; 258–265. I would argue that we saw glimmers of this in the Occupy Wall Street movement and are now seeing this spirit in the Black Lives Matter movement.
- 24.
Henry Giroux, “Hollywood and the Demonization of Youth: Beating up on Kids,” in Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today’s Youth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), 35–36. Giroux’s point becomes clear when one reviews the discourse around the Occupy Wall Street movement. See Allison Kilkenny, “Correcting the Abysmal ‘New York Times’ Coverage of Occupy Wall Street,” The Nation, September 29, 2001, http://www.thenation.com/blog/163626/correcting-abysmal-new-york-times-coverage-occupy-wall-street#. Accessed March 12, 2013. This was a foretaste of what we subsequently witnessed in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere, where youth protesting police brutality were simultaneously characterized as “thugs” and dismissed as unruly youth in need of a good slap. See https://youthradio.org/news/article/young-baltimore-speaks-i-dont-enjoy-being-a-part-of-this-i-feel-obligated-to-do-this/. Accessed June 27, 2015.
- 25.
Clark, 39, 40.
- 26.
Hersh, A Tribe Apart: Inside the Heart of American Adolescence (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1998), 364, 366.
- 27.
Clark, 40, see also 20.
- 28.
Christian Smith, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). See also Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
- 29.
YTI Staff Handbook, 2012 edition, 4.
- 30.
Gen 1:27; Ps 139:14; Rom 8:14–17.
- 31.
I Cor 12; Eph 2:20–22; 4:1–16.
- 32.
Mt. 5:38–48;18:15–20; 21–35; Luke 15.
- 33.
I Tim 4:12.
- 34.
Luke 22:26.
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Corrie, E. (2016). Crossing Over: Transforming the War on Kids Through Ministries with Youth. In: Ott Marshall, E. (eds) Conflict Transformation and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56840-3_6
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