59. "Teen takeovers" as positive developments

The New York Times published an article Wednesday quoting Haile Irving, age 17, and Devin Mitchell, age 16, of Atlanta, Georgia, who “delivered a speech titled ‘Re-Imagining Third Spaces’” in front of public school students, the mayor of Atlanta, and a school superintendent. Haile and Devin “argued that teenagers need their own spaces, modeled after co-working spots downtown to do homework and art projects, host charity events, or hold pop-up shops to sell goods and services.”

This idea of teen-centered third spaces could well form one of the articles in a new Constitution for Public Education—spaces specifically dedicated to paid and volunteer youth knowledge work that are not inside of, but parallel to schools.

I reference this article, however, not only for the important third space idea, but also because it is reported in the context of youth criminality: the article is titled “What Are Teen Takeovers and Why Are Police Struggling to Stop Them?” The article goes on to describe teen takeovers as “large, quickly organized gatherings of youths…in downtowns, parks and leafy neighborhoods. They can be noisy, boisterous and at times violent, their impact often amplified on television, especially in conservative media outfits like Fox News.”

Another young man quoted in the article, Louis Custard of Detroit, says: “What I see is a bunch of kids trying to escape the modality of their regular day-to-day life.”

The article hints, without being explicit, that teen takeovers are largely phenomena involving black youth. But “trying to escape the modality of their regular day-to-day life” obviously applies to the enormous numbers of white young people, too, who are caught in cycles of addiction—to drugs, alcohol, and social media. (I should add, teen takeovers may well be part of white youth culture, too, just less widely reported in the sensationalistic press. I don’t have the data, but apparently, neither do the New York Times reporters, or they would have been more explicit.)

As is usual in public discussions of what young people need, meaningful employment is barely mentioned. The article talks about basketball, recreation, their “urge to socialize into more constructive activities,” “voice,” and “looking for attention,” but only mentions economic factors twice. One mention is the quote above about pop-up shops selling goods and services, i.e., side hustles. The other is distressingly oblique: citing Ashley Jennings, 17, a member of the Youth Advisory Panel for the Detroit Board of Police Commissioners: “It takes money and transportation to get to the suburbs, where teenagers can bowl or watch a movie and avoid the city’s 10:00 PM curfew. Teen takeovers by contrast, are free and accessible.”

American cities in the second-half of the 19th and early 20th centuries had very similar issues. Large numbers of young white people migrating from rural to urban areas, including children of immigrants not yet integrated into the urban economy, often disturbed the peace until the corralling of white teenagers into high schools in the High School Movement of the 1910s and 20s. A similar process was repeated for black teenagers in the 1950s and 60s following the second great migration from rural south to urban north after the Second World War.

But the solution of “school” and “recreation” for the problem of young people’s dramatic and, in my view, healthy energy is sadly patronizing and demeaning. Adolescents do not need to be, and do not want to be, treated like small children. They believe they can be useful. Yes, they want to have fun. But ask them: they want to have fun and be useful, too.

Being useful, we must learn to insist, is an economic role, that is, it relates to the production and exchange of value. The regular day-to-day modality for young people in the United States is a systematic postponement and therefore obstruction of their economic roles in a knowledge economy. Parallel institutions that allow young people to organize themselves around paid knowledge work, third spaces that are both fun and economically productive, are inventions that attract young people’s bodies, minds, and spirits. Students need much more than a “voice.” They need complete roles in which to exercise their vibrant adolescent power.

We are so frightened of the physical, emotional, and intellectual power of young people that reporters and politicians look immediately to the police to contain it. Instead, we should ask: What can it do for us? How can teenagers help us meet the many troubling needs that confront our time?

The answer in every community, rich and poor, is that young people can build positive, fun, future-directed relationships around the exchange of knowledge. They can develop relationships with each other, with younger children, and with adults. Wherever a group of young people is paid to do this kind of knowledge work, younger children lap up the attention and skill building, adults are impressed by the teenagers’ ability to connect and to act responsibly, and the young people themselves develop new individual and collective identities as citizens who can be useful, productive, and inspiring.

This is true regardless of the wealth of the community. All teenagers want to be useful and all younger children want the teenagers’ attention. It is true regardless of the religion, ethnicity, culture, or politics of the community. Conservatives, liberals, radicals, racists, and bigots have teenagers who are bored and frustrated, and they have younger children who need more time, attention, and help than older people are able to give.

You might worry about the potential of the adolescents to corrupt younger children or to corrupt their peers, but think a minute: the corruption is already taking place in wildly out-of-control ways because younger children naturally imitate the culture of the teenagers, and that culture, currently, is mostly at the mercy of horrible commercial interests. Our proposal is to fund a new culture of knowledge-based relationships directed towards thoughtful development of the intellectual, artistic, and physical vitality of every community.

You can be sure that many middle-schoolers already know all about teen takeovers and are watching them closely, waiting their turn.

What we need is for teens to take over a large part of the cultural rebuilding of the country. We can invite them to plan that takeover by offering them some significant wages to do knowledge work in their home communities. The money is already available to pay them, but we pay it instead to the police, unproductively, to try to control adolescent energy. The middle-schoolers will watch and be impressed by a knowledge-based takeover, too, and will eagerly prepare for their own turn at being useful as a new way to grow up begins to take shape.