Our FINAL blog: Our Story and Praxis

^{This blog post is excerpted from YouthxYouth: Pedagogy of Liberation}

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March 2020 crashed down with overwhelming force, and in the eerie quiet that followed, everything that had been left unresolved by so many generations before felt so very loud. Classrooms emptied and in homes across every country, young people sat before devices, bearing witness to adults (policy-makers, institutional leaders, etc.) gathering in urgent meetings to discuss "recovery." They spoke of young people as though they were distant constituents as the young people themselves, those whose sacred futures hung in the balance, were nowhere in these rooms. Once again, they had been rendered invisible and it was an old story, really. The story of education has long been written by those who are no longer learning it and designed by those who will never again sit in its classrooms. For generations, education has been something done to young people rather than with them, let alone by them. They have been treated as empty vessels awaiting wisdom, blank slates upon which predetermined visions of what the world should be may be inscribed (Freire, 1968).
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The invitation

Amidst this moment of collective grief and systemic unravelling, YouthxYouth was born. We extended an invitation, we asked young people across the world: What if you designed the future of education? And in response, in January 2021, nearly one thousand youth activists and adult allies gathered online for the first YouthxYouth Learning Festival. They came from over eighty countries united in their longing for education that served them wholly.

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What emerged from that festival was a community bound by a collective understanding of education as a practice of liberation. We saw this liberation as relational and collective, emerging in the space between us, and fundamentally in our willingness to see one another fully and to build together what none of us could build alone.

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We have witnessed such spaces before, thus we know their fragility and their power, how sacred they are, these clearings where people from different soils can gather without the harm that seems inevitable within Empire, weaving in service of our collective freedom. It is the careful tending of principles and the gentle cultivation of how we want to be with one another that created the web holding YouthxYouth.

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Young people as creators

We organise ourselves around the fundamental assertion that young people are not "the future." They are the present, they are creators, artists, organisers, and world-builders whose presence is essential to the transformation of education and the systems that surround it.

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When we relegate young people to the category of "future," we defer their agency, telling them to wait their turn and to accept the world as adults have made it until they are old enough to inherit the mistakes. Secondly, we absolve the responsibility of listening to them now, for being transformed by what they know, and for allowing their visions to reshape our present.

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But young people are already experts in the worlds they move through. They witness injustices that adults have learnt to look past and they carry knowledge that our schooling systems have tried to erase. They hold such immense capacity for imagination, without which we merely remain stuck believing that the worlds we dream of are impossible.

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Learning edges and material conditions

In sharing our origin story we also want to name something that YouthxYouth is reckoning with. When you create spaces rooted in service and when you gather people animated by the desire to give, you often attract precious beings whose generosity exceeds their willingness to name their own needs. It's a training in selflessness that asks us to disappear ourselves and it shows up in organising spaces. It requires us to consciously examine our conditioning and the ways in which the inevitable shaping we've received from old systems affects how we show up and organise.

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Additionally we want to name that many within the YouthxYouth community face material conditions that make showing up difficult, sometimes impossible. This is most definitely not incidental to the work of educational transformation. When we speak of reimagining education, we cannot ignore the fact that access to that reimagining is itself shaped by material reality. Who has internet? Who has devices? Who has time, when survival demands your immediate attention?

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These stories matter and they are part of the education we need and the learning that institutions refuse. They teach us that transformation cannot happen in the abstract, it must happen in the material world, where bodies live and where access is never neutral.

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Against singular solutions

The logic of institutional reform always seeks the scalable and the replicable. It essentially wants to know: What works? Can we bottle it? Can we roll it out? But education for liberation wholeheartedly insists on context and on the particularities that tells us what this community needs right now, in this place, and with these people.

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Instead, YouthxYouth extended an invitation to experiment, iterate, and learn. We sought to create a collaborative approach that others could adapt, translate, and transform for their own contexts.

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The experiment continues

YouthxYouth describes itself as an experiment, as a living inquiry and a collective attempt to learn our way into new worlds. This language positions the work as a journey and as a question whose answers keep unfolding.

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Looking back now, from wherever you are reading this, at who we were and who we are becoming, YouthxYouth remains a sincere experiment in creating learning spaces that hold the potential of our collective liberation. This experiment does not end with us. It continues out in the world through you, and through every person who has ever felt the calling towards the life-affirming worlds of our deepest longings.

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The story of our evolution, from our first Learning Festival to what may be our last (who knows, perhaps we will return in a few years in a different form, having taken time to rest and devise a new strategy worth experimenting with), is really a story about what becomes possible when we weave across the stories of separations that riddle our current world and that acknowledge that if we want different outcomes, we need different processes.

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We are called

If you are reading this, you have been called to the same desire for liberation. You have felt the longing for education that serves interconnection rather than separation and you have sensed that another world is possible.

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If you are feeling called, this work can continue through you. We leave behind our lessons and longings to be experimented with in your context, with your people and in your particular corner of the world. The crisis continues but the invitation remains open, and young people continue to assert their presence, their wisdom, and their right to shape the futures they will live in.

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Thank you for witnessing the story of YouthxYouth and for becoming a part of it.