Yesterday we were talking in my media studies class about the oft-noted issue of teenagers’ political apathy, and disinterest in current events. How could their peers be so oblivious to what was going on in the world, my students asked themselves. Why were they so escapist?
I seem to have this conversation fairly often with students, probably because I teach courses that necessarily bring “the real world” into the classroom. Students who are attracted to my classes tend to be more aware than most of their peers, and feel frustrated that it’s so hard to get other teenagers to become more politically active.
For instance, one of my current students started a campaign to get Coca-Cola off our campus. When she posted a notice on the student blog explaining why she believed Coca-Cola should be boycotted, and asking for support, she was deluged with comments, many of them angry dismissals of her proposal.
“People just want to drink their soda and not be bothered,” she said bitterly. “They just don’t get it.”
Is it true that teenagers “don’t get it?” Or could it be that what they see of the world is just so painful that they can’t afford to take it in, because it would totally paralyze them?
I am educating my children in a Waldorf school, one of the tenets of which is that children should not be exposed to media before high school, because they are developmentally unable to process what’s being thrown at them through TV, movies and the Web.
Few of us follow this precept to the letter these days, but I have tried to shield my children during their early years from the horrors that abound in our world today. Childhood is so fleeting, why should it be weighted down with apprehension of injustice, unhappiness, suffering?
We live in a time in which childhood and teenage depression is soaring; in which the use of psychiatric medications on children and young adults has reached epidemic proportions. I am wondering if there is some relation between the mental health of our kids and the constant diet they’re fed of media horror stories: global warming, HIV-AIDs, cancer and other serious health problems, constant war, strife and violence, political corruption, environmental degradation, abusive sexuality, and on and on.
Maybe the teenagers that I work with are acting in self-preservation when they opt out of politics and issue-driven activism. What they are doing, all the time, is relating socially with one another, and maybe that’s exactly what they most need to be doing in these days of their youth. That may be how they develop the social skills they’ll need to become effective players on the political and activist stage later in life.
It could be that the best we adults can hope for is to instill in our kids a basic sense of ethics, the self-confidence to speak their minds and stand up for what they believe, and the skills and tools they’ll need to make a difference.
And in the meantime, I don’t think we should expect them to take the weight of the world on their shoulders. There will be time enough for that later on. Right now, in their youth, let them play.
# posted by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez @ Saturday, December 02, 2006
: 2:19 PM 
