An Unexpected Turn... alternative approaches (again)

Again on the alternative approaches.

I've laid out my approach before and discussed alternatives. I'll try not to go over all that ground again. Anyway, my proposed approach (which is, to a first degree approximation, a workshop format) is not the most well-received part of my project, I'll admit. It is the first thing that people criticise (albeit constructively) and it is definitely the thing that people, though they universally agree with the motivations, politely suggest should be modified.

So let me use this post to express a principled, respectful dissent against this notion. Then I'll point out some compromises I am having to make in order to progress.

We'll begin with a dialogue:

Me: "So Straight Forward aims to meaningfully empower young people in politics..."

Composite individual: "Gee, that sounds noble!"

Me: "For me, empowerment is being able to have a conversation with a politician as an equal. I suppose the analogue is a conversation about football."

Composite: " Yeah, that would be great! The question is, though, how do we get there?"

Me:  "So I plan to deliver a series of talks which selects five fairly recent events and use them to illustrate the changing nature of the political consensus in Britain. Then, I give people a framework through which to see politics, which is fundamentally about seeing politics through politicians and the decisions that they have to make."

AND… SCENE.

At this point, after some rather ill-explained summaries of those arguments I have about which events should be chosen, how to interpret them and so on, I generally get something along the lines of "Well, what is it that young people get to DO in this project?"

Now, I began this project determined to set up a media outlet for these now greatly astute and shrewd young people. In my vision, these young people immediately wowed their elders and we began a grassroots revolution in society's perception of their progeny.

But this is not a satisfactory answer to the question. People have serious qualms about asking young people to embark on a project where the promise goes like this: "We'll do a newspaper and some campaigning on local issues but only once I have talked for a long time."

I get that the doubt might be in my own abilities to keep the attention of an audience. However, I have managed thus far to satisfactory effect.

Instead, I think the objection comes from a well-meaning place. The objection comes, rather nicely along the way, to this: young people will get bored if they have to listen to someone for too long, especially if that person is not a known quantity. Especially if it is not a subject they are said to traditionally care about.

Now, I think this panders to a certain view of young people that I think is precisely the reason there is no concerted effort to engage the young. That view holds that young people exist in an impenetrable bubble, over which they are sovereign. Inside the bubble, all is sound and light, with a cacophony of alerts and graphics. For all intents and purposes, they are attached by optical nerve or brain stem to the device du jour, using the most trendy app.

Outside the wall is a wilderness of that which is deemed boring. You cannot really get in, you can only maximise your chances of being selected for the bubble. To maximise your chances, you don the trappings of modern technology and use it to amplify, visualise, simplify, app-ify and lots of other mysterious processes to communicate your message. Only in this way do you stand a chance.

Of course this is a gross caricature. But you can't question the appropriateness of the talk as an appropriate medium for this generation without subscribing to something like this. Let me dissent, as I said before.

People, I think, respond to authenticity. More specifically, they respond badly to things that seem contrived. By this token, you have to be careful with your deployment of technology or it becomes gimmicky. By all means, polish the production but sanding the edges off too much leaves you with an amorphous blob.

More importantly, people have to be in the right mood. The mistake is in assuming that people are looking to be entertained all the time. Sometimes they want what they find entertaining to be subverted, challenged, stretched to absurdity. Sometimes, you just feel like you want to learn something. People flit from watching TOWIE to Africa. Moreover, to make this assumption about young people is to ignore reality: young people already pursue interests not in the canon. They do so, voluntarily in most cases, when they go into college in the mornings.

Granted, they get qualifications out of it. But many people do English A Level (and many also go on to take it at degree), when there is no significant earnings advantage to it. Nor does it qualify them to do or be anything more than they are before. Yet they pursue it because they are interested. Politics can be the same. You can give people a working understanding of the issues without committing them to lots of reading or exams.

Now, I said I'd sold out on that. Why? Well, I can't convince people that my format will work in all cases. As a really new project, I don't have any case history to say "Look, this really worked in this way." Nor can I say "this is the finished product, take it or leave it." This isn't a finished product, it's in development in a huge way. So I have to make concessions, or simply have people admiring my intention and agreeing wholeheartedly with the sentiment I'm espousing but then not being convinced I can do it.

So my halfway point is heavily inspired by John Hunter of The World Peace Game Foundation. Hunter created the World Peace Game as a teaching tool for his gifted fourth graders (age 9/10, or the English, Welsh and Northern Ireland year 5). Consisting of five storeys, the game is played over what appears to be the course of the academic year. Players are divided into nation teams, consisting of various Cabinet positions.

They then aim to solve a list of issues which are destabilising world peace - for instance, global warming, poverty and so on. Of course, these issues tilt away from each other and stand to some degree in opposition. The point is that the situations aren't easily reconciled and they are beyond the capacity of any single player. The game is a mainly uncodified pile of differing protocols but Hunter facilitates the games so that they are each unique.

I won't delve too much into the WPG. Go to the website. But what the game provides is a great set of in-game experiences that allow the players to pause the game and discuss the implications of those events and how they relate to the challenges they themselves will face in the future.

Now, my hope is to recreate that discussion in a smaller way over the course of 50 minutes. I call this little subproject "Tension" -- to highlight the tension between the nation-teams' goals and the global goals, along with the opposing demands from the domestic and international front. I slim the game back down to one layer, sadly terrestrial, and set up an asymmetric distribution of power between the nations. I hope that this imbalance, this disequilibrium, spurs action to reach an equilibrium (i.e., attempt to solve the game). Specifically, because unlike many games, the solution is not in the capability of any one player, it should spur discussion on how to co-operate. Once there, the rest should fall into place as each team realises the other's limitations.

This, of course, is the essence of politics. Co-operating within constraints to achieve a favourable outcome.

So, yes, I sold out on my lecture series/workshop format -- I'll be honest. I'm not even sure I've done the right thing. But I think I've gone low-tech enough to be slighly disarming but interactive enough to perhaps create an atmosphere more conducive to questions and conversation -- which is a precondition for what I want out of this.