At a symposium yesterday six first-year students at Portland State University, my twenty-year-old son and I constituted a panel on the impact of story sharing for radical empathy on our class and in working with at-risk youth, I was asked whether or not I thought such young people were ready for such responsibility. Perhaps I misunderstood the question, but it puzzled me. Most of the first-year students I've worked with at PSU have gone through a lot to get here; they've learned to be extremely resourceful.
I also believe that what our youth and young adults hunger for is not less responsibility, but more real responsibility to be invited to work in contexts where they can truly make a difference. Certainly I've noticed that my own students are adept, flexible, and poised when, for example, confronted by a group of ninth-grade students who don't want to talk about their feelings, their lives, or their stories.
We tell our students that if they work hard in school for seventeen years--or maybe nineteen or more--some day they may get to be an adult, become independent, maybe even do something important, maybe even have a sliver of a chance of making a difference. In the meantime, mass media demands that they be passive consumers, eat and drink empty calories, consume banal entertainment, play interminable video games. Many never make it to the finish line of school or the threshold of adulthood, and many who do are exhausted, jaded, or both.
They want more than that, and they are ready for much more than that--not to mention that the world we are handing over to them requires much more than that.
