Youth volunteering has never been more important
Martin Stephen - High Master, St Paul’s School
Volunteering is under threat. It is a threat never reported in the media, never made in to headlines in the evening TV news, never mentioned in the bland approval politicians give to the general idea of volunteering. The threat has been in the air for years. Its first trumpet call was when VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) switched subtly from young, pre-university young people to adult, qualified professionals. The reason was clear. If you were an emerging African nation, who would you rather have shipped over to you from Europe? A qualified doctor, or an 18 year-old desperate to become a doctor? A man or woman with ten years experience in the City, or a would-be banker?
A second threat to youth volunteering came with the growth of the Health and Safety Culture, reaching a pre-eminence in the UK perhaps some ten years ago. The Health and Safety Culture is a cultural phenomenon, as much as anything else, spawned in late industrial societies out of a combination of an expectation of life and a predatory, parasitic legal system willing to feed off any threat to that expectation. There has to be a culture of risk in volunteering, yet risk is one of the things we have desperately tried to iron out of the lives of young people.
The third threat? A graduate in England can expect to leave university with debts of over £20,000. That is hardly an attraction to a young person wanting to spend a year overseas at their own expense. The rush to university is seriously increased, the attraction of volunteering seriously threatened.
So where does this leave youth volunteering? Oddly enough, in a situation where it has probably never been more important. One truth has not altered for most of human history. It is that education is the way out of poverty and disadvantage. The young volunteer from an advanced, industrialised country certainly knows enough maths and science to make a real difference to children in a rural primary school in the developing world. If the volunteers are trained, their capacity to give children, who are victims of world-poverty, a crucial life-enhancing skill—a command of English—is excellent. The young volunteer will never replace or take the place of the professional, graduate teacher, but what is undeniable is young people are at a point in their life where they have a lot to give and the energy and commitment to make a difference. They can prime the pump magnificently, a fact recognised by the hugely increased investment in classroom assistants in the UK. The young volunteers’ youth makes them very powerful role models: youth speaks to youth, across race, religion, culture and creed. It is not what they know, or have been taught, important though that is. It is that they see education as normal and desirable, see it as cool to be going to university, see it as cool to be a learner.
But there is at least an equal and perhaps even more important benefit. A religious zealot—Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu and so on to every world faith—can now flash a message of hatred to millions of people with one click on a computer keyboard. That hatred is the new pollution. We can try and blow up hatred by dropping bombs on it from 40,000 feet. We can try and buy it off by handing millions of pounds of aid to countries whose corruption will siphon off the money to those who need it least. We can park tanks on the streets of the nations we deem most guilty.
Or we can send out our volunteers.
Which 18 year-old who has struggled to teach English to 40+ African children under a tree, because the funds do not yet run to a building, never mind electricity or a computer, has failed to reorganise their own priorities? What young person from the polluting, profligate industrial countries looking out on 40+ children whose parents have given up the equivalent of a week’s food for their child to be there does not recalibrate their priorities?
And as for the recipients, what do they learn, sitting cross legged before their bought-in teacher? Are they confirmed in their belief that people in the developed world have ludicrous wealth at their disposal and live at the extremes of violence and hedonism made normal in the movies? Or do they see and sense real people, people who hope and despair, laugh and cry, feel as they do when a mother dies or a brother marries?
We are wrong to look for world peace. The world was never that simple. Yet if we look first for world understanding, world peace might actually come nearer. Young people have a God-given ability to communicate across all boundaries - their aim to win a truce and a negotiation between clashing cultures. In a well-run volunteer programme, each party converts the other, to mutual benefit.
I hope there is a sense of passion in this article. There should be. In the 1960’s I was as a volunteer in England, taken from my cosy middle-class culture and plunged in to northern working-class culture in the shape of a junior prison. The experience was in England, certainly, but it might have been another country, so far removed was it from the normality of what had been my everyday life. That experience scoured out a huge number of wrong ideas from my brain, and burnt in attitudes and beliefs that have seen me through my life as, prime anchor points. Volunteering completed my education in many areas, and started it in others. And is it a mere sentimental memory that as a volunteer I might just have persuaded one or two of those blighted young men that going to university was a real possibility? If I did so, in a very small way and for a short period of time, I was justifying youth volunteering.
Martin Stephen
Respond to this article
Back to The Great Generation Journal main page
