The kids are alright

On creative education and giving young people a voice.

Photo by Angelina Litvin on Unsplash

When I was growing up, a lot of people assumed that I would become a teacher. I think that’s pretty common for anyone (particularly girls) who do pretty well at school and are generally outgoing and sociable. When I went to uni to do French and English, that assumption was only compounded: what else are you going to do with a languages degree other than teach?

It also could be because lots of people in my life worked in education. Plus the fact that, even in the late 2000s, teaching was a stable, relatively well-paid and well-respected job that was still hiring even in the wake of the recession. Cut to 2024 and that’s not necessarily the case, but that’s a different newsletter…

I had other ideas. Teaching was not for me. My friends who did want to teach had enthusiasm and ideas and drive for it that I never did. Not even in my most uncertain career moments have I considered doing a PGDE. And yet, a lot of the roles I have worked in have involved working with young people - including the job I’m in now.

Now, I don’t want to get into some deep pschoanalysis about fulfilling other people’s expectations while still pretending that I have some agency over my life choices…but I definitely didn’t always enjoy working with kids. I have found it frustrating, exhausting and often intimidating, particularly when I was younger. I was basically still a kid myself.

As I’ve become more confident over time (and my ego has become smaller), the breakthroughs and shiny moments of pride and joy have become more frequent. When you put aside concerns about funding, smartphones, AI, decreasing media literacy and the myriad other social issues that we have to contend with, working with kids on creative projects can be magic.

I’m coming up on one year in my current role at a charity that works with young people on creative writing projects. While no job is perfect, I haven’t felt this aligned with my day-to-day work in a long time. I give the credit for a lot of that to the kids themselves.

I’ve written about this before, but there’s something to be said about the impact that encouraging other people’s creativity has on your own confidence. I regularly work alongside young people who tell me they’re not creative, they hate writing, they don’t have any good ideas and honestly, same. I feel like that a lot of the time too. But then you convince them to write something, anything down, and nine times out of ten that’s enough to get them going. Suddenly, they’re off. You come back ten minutes later and they’ve penned a poem about how brilliant their mum is, an ode to their favourite Chinese takeaway, something funny their dog did at the weekend, a story about why they hate books so much…And then you think, well maybe I should take my own advice sometimes too.

More than this, though, seeing these creative lightbulb moments, this confidence bloom over and over again, makes me only more certain about the need for art in our lives. Like a lot of adults, I am deeply concerned about the negative impact a life lived online is having on young people. But I’m also not naive to the fact that we need to do something about it.

We can’t just sit and wring our hands and complain about ‘the kids these days’, even though it’s all too easy to do. I see and hear a lot about young people not being able to articulate or think for themselves, or have the capacity to try. Sure, we can spend hours articulating why this might be - the pandemic, TikTok, austerity, permissive parenting, the decimation of children’s media - but I’d rather hear more about what is being done to combat it.

In this weathered world, where people don’t have their basic needs met and where the work of the creative industries is so chronically undervalued, it’s hard to express those feelings without sounding trite or sentimental or out of touch. But that’s exactly why we have to champion creative education, so that it remains essential to the fabric of how we live. Bread and roses, right?

Not everyone is going to win the Booker Prize. That’s not the point of a creative education. Encouraging creativity is all about building confidence. It’s about feeling in charge of your own self-expression. It’s about seeing your ideas coming to life, putting them out into the real world and realising that your point of view matters. It’s also about recognising everyone else’s points of view and seeing yourself as part of a wider (creative) community. It’s about enjoying and appreciating things even if we’re not personally ‘good’ at them. It’s about breaking down creativity, changing it from this elusive ‘gift’ that only some people have, to something that is fundamentally about what it means to be human and alive.

Not every kid who experiences a creative lightbulb moment at school will necessarily go on to have a so-called creative career. Many will, and I think that’s brilliant. But that’s not the reason that kids should have opportunities to be creative. Every young person deserves to know that their ideas are important. Helping them to put these ideas down in their own words is a great place to start.

To round off this week’s newsletter, here is some good stuff to take you into the weekend. As ever, if you’ve got your own recommendations for things to read, watch or listen to, please share them in the comments.

• I absolutely loved Sam Baker’s answers to The Oldster’s questionnaire about aging. In particular this response to a question about milestones:

  “I think age-related milestones are part of the reason we’re all so dissatisfied and feel like such under-achievers—do this by this age, do that by the next, and constantly failing to hit them.”

• Author Lauren Elkin on The Shakespeare and Co podcast talking about her latest novel and what it means to write and live en franglais was great company on my commute to work this week.

• Continuing the French theme, this episode about Arabic in France with journalist Nabil Wakim was fascinating. A great conversation about community, identity and the way the state impacts on language.

• Two words: Wolf. Hall. Sunday nights are BACK, baby!