Youth Activism in an Era of Education Inequality by Ben Kirshner

Abstract

Book Reviews 208 Studies Minor at Illinois State University. She received her doctorate from the University of Southern California in Sociology in 2001. She created and teaches a course called Children in Global Perspective, as well as courses about family relationships and research methods. Her research explores what the currently available, global data about children reveal about children’s inequality worldwide. Her publications have focused on marginalized children from a global perspective, extended families and kinship, and adult children in stepfamilies. Youth Activism in an Era of Education Inequality Ben Kirshner (2015). New York: NYU Press, 240. $27.00 (paperback); ISBN: 978-1479898053. In Ben Kirshner’s book, Youth Activism in an Era of Education Inequality, the reader is presented with theoretical scope and lived detail of youth activism. Kirshner describes social contexts in dire need of transformation and provides nuanced analysis of complicated attempts to alter these contexts. Kirshner sets out to, and largely succeeds, in providing a comprehensive examination of what it means—and what else it could mean—to consider youth activism as precisely the push for social transformation so sorely needed in this “age of impunity” (King 2015) in education. Perhaps there is no more quintessential phrase from this book that captures its ethos and approach than Kirshner’s position that “youth should not be treated as ‘citizens of the future’; they should be treated as citizens now” (6). Readers are provided an excellent grounding in the frames of “youth” that run across much research on young people, youth engagement, and social change. Throughout, Kirshner draws on participatory approaches, analysis of distal movements, and theory on youth and social change. He weaves up-close details that address the pragmatic question of “how did they do that?” with exploration of the obstacles, tensions, and difficulties that come with doing anti-authoritative work in various settings. Throughout, Kirshner maintains a strong stance that youth activism should be provided more ground, support, and space not because youth need to be “given” voice or valued for their youth but because social change is facilitated by virtue of the societal spaces that youth choose to and are forced to occupy. Kirshner consistently spells out what possibilities are made available if adults understand themselves as intergenerational collaborators and resources, rather than guides for youth development. For example, in chapter 5, “Schools as Sites of Struggle,” Kirshner provides description and discussion of several school-based participatory youth research projects that exposed various forms of institutionalized discriminatory practices. We read about the ways that youth and adults must tangle with the politics and constraints of advocating for change within hierarchical structures. As we should Book Reviews 209 expect, the institutions pushed back, passively and not so passively with expressions of discomfort, concern for image, and adultist explanations of what the youth might not have understood. I wondered how these instances of resistance to students’ activism could be further explained by situating them within a time when schools have become, if anything, even less hospitable locales for critical inquiry and research precisely because of the neoliberal agendas that have conflated test score achievement and public image with learning and growth. If you are remotely interested in how youth activism has been taking shape over the past few decades and how it draws from and is defining social change, you should get this book. The writing is a rare combination of rigor and accessibility, much in keeping with the focus and ethos of youth activism. Coming at an opportune time where much as has been written to highlight youth participatory research projects but not as much that explores them as a collective, necessarily wonderful and fraught loosely set of actions, Kirshner analyzes within and across. He asks refreshingly necessary questions, including how we can learn from the areas of failure and struggle, arguably more than we can from the successes and desired impacts. If I were sitting down with Kirshner to talk about his book, there are two areas of discussion I’d bring up. I don’t offer these as criticisms of the book. No single text can address all things, but at their best, they deepen understanding that then naturally lifts up more questions...