Socially-just radical alternatives for education and youth work practice

"Challenging dominant neoliberal discourses about ways of working with 'disconnected' young people, this book sets out ideas for generating radically different ways of thinking about such practices. Drawing on contemporary and historical material, the book argues that alternative approaches to formal and informal education are necessary to challenge repressive practices, and to help build a more equal, socially-just society. The book achieves this by re-imagining - with the aid of utopian studies - how formal and informal ways of working with young people might be made more empowering. Each chapter contributes to addressing the heterogeneity of experience of diverse life-worlds - in contrast to the homogenous one-size fits all approach to education and youth work that has become the dominant mode in neoliberal societies. Whilst many young people do make successful transitions to adulthood, a substantial minority are failed by an increasingly marketized social system - particularly education where young people are expected to achieve specified outcomes in a structure that does not speak to them, and leaves them wondering on the irrelevance of academic qualifications that seem to be out of their reach"--