Youth Development as a Public Idea

The Evolution of a Public Idea

Within the span of a year, two commissions, the William T. Grant Foundation Commission on Work, Family, and Citizenship, and the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, issued reports that framed challenges for the next decades. The Carnegie Commission's Turning Points (Task Force on Education of Young Adolescents, 1989) asked: “What qualities do we envision in the 15-year-old who has been well served in the middle years of schooling? What do we want every young adolescent to know, to feel, to be able to do upon emerging from that educational and school-related experience” (p. 15)? Their answer focused on five characteristics associated with being an effective human being: “Our 15-year-old will be an intellectually reflective person, a person en route to a lifetime of meaningful work, a good citizen, a caring and ethical individual, and a healthy person” [Page 1179](p. 15). The W. T. Grant Commission's The Forgotten Half (1988) stated, “Young people's experiences at home, at school, in the community, and at work are strongly interconnected, and our response to problems that arise in any of these domains must be equally well integrated” (p. 3).

In The Power of Public Ideas, Robert Reich (1988) wrote,

By reframing the goals in terms of development and by articulating a vision of what it takes to support youth, the Grant and Carnegie reports were, in essence, calling for a new public idea. At the time, many youth advocates were becoming acutely aware of the disconnect between policy approaches to youth and the opinions of the people who actually spent their days directly interacting with youth—youth workers and parents. While policymakers maintained a “problem fixation” mentality, focusing on defining and eliminating deficits, those on the ground focused on young people's current strengths and future potential. Policymakers focused on isolated problems to be “solved” by programs and professionals, while any parent could tell you that children are complex beings raised in families and communities. Policymakers spoke of services, while those on the ground began to speak about opportunities and supports.

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