The contours of the new youth policy: Motherland-daughter calls
After our recent criticism of the Strategy for the Development of State Youth Policy to 2025 of the Year, prepared by Rosmolodyozh, it is logical to try to answer the question “how is it right?”. The results of the attempt are lower.New youth policy - education responsible for the country
The main goal of the state youth policy should be the education of generations aimed at the development of the country. Development is a universal idea that will never lose its relevance and will be in demand in times of crisis and in moments of growth. This idea is so valuable and multifaceted, that it has the right to be central, regardless of the conjuncture.
We cannot predict the social and economic situation of 2025 of the year (exactly before this deadline the document criticized by us intends to plan), but it is better to assume that it will be tougher and, accordingly, will make more demands on young people than the current rather herbivorous situation. This approach is the most productive - it is better to prepare for the worst, but hope for the best than vice versa.
Before you understand how to educate young people, you should imagine the reference image of the generation that we would like to see in the future of our country. Here are the features that seem important:
- young people of the future are aware of themselves as part of a large and great country and cannot imagine their life without it;
- the youth of the future considers their personal contribution to the development of their country to be the meaning of their life;
- the youth of the future feels personal responsibility for the state of the country before the next generations and previous ones;
- The youth of the future realizes that for the development of the country it is necessary to constantly develop their personal skills and abilities, finding them to use in activities for the benefit of the state.
Besides:
- the youth of the future does not expect the state to solve all their problems, but is ready to deal with them independently;
- The youth of the future is ready for any twists of fate and is able to quickly adapt to changing conditions, without changing its principles;
- The youth of the future understands that there is no end point in development and any stop in it is equivalent to going backwards.
In other words, we need to educate a generation with statist views on life and a high degree of independence. If it succeeds, then for the future of the country, you can be calm.
Based on this image, we can formulate the main idea that should be invested in young minds - this is the idea of messianism. From early childhood, a person must realize that he was born in order to fulfill a special role - to bring our country to a new stage of development and bring up its children in the same vein. This installation should accompany the person everywhere and at each stage of growing up to be dressed in a modern and easily perceived form.
The new generation is special. However, this feature does not give him any material privileges and loads with enormous responsibility. At the same time, this situation allows us to solve the main problem of any young person - the problem of self-identification. Awareness of oneself as a person responsible for the country is the core and gives a wide opportunity for self-expression in various life spheres. It also directs such a search in a constructive way, significantly reducing the number of options for destructive self-realization.
It should be understood that without colossal efforts aimed at raising precisely in this direction, we will never get a generation capable of overcoming the serious challenges of our time. It will not appear from nowhere, it will not nurture itself. This, in turn, imposes responsibility on us, the parents of our children, and on the state responsible for the new youth policy. If we ourselves do not feel responsibility for the country - the youth policy will remain the same as it is now: a set of unrelated single goal measures.
New youth organization
Youth policy should be enshrined in government documents, which should go through a wide public discussion. Of course, in addition to the ideological component, youth policy should include such mandatory elements as providing young people with housing, increasing the availability and quality of education, increasing the level of youth employment, measures to stimulate fertility, etc. We will not focus on them for the time being, since, firstly, they are partly successfully implemented and now, secondly, they are secondary, since ideology should be the core of the policy.
To implement the ideology (I remind you - it is the education of those responsible for the country), it is necessary to create a special body that will become a link between the state and the youth. For the time being, we will leave the legal and organizational form behind it. We note the main task of such an organization:
- to be a conduit between the youth and the state, that is, to be able to recognize in time the signals of the youth environment and transfer their power. At the same time, it should be able to formulate state priorities and needs in a language that is accessible to young people and translate it into reality.
A prerequisite for the success of such an organization is mobility. Based on this, I believe that it is not necessary to load it with an excessive budget, and therefore, excessive functionality. However, it should be entitled to request and receive support from government departments to implement certain elements of youth policy.
The Organization’s responsibilities fall into:
- development and implementation of specific measures that carry young people with ideological content;
- collection, analysis and development of a response to the trends and moods of young people;
- constant monitoring of the quality of the youth environment with the search for promising representatives and their promotion in relevant areas;
- Work with problem representatives of the youth in order to socialize them.
It is impossible to create an Organization that simultaneously meets the above requirements and enjoys the unconditional trust of young people. This means that its formation should be phased, and the strengthening of the ideological component should increase with its general strengthening. Stages may look like this:
Stage 1. An organization that promotes universal values, such as a healthy lifestyle. The stage is characterized by predominant activity on the Internet with a gradual increase in activity in real life, which allows to unite youth groups on the basis of sports festivals, seminars, joint training and other things.
Stage 2. The promotion of a healthy lifestyle is accompanied by the popularization of self-development in a broad sense - from reading books to professional self-determination. The stage is characterized by the addition to the sports theme of the cultural component and the strengthening of the discussion line. The development of young people is cultivated through joint visits to cultural events, visits to cinemas, etc.
Stage 3. The ideology of the Organization introduces ideas of the need for development not only of oneself, but also of the environment around it, and through it the state as a whole. The stage is characterized by the involvement of young people in active activities directed outwardly - volunteering, jointly combating public evil (drug addiction, pedophilia, alcoholism, etc.), and environmental issues.
Stage 4. Having mastered the previous stages and gaining the necessary number of active and loyal participants, the Organization can declare itself as a spokesman for the interests of young people and proceed to the full range of functions assigned to it. At this stage, the Organization should receive a legal status allowing effective interaction with the authorities.
It is necessary to understand that each stage can last for years and we still have to determine the necessary conditions for the transition to a new one - haste in this delicate matter can only harm.
However, forced variants of the development of the Organization are possible under certain external conditions. So, a serious deterioration of the socio-economic situation may require a quick mobilization of young forces to solve specific problems. In this case, a different development scenario should be applied.
Methods
The fact that young people need to educate in a patriotic spirit, now does not say just lazy. Everyone agrees with this, but no one really knows how to do it. At best, the old method of the Soviet school is used, which often does not correspond to the realities of modern times and therefore is ineffective. There are no new approaches at all.
Talking about methods without grinding the above proposals is premature. However, there are some general considerations that I would like to share.
The first. A distinctive feature of most modern educational activities is inexpressiveness. Probably, this is a consequence of the fact that their organizers themselves do not quite understand why they are being held, that is, a consequence of the absence of a youth policy as such. As a result, a formal approach prevails - again, it seems that the adults involved in the upbringing were never young.
Meanwhile, in order to influence the youth, it must be interested. To do this, keep abreast of her preferences and moods (see the functions of the organization). And the methodology should take these preferences into full account.
For example, today there is a clear lack of opportunities for joint efforts, the collective activities of young people. At the same time she tries to find them on her own, but not always successfully. Numerous anti-pedophile anti-drug trafficking communities are proof of this. Partly even the protest activity is dictated by the same lack of joint self-realization. To feel the real elbow of a comrade in a situation that provokes a surge of adrenaline is an unforgettable feeling that there are very few legal ways to experience today.
The third stage of the development of the Organization involves the creation of such opportunities. If it developed today, then it certainly would have been the same groups in the fight against public evil, but organized properly. This also includes joint street patrols.
The second. Today, the educational work completely ignores the gigantic and growing rapidly virtual world. More precisely, it is ignored only by us, and our ideological opponents have long mastered it and are using it to plant the attitudes they need in young minds. We wrote about it a lot and in detail.
This is a serious omission, since virtuality is no longer such in the usual sense for us. In fact, we are talking about the development of the “expanded” world, where values and behaviors in the virtual are shifted to everyday life. People spend money (sometimes big) to acquire virtual statuses, express themselves through this world and in many ways form an idea of the real world, through the virtual one. Today, such a “virtuality” is the most serious tool of upbringing and education.
I will give an example concerning the acute issue of interethnic relations. Somehow I happened to test a popular multiplayer game today. In it, I acted as a pilot of a Soviet fighter, fighting on historical cards with fascists. My link also included a guy from Tbilisi and a grown man from Ukraine. We communicated by voice in real time, coordinating each other's actions.
So, in a short time we flew so much that we began to feel like old friends. The guy from Georgia turned out to be a wonderful, well-mannered and cheerful conversationalist who entertained everyone during the flight. The Ukrainian always rushed to the aid and was substituted to the enemy, just to help out his comrades. And all this together helped to better understand that amazing multinational community, which was called the Soviet people, and so also, shoulder to shoulder, fought for one country in the old days. Community, we note that most of us have almost found.
But even I, the man who revised and re-read all the most famous works about the Great Patriotic War, and was sure that I wouldn’t discover anything new for myself on this topic, was surprised when I experienced the echo of this community. Extremely strong, I must say, feelings.
Thus, “virtuality” should become one of the main directions of educational work in the framework of the new youth policy. The work in it is a tilled field, and the effect can be very powerful.
Third. It is necessary to actively acquaint young people with the country in which they live. This includes visits to various regions of the country, familiarity with industrial and agricultural enterprises, the work of various public services, as well as study visits to neighboring states in the Eurasian region. Without such a practice, it will not be easy to achieve self-awareness as part of a large country.
Considering that the number of young people, unfortunately, is decreasing in our country and by the year of 2025 will be significantly less than it is now, this task takes on special significance.
Youth career lift
The significant risks of a new youth policy are organizational. So, the body that deals with it at some stage may lose mobility and turn into another bureaucratic structure. The risk of engaging it in the battle for budgets is also great, when programs and events are written not to implement the policy, but in order to beat out more money from the state.
However, even more significant risk is the withdrawal of the Organization from the control of the state. The fact is that such an organization, at least at first, needs a bright and public leader. Without such a figure to achieve recognition of young people will not work. Naturally, such a person, as the Organization develops, will receive its own political weight and at some point may succumb to the “Fuehrer's temptation” and at least start to play its own game, and in the worst case - turn the organization into a means to realize its own ambitions.
To avoid such a risk, it is necessary to provide for a system of staff rotation and promotion of the former leaders of the organization in other government bodies in accordance with the results achieved by them. Thus, the task of updating the state apparatus and a gradual change of the elite in it will be solved in passing.
Summarizing the above, summarize:
- A new youth policy should be aimed at educating generations who think in statist categories, and the central function in it should be ideological;
- Youth policy should be carried out through a special Organization, which is a conductor between the interests of the state and the needs of young people;
- Youth policy should be implemented in stages;
- The methodology of youth policy should take into account the rapidly changing interests and needs of young people;
- The main method of educating state consciousness is acquaintance with one’s country and various aspects of life in it;
- At the head of the Organization there should be charismatic and prestigious leaders among young people who can pursue a career in government, and the organization itself should become a career elevator for young people.
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