What is Youth Development and Why it Matters
In Indonesia, the population of young people is around 65 million of those aged between 10–24 years old, comprising 28 % of the total population (UNFPA, 2020). This is a great potential to be developed in order to support national development. With effective policies and strategic investments, young people could claim their rights in fulfilling their potential to be participating and advance socio-economic growth, thus bringing significant returns for social and economic growth. In the context of Indonesia, investing in youth development should help address various issues which hinder progress, such as poverty, low education, polarization, to the challenges resulting from the current COVID-19 pandemic. As the world is preparing to function beyond the pandemic, which also means to include young people as the keepers and agents of the sustainable development goals. On the other hand, leaders and major organizations could play key roles in facilitating young people in sustainable development goals through policies and effective programs.
The sustainable development goals recognize the importance of addressing the rights and needs of young people, seen as capable individuals. Based on this premise, the Indonesian youth is currently being the target of development from both national and international governments and agencies. There are several existing approaches used to design programs and activities of youth development. This writing will particularly address the Positive Youth Development (PYD) approach. The concept of Positive Youth Development (PYD) has received growing attention both in the world of academia and practitioners. This approach was introduced as a more affirmative and welcoming vision of young people, emphasizing on potentialities rather than incapacities of young people (Damon, 2004). Thus, it will explore to what extent young people could be helped to explore the world, gain competence, and acquire the capacity to contribute importantly to the world. In this writing, I will emphasize the importance of education and skills development to support productivity among young people.
Positive Youth Development
One of the core principles of Positive Youth Development is the focus on each and every child’s unique talents, strengths, interests, and future potentials — including those coming from the most disadvantaged backgrounds and most troubled histories (Damon, 2004). According to Damon (2004), the PYD approach recognized three factors related to the development of children and youth, namely their nature, their interaction with the community, and their moral identity. Bonnie & Benard (1991) claims the nature of every child which possesses the potential to develop resiliency. Resilience is simply one of a cluster of adaptive response patterns that can be learned by anyone during childhood (Bernard, 1991; Damon, 2004). Traits associated with resilience are persistence, hopefulness, hardiness, goal-directedness, healthy expectations, success orientation, achievement motivation, educational aspirations, a belief in the future, a sense of anticipation, a sense of purpose, and a sense of coherence (Bernard, 1991; Damon, 2004). These traits are developed into internal assets supporting a child’s commitment to learning, social skills, and positive identity (Damon, 2004), which are assumed to have a positive contribution on their interaction with the community. The Positive Youth approach is consciously holistic, considering the whole community in relation to the whole child rather than privileging any particular interaction or capacity (Damon and Gregory 2002; Damon 2004).
Research in the positive youth development tradition also took the role of moral and religious beliefs in shaping children’s identities and perspectives on the future. According to Benson (1997), there are five internal assets listed that are personal qualities with an unmistakable moral dimension, namely: caring, equality and social justice, integrity, honesty, responsibility, and restraint. One of the primary external assets that Benson identifies is the religious community, indicated by a young person’s participation in the activities of a religious institution (Benson 1997, Damon, 2004). Deeply held moral convictions and religious faith can both provide young people with crucial resources for their development, also to define the self (Damon, 2004). Thus, identity formation during adolescence is a process of forging a coherent, systematic sense of self, while moral identity formation is a process of constructing deeply held moral beliefs that serve as the ideational core for a cohesive moral component of one’s personal identity (Damon, 2004).
In the emerging heterogeneous global society in which basic life choices and life-style decisions are not preconfigured, adolescents will need to acquire the motivation and skills to create order, meaning, and action out of a field of ill-structured choices. In this case, they will need to exert cumulative effort overtime to reinvent themselves, reshape their environments, and engage in other planful undertakings. A generation of bored and challenge-avoidant young adults is not going to be prepared to deal with the mounting complexity of life and take on the emerging challenges of the 21st century. Therefore, initiatives are required to facilitate the growth and development of young people in order to meet and conquer these challenges effectively. Larson (2000) posited the conditions that make structured youth activities a fertile context for the development of initiative have a positive contribution towards the development of an array of other positive qualities, from altruism to identity. By involving in these activities, young people come alive and become active agents in ways that rarely happen in other parts of their lives (Larson, 2000). Furthermore, Larson (2000) listed three conditionings that should support positive youth development, namely individual differences, coaching, and practice.
Youth, Skills, and Work
Globally, jobs are not being created fast enough to meet the needs of this large youth population, where around one in eight people aged 15 to 24 is unemployed. Young people are about three times as likely as adults to be unemployed. With youth unemployment threatening to rise still higher, many young people face the prospect of remaining without secure work for years to come. Thus, the need to develop young people’s skills has become urgent, and greater attention is required to developing a skilled workforce. Thus, young people, wherever they live and whatever their background, require skills that prepare them for decent jobs so they can thrive and participate fully in society (UNESCO, 2012).
If stakeholders fail to educate, train and employ young people in decent jobs, it risks disappointing young people’s aspirations and wasting their potential. Also, sustainable growth will be harder to attain and jeopardizes gains from interventions in other areas, such as poverty reduction, health, and agriculture. Thus, it is important to ensure skills and the contexts in which they may be acquired: foundation skills, associated with literacy and numeracy; transferable skills, including problem-solving and the ability to transform and adapt knowledge and skills in varying work contexts; and technical and vocational skills, associated with specific occupations. One pathway leads to formal general education and its extension, technical and vocational education. Whereas the other path shows skills training opportunities for those who have missed out on formal schooling, ranging from a second chance to acquire foundation skills to work-based training, including apprenticeships and farm-based training. Those lacking even foundation skills often have to make do with subsistence-level work, for wages that trap them in poverty, whereas the uppermost level represents those whose accumulated skills which allow young people to advance to better-paid work, including entrepreneurial opportunities, and to higher education.
People need foundation skills to stand a chance of getting jobs that pay decent wages and becoming a productive force in the economy. These skills are best acquired through formal education. But many people enter adult life without these skills, based on the facts that: a) Some young people never make it to school; b) Young people need a second chance to acquire basic literacy and numeracy; c) Gender disparities are aggravated by wealth disparities ; d) Location affects the acquisition of foundation skills. Furthermore, there are also transferable skills. Based on the measured effects of skills on work opportunities mainly by looking at the difference in earnings between people with different levels of education, it is found that skills help young people adapt to labor market changes, including new technologies and the demands of a ‘green economy’. In the study, it was analyzed the simple relationship between wages, years of schooling, and years of experience, controlling for basic demographic characteristics such as gender and age, to estimate the rate of return to education — the percentage increase in wages for each year of school. Furthermore, skills also help many young people working in the informal sector in poor countries to become successful entrepreneurs. Based on these findings, it is thus important to ensure the following: a) Staying in school longer can enhance problem-solving skills; b) Good quality education boosts confidence and motivation; and c) schools need to teach IT skills.
From what has been described here, we can see that youth development is one of the crucial aspects to ensure the progress of a nation, including in the context of Indonesia. The effort for youth development is multidimensional which requires the involvement of many different stakeholders. Also, given the existing and perceived challenges faced by young people, it is also important to ensure programs and policies which also address those issues.
References
Damon, William. 2004. What is Positive Youth Development? . The Annals of the American Academy: 591
UNESCO. 2012. Putting Education to Work. Education for All Global Monitoring Report
