In-Person Support-Networks for Millennials and their Families
When the 19th century turned into the 20th America became full of a new breed of idealistic clubs preaching education, patriotism, community and family values. By the time Teddy Roosevelt took on “trust-busting” as his presidential mandate, our country was already filled with Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, YMCAs, YWCAs, PAL, Kiwanis, Moose, Elks, Rotary, Lions Clubs and Lodges. For we all recognize that the heyday of new clubs just happened to coincide with a time of anarchy and strikes by millions of immigrant factory workers in the 1890’s. This was a time when giant corporate monopolies were taking over mining, railroads, energy production, communications, food imports and processing. Churches and families still were at the center of community life throughout our urban, rural, and newly-growing suburban culture, but the ‘little people’ needed a sense of belonging, bonding, and purpose.
Today, America –with the rest of the world—is struggling to hold families together. Most of the old clubs still exist, but do not attract new members. They are no longer the magnets that define a community’s life. Where churches are still thriving, their youth groups are not where children grow up and learn the skills of social participation and citizenship. The media defines the values of society at-large, and social media provides the opportunity for potentially “full” participation.
Oddly enough, a new generation of clubs is possible. Many parallels exist today with 150 years ago. Social stresses with the breakdown of family, of schooling, and of many traditional values, along with the influx of many thousands of non-English-speaking immigrants being absorbed into every community around the nation call for some integrated sociological thinking. It doesn’t take much reflection to realize that a single new factor, common to everyone is that we are all bombarded with a “Smartphone World.” For better or worse, it allows anyone to separate from person-to-person communications. One can work from one’s room, buy from one’s room, get a degree from one’s room, learn a trade from one’s room, and even find one’s mate from one’s room. This new way of life affects us all, and is wreaking vast changes to every phase of human culture. It is, therefore, the perfect opportunity to take this in-hand as the focus for a new generation of in-person clubs.
Media Scouts
For lack of a better generic name, we can call this club “Media Scouts.” It engages both children and adults in the responsibilities of social awareness, “taking control” of the media from which everyone’s picture of reality is derived. It does this through group participation in the production of information. Beginning with elementary school children, and moving up through college and adults. It will provide the roots and trunk from which other community support-networks can branch off, like limbs from a tree rooted in the next generation.
Like Cub Scouts, Boy & Girl Scouts, and Eagle Scouts, there will be different levels of badges based on workbooks. Many of the workbook activities will be, as with traditional scouting, about learning basic life-skills such as handling tools, first-aid, etc. Today, however, basic tools include the smartphone, so that interviewing neighborhood adults can be used to develop a wide range of literacy skills—at the same time collecting information on the world of work, the use of old-time tools, the history of the neighborhood and its churches, organizations, sports, and family stories.
Older scouts will learn the skills of documentary film-making, which includes information sorting, packaging, storing and marketing. Most importantly the focus is NOT on the technology but on a knowledge of careers, crafts, jobs, and the components of team-work. A most obvious attraction of honing skills of observation and media reporting, however, will be earning badges as an adjunct to participation in school sports.
Senior scout leaders (e.g. the “Eagle Scout” level), besides assisting adults running meetings will earn their badges by interfacing with the community police, fire, utility and health-care workers. They will specifically be tasked with providing officers and others with community-interfacing skills. With the assistance of their senior-level manuals, the MEDIA SCOUTS will define and train in the activities that police officers can eventually carry out during the summer-camp season with small children, such that each officer will have carried out their personal activity with 80% of the city’s campers. What was once the Police Athletic League can now be re-generated as a “Police Activities League,” serving and be-friending the community members in creative new ways.
A college-level cohort will be earning their badges through the highly complex and creative task of integrating all the lower-level information from the local clubs into neighborhood and city-wide packages that can become part of the living history of our city (or any city). This is an ongoing task with relevance to corporate, government, and the creative arts.
Scriptwriter Clubs
The Scriptwriter Clubs are loosely tied to Media Scouts, in that these are geared to the creation of the narrative arts – writing and performance. With a workbook designed around those of the well-developed Toastmasters Clubs, Scriptwriters hone their presentation skills in various universes of discourse. Club members learn the skills of shape-shifting their presentation to different sub-cultures, interweaving the skills of the cultural anthropology, sociology and political science with those of classical Rhetoric and storytelling.
Scriptwriter Clubs will develop scripts for historical re-enactors introducing youth to the excitement of the past, as well as “educational vaudeville,” in which comedy and surprise can be used to introduce the complex worlds of academic knowledge that often bury democratic discourse from graduate school onwards.
Scriptwriter Clubs shall be designed with the aim of creating a new generation of social docents, able to bridge the many splintering subcultures that are result of social media and the rapid integration of disparate heritages in a global economy.
An entirely new discipline of Educational Theatre is to be created, building on the existing business of Themed Entertainment Attractions (TEAs) that has grown up in the wake of EPCOT and Disney’s Imagineering (engineering) Institute.
T.O.W. Clubs for Teachers
TOW stands for Teacher Outreach to the Workplace. A summer program similar to the Scriptwriters Club would take teachers into the workplace to discover connections between curriculum and the roles of a citizen supporting society.
With a joint sponsorship of the Departments of Labor and Education, TOW Clubs would provide teachers with an out-of-school fellowship to renew their faith in their jobs and the underlying aims of public education.
A bit of explanation is in order, for the familiar caricature of yesterday’s teacher still dominates the culture of education. Yet today, the teacher’s role is perhaps the most daunting and demanding career a person might choose. In the job of socializing the individual, while our media and technological culture have eroded the role of family across the world, the educational establishment is tasked with making up all the differences. And the educational establishment foists it off on our teachers, who must take on all the responsibility of the parent, the home, and the extended family.
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