Youth and education

In this article educational challenges and developments are analysed from a youth studies perspective. Youth research is engaged in understanding the links between societal change and youth responses with a focus on the relation between social integration and individualization. The article shows how a new analysis of the relation between youth, modernization and competence might influence both the general understanding of youth understanding and educational developmental perspectives. In modern society, the period of youth is changing from being a transition to a highly valued period in its own right. In this way, youth life functions as a reserved situation of fragmented contextualization of modern development. This change questions the traditional educational perspective and underlines the new challenge of developing general competence for modern life. In this situation, conversely, young people should not learn to be adults but to be youth.