Risk and Nostalgia: The problem of education and youth unemployment in Australia--a case study

In this article I establish a coincidence between Beck's notion of risk and policies relating to education, social security and the labour market in Australia. A critical analysis is offered of the three dominant explanations for persistent unemployment and the unequal distribution of paid work since the 1970s: (1) deficits within 'the unemployed' arguments; (2) claims that high levels of joblessness were structurally necessary; and (3) accounts offering a political-economic analysis of who has the effective power of decision-making. I argue that while much of the rhetoric about the contemporary role of education talks about embracing change, what we witness involves a resistance to change. As so often happens in 'hard times', rather than looking toward the future we tend to hark back to outmoded 'solutions' for the new issues we confront. This is poignantly evident in requirements that education becomes a front line response to unemployment in a context of recent restructuring and a shift toward a 'post-industrial society'. The category of 'youth at risk of unemployment' is an attempt to force a relatively new development (ie, a restructured labour market) into an old paradigm which takes industrial culture as a 'given'. Thus we observe a 'discovery' of the 'causes' and 'indicators' of 'youth at risk' (of unemployment) without considering the possibility that a new set of theoretical, philosophical, ethical and practical paradigms are required. In the final section of the paper I suggest it is more productive to ask alternative questions to those currently posed and conclude by outlining what these questions are.