It's a great question, and I wish I could do justice to the complexity of the feedback we got from young people on this.
On the one hand, I think you're right. We need to see the innovative and diverse space that education offers. Young people always talk about primary, secondary and tertiary education; they were always talking about formal and informal education, societies learning about their past, museums and the range of factors, education not just as a formal curriculum in the schools and tertiary institutions, but informal education as well.
We were struck by the number of organizations out there, both civil society organizations and youth-led organizations, that were doing innovative and creative work on educational issues from early intervention models, for example, in the focus on masculinity and the fact that young people are saying we have to address this issue of masculinity.
I remember talking to a young gangster from Honduras who was saying to me, “You're talking to me about masculine identity as a destructive force. I'm 20 years old; you're about 15 years too late.” He was saying that early childhood intervention models, when we're starting to deal with values-based approaches, issues like masculinity and trying to address the negative forms of masculinity or embed more positive, non-violent discourses about masculinity that are not necessarily shaped around power over or access to young women, need to start much earlier.
UNICEF, although their concern is under-18-year-olds, recognize that, as part of a contribution to the youth, peace and security strategy, early intervention models in schools-based education at the primary and secondary level is critical; the early period of adolescence is absolutely critical.
On the other hand, it was interesting to us that young people—and it may have been about the selections of the young people we spoke to, although I think we accessed a wide range—were telling us to be careful, don't trap this just in vocational education. They don't want to be seen as economic automatons who are being designed for places in the economy, jobs in the community. Education is much richer than that.
It doesn't mean that vocational education is unimportant to young people, but they were telling us not to just focus on this as a vocational issue, an educational issue, for the purposes of employment not least because, in some societies, young people were saying the gap between the educational qualifications that they can acquire and the opportunities to use them in creative, inclusive spaces in society produces real frustration. If we don't recognize that education has to be utilizable to young people, we make a grave mistake, but that doesn't mean we can consign it just to the area of vocational education.
So yes, in all of these arenas, I think young people were seeing education as critical, but I will say this: It was very powerful for us, the way in which they described the triangular relationship between education, employment and civic engagement. Young people were saying they didn't want education that gave them no pathway, but peace education was very important to them. They were saying they didn't want jobs that just made them street sweepers; they wanted jobs that had meaning and that reflected a contribution to society. I think this is a very powerful voice in the way we understand the relationship between education, jobs and peace for young people.