A Crazy Idea
Worried about under-achievement in American education? The dropout epidemic? Teen pregnancy? Substance abuse and crime claiming the lives of our young people? All of the above? Here's a crazy idea: let teenagers solve their own problems. They don't listen to adults anyway, what have we got to lose?
Now that may sound like a flip and uncaring idea. No one in their right mind would argue that young people don't need the wisdom and experience of adults to help guide them. But let's face it. For all but the wealthy, it's only been about 70 years that we've been trying to control and protect young people past the age of 13 or 14. Before that, adolescents were on the streets, farms or in factories earning money to survive. The problem is that in American culture, teenagers never really bought into the agreement. Our culture does as much to promote rebellion as obedience. So why not try what companies and organizations of every kind are doing? Why not crowd-source the problem? Use wiki-wisdom? For every teenager out there with a problem that prevents him or her from focusing on building a future, there's probably another teenager with a solution. Maybe they'll listen to each other. It's worth a try, and there are good reasons to believe it can work. The Internet offers us, for the first time, a way to establish such a discourse among young people—the real stakeholders in the greatest problems we face. The Fieldtrip project is a way to get things rolling.