Can We Transform Education Without Giving Young People More Power?
We talk constantly about changing education. But how often do we ask young people what they want it to become?
We talk a lot about what needs to change in education. But there's one question that rarely seems to be at the center of those conversations: What do young people themselves think?
For all our talk about preparing them for the future, supporting their development, and creating better ways to learn, young people still have remarkably little say in the systems designed for them.
What happens when we begin to see that not simply as an educational issue, but as a question of rights and power?
Prefer listening? This article was inspired by a conversation on the Radical Learning Talks podcast about youth rights, education, and what it would mean to take young people's voices seriously in the systems that shape so much of their lives.
In this episode, we explore:
Why youth rights need to be part of conversations about education
What happens when the right to education becomes compulsory participation in a system young people didn't choose
Why even alternative and self-directed learning spaces can reproduce adult-child power dynamics
How adultism shapes the way we listen to and make decisions for young people
What might change if young people had more voice, agency, and influence over their own lives
Who Gets to Decide What Education Looks Like?
There is no shortage of conversation about the future of education. We debate what children need to learn, how schools should change, what skills will matter in the future, and which teaching methods work best. We redesign curricula, introduce new technologies, rethink assessment, and create alternative models for learning.
And yet, there is something remarkably consistent about almost all of these conversations: the people having them are adults.
This is so normal that it's easy not to notice. Adults decide what children need to know, how their days will be organized, where they will spend them, what counts as progress, and when they're ready to move on. Even when we're trying to create something more progressive or humane, we're usually still the ones deciding what that something should be.
Young people are the people most directly affected by education, yet they have remarkably little power over what their education looks like. We don't find that particularly strange because most of us grew up with exactly the same arrangement. Adults knew more, had more experience, and were responsible for us, and those differences seemed to explain why they should also be the ones making the decisions.
Of course adults have knowledge and experience that children don't yet have, and we carry responsibilities that they don't. But it doesn't automatically follow that knowing more about some things gives us the right to hold power over another person. There is a difference between using our experience to support young people and assuming that our experience means we should decide for them.
“We just expect kids to basically give up their entire childhood to a system that they weren’t part of designing.”
That becomes especially significant when we're talking about education, because education isn't a small part of childhood. For children who attend school, it occupies an enormous portion of their waking lives for many years. Their days are organized around it, their progress is continually evaluated within it, and many of the decisions that shape their daily lives are made by people other than themselves. Yet we rarely talk about any of this as a question of power. We simply call it education.
Perhaps that's one reason conversations about youth rights can feel so unfamiliar. When we talk about children's rights, we often think first about protection. Children should be safe and cared for. They should be protected from abuse and exploitation, and they should have access to education. Those things matter enormously, but rights aren't only about what other people provide or protect. They also have something to do with being able to have a voice in your own life.
And this is where education becomes complicated.
Young people have a right to education, and adults and societies carry a responsibility to make education available to them. In the podcast, we talk about how education can take many forms and about the responsibility adults hold to make sure young people have access to opportunities to learn and develop. But we also question what happens when protecting a right to education becomes inseparable from requiring young people to participate in the particular form of education adults have created for them.
A right to education and an obligation to submit to a particular educational system are not quite the same thing. Once we begin separating those ideas, the conversation becomes much bigger than whether school is good or bad. It becomes a question of what it would actually mean to take young people seriously as participants in their own education — and why, even in conversations about transforming education, giving them meaningful power can still feel like such a radical idea.
Changing the Model Doesn't Necessarily Change the Power
Many of us who move toward alternative education do so precisely because we want young people to have more freedom and agency. We create self-directed learning environments, democratic schools, homeschool communities, and other spaces intended to give children more agency over their lives and learning.
But it's possible to change almost everything about an educational environment while leaving one thing surprisingly intact: the assumption that adults should still hold most of the power.
This can be particularly difficult to see when our intentions are good. We may genuinely want to listen to young people and respect their autonomy, while still finding ourselves deciding which choices are reasonable, when intervention is necessary, or how much freedom is too much. We may invite young people into decision-making while quietly reserving the right to overrule them when their decisions make us uncomfortable.
That's not because adults are secretly trying to control children. Most of us have simply had very little experience of relationships between adults and young people that work differently.
We grew up in a world where the hierarchy was already established. Adults made the decisions, children followed them, and eventually the children became adults and moved to the other side of that relationship. By the time we have children of our own or begin working with young people, that hierarchy can feel less like a choice and more like the natural order of things.
When Being an Adult Means Having More Power
There is a word for this that many people have never encountered: adultism. Adultism describes the ways adults are given greater power and authority simply because they are adults, while young people's perspectives, preferences, and experiences are treated as less important or less credible because of their age.
It doesn't mean adults and children have the same experience, knowledge, or responsibilities. They don't. The question is what we believe those differences entitle us to do.
Once we begin noticing adultism, we start seeing things we've rarely been asked to question. We notice how often a child's no can be overridden simply because an adult believes they know better. We realize how normal it is for young people's time to belong to someone else, or for decisions that profoundly affect their lives to be made without their meaningful participation.
“The future of education needs to be youth-rights-centric. Otherwise, we’re just staying in the same place.”
Education makes this particularly visible. We can redesign the classroom, remove grades, loosen the schedule, introduce choice, and call what we're doing progressive. But if young people still don't have meaningful influence over the environments they're spending their lives in, it's worth asking how much has really changed.
That doesn't mean children should suddenly carry responsibilities they're not ready for, or that adults abandon theirs. Sharing power isn't the same thing as pretending there are no differences between adults and children. It's about questioning why difference has so often been translated into hierarchy.
Perhaps that's where some conversations about educational reform stop too soon. We spend a great deal of time thinking about how to make education more engaging, personalized, relevant, or flexible, and about what children will need for the future and how we can prepare them for it. Those can all be worthwhile questions. But the people answering them are still overwhelmingly adults.
Why Giving Up Power Can Be So Difficult
Giving young people more agency can feel surprisingly difficult, even when we believe deeply in autonomy. There are moments when a young person's choice collides with what we think they should do, and suddenly our commitment to their agency becomes much harder to hold.
Some of that may be fear. We know things children don't know. We can imagine consequences they may not yet be able to see, and caring for someone includes wanting to protect them. But the conversation led us somewhere else too: what happens when the freedom we're trying to give young people is freedom we never had ourselves?
Many adults grew up with very little say over some of the most important parts of their childhoods. We were expected to comply, to do what was required, and to accept that adults knew what was best. We may have spent years becoming the people we were expected to become before having much opportunity to discover who we actually were. It would be strange if none of that followed us into adulthood.
Perhaps changing our relationship with young people therefore requires more than changing our ideas about education. It may also require us to notice what happens inside us when a young person says no, chooses differently than we would, or asks for a degree of freedom that we ourselves weren't given.
Because if educational reform only changes what we do with young people, while leaving unquestioned our belief that adults should ultimately decide what is best for them, we may keep rebuilding the same relationship in increasingly progressive-looking forms.
And that brings us back to the question we started with. We spend enormous amounts of energy asking how education needs to change.
Perhaps we haven't spent nearly enough time asking who gets to decide.
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