Click below to make the pledge.
Pledge to Participate
The Youth Rights Day is a simple idea for how to increase the visibility of people advocating for the social, educational and environmental rights of the young. The pledge only asks that people start needed conversations with neighbours and friends to help overcome misconceptions about youth. It is all about learning how to live better together.
Click here for a list of Book Authors supporting this call to unite.
Click here for a list of programs, groups, services and organizations, leading the way. A goal of the Youth Rights Day is to expand this list to give dimension to the scope of the global effort to improve the treatment of young people.
Visit the Youth Rights Day Facebook group for more information.
What Is It?
The Youth Rights Day is a movement. It is not an organization. It has no board of directors. It has no budget and it does no fundraising. It simply presents an opportunity for people to build awareness of the rights of youth, and for the advocates of young people to show their collective strength. The success of it is in the hands of each individual and what they choose to make of it. The Youth Rights Day was initiated with this 2021 letter signed by youth activists.
The Bottom Line
If you want to change a culture, you need to change how its young people get their education. This idea is conveyed by Schooling the World. While the health and wellbeing of every individual is critical, behind the Youth Rights Day is a sense of urgency to secure our future. Our civilization needs to change its current trajectory to avoid untold hardship.
How To Use It
Use the Youth Rights Day as a way to start a conversation about your views on youth rights. Use it to bring attention to a small community group, a larger organization, an author, a video or a website, etc. People need not feel unqualified to start a conversation. A conversation can be started by someone who knows little about the topic. Consider this sample conversation. A person says to an acquaintance, “The Youth Rights Day is coming up on November 20th. Do you know anything about it? No? I don’t know much either, but I want to learn more about democratic schools and community learning hubs. Would you be interested in pursuing that with me a little?” The conversation might go no further or it might evolve into something like a group of neighbours getting together on November 20th to share what they have learned in the meantime.
This Website
The Youth Rights Day was officially launched with this 2021 letter signed by youth activists. This website is not the website of the Youth Rights Day. There is no one such website. It is only an example of what a person or group can do to bring attention to youth rights and to help the advocates of young people to come out of the shadows and show their united strength. The vision is of people everywhere, speaking different languages and living in different cultures, voluntarily producing something similar or different that has the same goals, but that takes into account the conditions of the people it seeks to engage. Imagine many such efforts throughout the world linking up together. It amounts to the orchestrating of a movement and it answers the call of the United Nations report titled: Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education. It “aims to catalyze a global debate on how education needs to be rethought in a world of increasing complexity, uncertainty, and fragility.”
The Pledge
The pledge is a way for people to consciously assume some responsibility for building awareness of how a society’s treatment of it young determines it future. People making the pledge are beholden to no one but themselves. By providing names of groups, organizations and titles of books, documentaries and other resources, people help to give dimension to the scope of the effort being made to correct our treatment of young people. Click below to
Make The Pledge.
Be Kind
Change of the scope being sought is a process, not an event. Movements can be self-defeating if they expect too much of people. For those raised in authoritarian environments, the transition to democratic ones does not happen all at once. It is a process that takes time. Patience and understanding need to be exercised for those on the journey. Some people are largely of the mind that young people need to be coerced to reach their potential. Others are well along the way to realizing coercion is ultimately unconstructive. The important thing is that people embark on the journey and maintain the open-mindedness that allows them proceed through the process step by step.
A Grand Show of Solidarity
The Pledge offers a way to demonstrate the size of the movement for youth rights. It is massive, and from the Pledge a list of all the groups and organizations advocating for youth empowerment can be created to show just how big it is. Below is how the list will look. Imagine how long it list can be. There is strength in numbers. Watch this short video and beckon to people to dance with us. In addition to making The Pledge, join the Youth Rights Day Facebook group and share there your work and opinions that can help to accelerate the youth rights movement.
Ideas for Action
Think of the Youth Rights Day as a conversation starter and a segue into talking about what you think, and what you are doing related to youth rights. Think of it as answering the UN call for a “global debate on how education needs to be rethought,” the call it extends with its November 2021 report titled: Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education.
Click to see more . . .
The Convention on the Rights of the Child
The Convention makes it a right for young people to have a say in matters that affect them, but it is far from being respected. This is particularly true in typical publicly funded schools, but change is finally in the air.
Click to see more . . .
Youth As Equals
“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” This statement made by Queensland Aboriginal Activists in 1970 describes a Rung 9 for Hart’s Ladder of Participation.
Click to see more . . .
Help to build the movement. Sign the Pledge. Start a conversation.
Together we can secure our future.
Youth Rights Day 