Review of Critical youth studies: A Canadian focus. Toronto: Pearson Education Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The premise of James Côté and Anton Allahar's excellent new book, Critical youth studies: A Canadian perspective, is that adolescence is not a biological period of maturation but rather a sociological construction, which has been invented by adults because of the political and economic benefi ts accorded to them by maintaining younger people in a subordinate position for an extended period of time.As such, the length of adolescence is subject to shifts in the socio-political landscape and now extends in Canadian society to the 25-29 year old age group.The book does not seek to be a comprehensive investigation of youth studies but rather a focused argument of how adolescence is viewed in Canada (Chapters 1-3), why it is viewed in such a fashion (Chapters 4-6), and how we might view it differently now and in the future (Chapter 7).Rather than going through each chapter in turn, I would like to highlight three aspects of the book that proved particularly helpful for my personal understanding of the issue: the use of statistics in Chapter 3, the theme of dissent running through the fi fth and sixth chapters, and the provision of alternative visions in the concluding chapter.The numbers in Chapter 3 are simply staggering and paint a compelling picture of the condition for youth in Canada.To start, young people are being disenfranchised by their shrinking percentage in the demographic landscape.While, as recently as 1981, the median age in Canada was 29.6 and the ratio of 15-29 year olds to 30-64 year olds was .72 (male) and .70(female), by 2001, the median age had risen to 41.3 and the ratios had dropped to .42 and .40,respectively.As well, young people continue to delay their entrance into the workforce.While 16% of women and 21% of men in the 20-24 age group were attending school full-time in 1981, those numbers had climbed to 43% and 37% by 2001.Youth were no doubt lured by the prospects offered by a postsecondary education, prospects which are best described as illusory, in that the number of highly skilled and skilled jobs are not keeping pace with the increasing credentials.Beginning in Chapter 5 and then forming the basis of Chapter 6 is the concept of the manufacture of dissent.Although the authors' argument is too complex to summarize here, I was mostly intrigued by the way the mass media has taken over control of "identity elements" and then repackaged these elements to young consumers.It reminded me of a current television commercial where a young male rock climber with child and dog attached to his gear mocks another young male rock climber for his biceps tattoo (a now seemingly passé identity marker), all in the service of selling a motor vehicle (the new identity marker?).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".