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Tuesday, September 6, 2011

In Defense of Reckless Youth « Student Activism

In Defense of Reckless Youth « Student Activism:

In Defense of Reckless Youth

The always-thoughtful danah boyd (those lower case letters are her idea) speaks up for youthful recklessness:

I’m worried about our societal assumption that risk-taking without thinking of the consequences is an inherently bad thing. We need some radical thinking to solve many of the world’s biggest problems. And I don’t believe that it’s so easy to separate out what adults perceive as ‘good’ risk-taking from what they think is ‘bad’ risk-taking. But how many brilliant minds will we destroy by punishing their radical acts of defying authority? How many brilliant minds will we destroy by punishing them for ‘being stupid’? It’s easy to get caught up in a binary of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ when all that you can think about is the consequences. But change has never happened when people simply play by the rules. You have to break the rules to