Betraying the Intellectual Tradition: Public Intellectuals and the Crisis of Youth

Building upon the late Pierre Bourdieu’s belief that intellectuals had a major responsibility in bridging intellectual work and the operation of politics, this paper argues that intellectuals, especially those in higher education, need to recognise that youth is an important moral referent and political starting point for addressing a number of issues related to a wide ranging number of political problems, including environmental and class concerns to matters of race, gender, and disability. Youth invokes compassion and understanding, which are crucial to shaping the civic imagination. The emphasis on young people’s experience is important because it foregrounds the relationship between power and the lived realities shaped by material relations of power. More specifically, young people provide a more crucial lens through which hegemony can be analysed, compassion mobilised, and politics engaged beyond local interests and national boundaries. Educators need a new language in which young people are not detached from politics but become central to any transformative notion of pedagogy conceived in terms of social and public responsibility.