To refer to this article use this url: http://www.quotidian.nl/vol01/nr01/a03
Conclusions
This article investigated how specific, varying school contexts affect the routines and rituals that constitute everyday youth culture at school. It has provided a thick description of life in 8th form, locating everyday youth culture between skipping rope (tactic) and Eid ul-Fitr (strategic). The two studied schools differed greatly. The closed playground of the Gunningschool versus the open, community building of the Kantlijn corresponds with the different images the schools conveyed, where ownership of the school laid with faculty and the community respectively. The classroom at the Gunningschool addressed the pupils as students with duties. The classroom at the Kantlijn was less of an educational space than it was a meeting place, where pupils and teacher Luck lived together. With a strong focus on conventional learning, the climate at the Gunningschool was best described as an educational culture. The Kantlijn, on the other hand, was best typified as a gezelligheidscultuur (convivial culture). The strong emphasis on special activities at the Kantlijn corresponds with the school’s emphasis on experience and learning about the world. The Gunningschool assigned less time to such activities. Thomas told me he needed all the time he had to teach the basic skills. The differences between the two schools exceed the black/white dichotomy. Not all black schools are as strict as the Gunningschool, nor were all teachers at the Kantlijn as easygoing as Luck. However, this article did show the black/white dichotomy in action.
With all time focused on teaching basic skills, the Gunningschool-pupils were not only missing out on fun, they also lacked training in what can be labelled as middle-class skills of personal reflection and self-awareness. Thus, in response to the research question, the study shows how the specific structure of a context (manifested here in the school building, the rules etcetera) is a decisive factor in the content of everyday youth culture.
In addition, the focus on strategic spaces has brought to the fore that stable strategics create stable tactics, promoting historical and generational continuity rather than change. Contemporary life at school is structured by a number of routines and rituals that, despite their contextual and historical situatedness, defy change. Tactics are the ways pupils ‘make do’ with strategics and although times and teachers change, tactics have remained more or less the same over time. However, depictions of Dutch youth culture in mass media generally portray contemporary youths as fundamentally different to previous generations, for instance by characterising them as the digital generation[10] or as breezersletjes (breezer sluts).[11] My analysis shows that life at school has remained basically the same (cf. De Waal 1989), despite large societal trends such as multiculturalism and digitalisation. Pupils learn from their teacher and from books, and in between lessons they prefer to talk with each other rather than play on the computer. During breaks, pupils go outside, where they spend time with each other shooting marbles and skipping rope.
The theoretical contribution of this article, i.e. the application of De Certeau’s strategic practices to youth culture, warrants more attention to the ways such practices produce inequalities, in terms of gender, ethnicity or other identity axes. A historical and comparative perspective might prove particularly helpful in the disentanglement of this production of difference. Through its empirical contribution, this article also intervenes in societal debates about youth. I have drawn from methods common to anthropology that favour a holistic perspective on culture. Furthermore, the conceptual tools from De Certeau bring a notion of power into the analysis, a notion that (often) lacks in marketing descriptions or psychological investigations. To quote Marx’ famous words: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx 1852, 10). The same applies to contemporary youth culture.