Emergency of youth in Colombia as a particular field of knowledge and as an analysis cultural category in the decade of the 1970’s

Abstract

This article analyzes the emergency of youth in Colombia as a particularfield of knowledge and as an analysis cultural category in the decade ofthe 1970’s, when the family, school and work relationships aresubstantially modified with the emergence, consolidation and exhaustionof the industrial urban model. Accordingly, youth appears as the groupwhose work insertion requires qualified education processes whichcannot be directly provided by the familial environment, thus displacingone of its main socializing functions to school. The school, at the sametime, generates expectations which cannot be met by the workorganization, as it is not in the position to absorb the resulting laborforce. This creates a future vacuum in both male and female youths,whose authoritarian paradigms favor the rupture of youth potential toactively participate in the construction of the emerging social order. Theconjunction of distinct phenomena that explain this situation becomesexplicit: the exhaustion of the modernizing model and the absence of asocietal alternative, the emptiness of the youth notion within the framework of modernization, the weakening of the family and schoolsocializing capacity because of their impertinence and low quality, andan acute youth marginalization process, both at economic and culturallevels.