I’m not sure that asking teenagers to write manifestos or make manifesto plays is the best way to find out what they actually want for the future.

(a thread)

There seem to be lots of projects making space for young people to write manifestos at the moment.

It’s not that surprising - the world is in flux in so many ways and we’re rightly keen to hear what young people want to happen next.

But writing manifestos is a) abstract and huge, and therefore difficult, and b) particularly suited to teenagers who are already actively thinking in this way, when many are not.

There’s a danger that when we ask *anyone* to write a manifesto they either write what they think you want them to write, or they write something general and bland that doesn’t really tie into their real hopes and dreams.

Try it for yourself, right now.

What’s your manifesto for the future of the world?

(I bet your heart sunk a bit)

Asking someone to write a manifesto is like asking them what they want to make a play about.

They’re far more likely to give you the answer they think you want to hear rather than an honest expression of what they really care about.

There’s something in assuming teenagers all want to write manifestos which speaks to a worry I have that adults are abdicating our own responsibility to make change by fetishising a young activist generation who are going to sweep us aside and change the world.

I don’t know that it should be for teenagers to come in alone and save the planet.

I think we older ones should be doing the heavy lifting, allowing the 15-year olds to do normal teenage things, like having crushes & going to school -and also being activists when they want to.

When we started out on the piece that we’re making at the moment, we were thinking about manifestos and protests.

But the young people I’m working with, like most of us, don’t speak in the language of manifestos.

They speak the language of hopes and dreams, expectations and ambitions.

And it is in these things that we find far more specificity, honesty and political energy than in any manifesto you could ever write.

There’s a lot of nice stuff going around at the moment about how important it is to imagine a hopeful future.

Because how can we create something we can’t envisage?

I wonder if that’s what should be driving our work with young people right now, in a specific, personal way.

It’s where youth theatre can come into its own.

To be a space where we can work out the tiny, personal, collective, cultural hopes that will inform the wider political needs of young people both now and as they grow older.

And then communicate them in our work.

But this will only happen if we move past a sometimes quite reductive and alienating idea that all teenagers are activists who want to save the world through manifestos and protest.

That’s just not the case for most teenagers, for lots of (good and sad) reasons.

More importantly, by perpetuating it we are danger of abdicating our responsibility as adults to do our bit to save the world too.