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15 - Integrated Transition Policies for European Young Adults: Contradictions and Solutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2009

By
Manuela Du Bois-Reymond
Edited by
Ingrid Schoon  and
Rainer K. Silbereisen
Ingrid Schoon
Affiliation:
Institute of Education, University of London
Rainer K. Silbereisen
Affiliation:
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena, Germany
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Summary

Introduction

We have gotten used to thinking of youth and young people not only in national categories – for example, young English, young Poles – but also in the European context. The White Paper, ‘A New Impetus for European Youth’ (European Commission [EC], 2001), is an influential document for envisioning a comprehensive policy framework for the 75 million young Europeans presently living in the twenty-seven EU member states. It has since been cited as a key to integrating educational and youth policy under the umbrella of participation and social inclusion. Another growing concern of the European Union (EU) is how to make Europe the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world no later than 2010, as outlined in the Lisbon Summit of 2000 (EC 2001). The new generation of EU educational and youth programs for 2007–2013 and the emphatically stressed commitment to do everything possible to implement the Lisbon goal expressed in the ‘Youth Pact’ all testify to that concern.

In this chapter, I discuss three constellations of young people in transition and the implications for youth policies and future research (du Bois-Reymond & Chisholm 2006). The first constellation concerns young people's learning environments that, although different in the various EU member states, nevertheless have common features, a most significant one being the erosion of the school-to-work transition. Educational policies on national and European levels promote new combinations of formal and nonformal learning–teaching approaches to repair old and to build new bridges between educational systems and labour markets.

Type
Chapter
Information
Transitions from School to Work
Globalization, Individualization, and Patterns of Diversity
 , pp. 331 - 351
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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