newsPeeks: identity

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that young people today are bearing the brunt of reckless decisions made by older generations.

A lack of affordable housing means millions of us can’t even contemplate renting our own place let alone actually buying a home. A lack of a fair economic policy means millions of us, not through lack of will but through lack of opportunities, are unable to find stable paid work. And a lack of long-term planning for our environment means millions of us, from England to Nauru, are going to be living with the consequences of unnecessary ecological catastrophes for the rest of our lives.

It’s scandalous.

Yet there’s a huge number of us who aren’t engaging in politics, or aren’t aware of the impact it is has on us.

For us to tackle these issues and find a way forward for our generation and the generations to come, we need to make sure we are all politically literate from a young age.

Why aren’t we?

Well for starters, we aren’t taught why politics and current affairs are important in schools, so it’s easy for many people not to appreciate its importance.

It is dangerous to suppose that we will automatically understand and engage in politics and current affairs without much support.

Most of us have a sense of interest in the world around us when we’re growing up, and a desire to understand what’s happening and why it’s happening. This doesn’t maybe lend itself to the Westminster focused news seen in much of the traditional media.

But this interest needs to be nurtured — it can’t be assumed it will translate into automatic engagement with politics later on in life.

At newsPeeks we think all of us need to develop a broad, critical and global sense of how the world is run and who is running it, starting from a young age. That’s what we try to do and you can see lots of our work over at www.newsPeeks.com, but we’re only just getting started.

We’re still learning ourselves — we’ve made big strides over the last few months, but there’s a lot more to come. The need for quality independent media has never been greater, and we know newsPeeks (and several other fantastic projects) need to rise to the challenge.