I drew on the reports from the youth forums that were held...

I drew on the reports from the youth forums that were held during Youth Week Victoria in 2000 and which included 2250 students from 162 Victorian schools. These reports identified major issues in 12 areas that affected young people (Youth Forum Report 2000) and for each they proposed a list of recommendations for action by government agencies, schools and community groups. There were two common threads that ran through these lists.

The first was a focus on the value of community and cooperation and the second was a focus on valuing youth and individuality. The contradictions inherent in these different writings would suggest that there is some confusion about the understanding of the nature of individualism.

One argument that helps to illuminate these differences was offered by Moffett (1994): The nature of individualization has also been evolving, some stages of which are selfish and narcissistic, attained by the majority now, further stages of which, attained by a leading minority, are empathic and compassionate.

The latter seem to return to the original group solidarity, but there is a world of difference between the primal herd feeling, which is unconscious and incapable of personal thought or action, and the expanded consciousness of the individual who has parlayed self-cultivation into transcendence (p. 10).

Certainly, young and middling adults today were born into a lifestyle of the sixties, seventies and eighties that favoured the individual over the community since it is one that their parents, and in some cases, their grandparents have maintained.

Accordingly, individuality has become such a strong and essential ingredient of their self-expressions that many may reject the tendency to have labels attributed to them, such as Generation X or Y, the Echo-boomers, and Screenagers, which have been variously applied to them by previous generations. At the same time, as Moffett argues, they appear to be comfortable with the concept of an individuality that can exist within a communal context.

If we were to accept Moffett’s argument, there are implications for all educators, that is, a need to raise our awareness of the respective roles of individuality and community in the lives of young people since it is probable that both would provide frameworks for their relationality and therefore be closely connected to their expressions of religiosity and spirituality.