Studying outside the box

I only re­cently found out that the term ’nini’, used to refer to a young per­son who nei­ther stud­ies nor works (Ni es­tu­dia Ni tre­balla), is ’neet’ (Not in Ed­u­ca­tion, Em­ploy­ment, or Train­ing) in Eng­lish. While these days it is not un­usual for nov­el­ties in the Eng­lish lan­guage to pass me by, I think the real rea­son it hadn’t oc­curred to me that such a term might exist in other lan­guages is that the idea of a lack of op­por­tu­nity for young peo­ple in Spain was so firmly fixed in my mind.

Un­em­ploy­ment among peo­ple under-25 in Spain has re­cently fallen slightly, but it still stands at 34%, with over half a mil­lion young peo­ple out of work. If you are fin­ish­ing school and faced with ei­ther no job or a low qual­ity one, then it is hardly sur­pris­ing that many young peo­ple de­cide to keep on study­ing. How­ever, that brings its own prob­lems, de­lay­ing their entry in the work­force and there­fore keep­ing them de­pen­dent on their par­ents, while pro­duc­ing a host of overqual­i­fied young peo­ple who are then forced to work below their ed­u­ca­tional level or go abroad.

Mean­while, those who choose to stop study­ing at 16 or 18 are left in a job mar­ket that of­fers them lit­tle, and so so­ci­ety ends up with a large pro­por­tion of ’ninis’, or ’neets’, if you pre­fer. While it is true that the econ­omy has im­proved a lit­tle, many young peo­ple still find them­selves in dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tions that have no clear so­lu­tions. While it is be­yond my pow­ers to offer them a way out, I think we would all agree that more ’neets’ helps no one, least of all the ’ninis’ them­selves.

If doing noth­ing is not an op­tion, and work op­por­tu­ni­ties are lim­ited, then we have no choice but to look again at ed­u­ca­tion, de­spite the caveats men­tioned above. Yet, maybe the ed­u­ca­tion op­tion could work bet­ter if we thought out­side the box. In this issue of the mag­a­zine, as al­ways at this time of year, we focus on ed­u­ca­tion (pages 20-29). How­ever, this year we have tried to deal with some less com­mon ed­u­ca­tional is­sues, from home­school­ing to uni­ver­sity courses for the re­tired. Even a quick look at the type of sub­jects dealt with shows that there are ed­u­ca­tional op­por­tu­ni­ties and so­lu­tions out there that go be­yond, say, every 18-year old sim­ply sign­ing up to do law at uni and then strug­gling to find a job with a law firm after grad­u­at­ing be­cause the mar­ket is so sat­u­rated.

We are liv­ing at a time when, from an ed­u­ca­tional point of view, there are many re­sources out there, such as a great many pub­lic ini­tia­tives or on­line ac­tiv­i­ties. Should peo­ple want, they can in­creas­ingly study in so many other ways and find a way of stand­ing out and there­fore hope­fully avoid the fate of too many young peo­ple, which is hav­ing to live as a ’neet’.