Young People on the Margins of Education: in the light of recent sociological contemporary diagnosis of the late modern world

Although educational rates overall have grown within the era of the global educational expansion and the educational mobility has increased significantly, we still experience a relatively large group of young people who are not in employment, education or training (NEET) (Karlson & Landersø, 2021; Katznelson et al., 2015).
In this presentation, I will explore how and if recent contemporary diagnosis by the two German sociologists Andreas Reckwitz and Hartmut Rosa can ‘set the scene’ for an understanding and analysis of being young and on the margins of education in a late modern welfare society. How can Reckwitz’ examination of ‘The Society of Singularities’ be used as a lens to understand the challenges these young people face and how they react accordingly (Reckwitz, 2019).
With a different societal diagnosis Hartmut Rosa points at the social acceleration as
distinctive characteristics in today’s western society that can lead to alienation on several levels (Rosa, 2021). How can we understand young people who struggles in the educational system based on this understanding and analysis?
The empirical data is retrieved within the Erasmus+ project COSI.ed (Co-created Education Through Social Inclusion) and is part of an ongoing PhD. -project. During a fieldwork in a Danish FGU-school, which is a relatively new form of school, with students that have faced severe educational challenges and have dropout experience, I have done observations and interviewed the young people about their educational trajectories and life stories.
The initial analysis of the data indicates that many of the young people experience a ‘double’ exposure to the consequences of being in vulnerable positions in society. On one hand they experience the classical challenges of being in a vulnerable socio-econmic position but on the other hand they are also subject to a new underclass which puts them in a very precarious situation.