The value of cultural practices for young people
Cultural practices, whether traditional or digital, are essential to young people’s development. It seems important to me to open up reflection on their symbolic value and the place of public policies.
Understanding the symbolic value of cultural practices
The question of the value of cultural activities offered to young people goes far beyond their financial cost. At the heart of reflection on cultural policy must be the notion of symbolic value, that is, what these activities represent for young people themselves. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, “it is not the value of things that matters, but the value we assign to them.” This fundamental distinction invites us to look differently at the approach to cultural policies aimed at youth.
Cultural practices function as external objects that allow young people to build themselves. When an adolescent invests in an activity, whether it be theater, music, drawing, or even creating digital content, they use this practice as a mirror of their interiority. These activities become spaces of symbolization where young people can express what they feel, explore their identity, and project themselves into the future. Moreover, these practices create precious meeting spaces. Around a common interest, young people from different backgrounds can come together, exchange, and weave lasting social bonds.
Digital as a legitimate cultural practice
It is essential today to fully recognize young people’s digital practices as genuine cultural practices. Too often, we observe from the outside a young person on their phone without understanding the richness of interactions and creations that unfold there. TikTok trends, for example, create ephemeral but intense communities where thousands of young people share choreographies, creative challenges, or humorous content. These practices have strong symbolic value for those who invest in them.
The lockdown periods in 2020-2021 reminded us of the essential nature of these digital cultural practices. While cultural venues were closed, it was through digital means that culture continued to circulate, create connections, and maintain a form of social life. This experience forces us to move beyond our prejudices about screen time to genuinely take interest in what young people do with their digital tools. The question is not how much time they spend in front of a screen, but how this time is invested, what skills they develop there, and what social connections they create. It’s not just online harassment or extremist ideas that circulate, there is much, much more. Let’s not forget that TikTok, for example, is a platform whose use is primarily learning (as is much of YouTube too, with information and tutorial channels).
Rethinking the debate between free and paid access
The question of free cultural activities for young people regularly sparks passionate debates within teams at cultural venues and local authorities. These debates actually reveal different conceptions of what motivates young people’s engagement and the role of public agents.
On one side, payment, even symbolic, can have several virtues. It allows young people to gradually learn the codes of the cultural sector in the adult world, and to develop their future autonomy. When a young person understands that a show has a cost, that it involves artists, technicians, venues to maintain, they integrate an economic reality that will be useful to them later. Payment can also reinforce engagement and the perceived value of the activity. Experience sometimes shows that financial participation, even minimal, can make participants more responsible and involved.
On the other side, free access responds to an imperative of equal access that is at the heart of public service missions. For many young people, the financial barrier remains an insurmountable obstacle that deprives them of cultural discoveries essential to their development. Free access then allows for genuine positive discrimination, offering everyone the same chances of access to culture. It can be the gateway to practices that young people would never have explored otherwise, with positive long-term impacts in terms of personal development and social integration.
The solution probably does not lie in the exclusive choice of one option or the other, but in a nuanced approach that knows how to adapt its methods according to audiences, activities, and pursued objectives. Certain discovery workshops can be free to remove barriers, while regular activities can require symbolic participation to mark commitment. The essential thing is to harmonize these practices between services to offer a readable and coherent policy to users.
The professional positioning of agents
The role of public service agents places them in a particular position where they must constantly articulate their personal values with their professional mission. This distinction is fundamental to successfully carrying out missions. Personal convictions about what is good for young people can sometimes create tension with the political orientations of the local authority or institution, or with the expectations of the audiences themselves.
In this context, field expertise is valuable. Agents are best placed to observe the concrete effects of policies, to identify unmet needs, and to propose developments. The role of decision support involves reporting these observations, analyzing them, and formulating constructive proposals. We must ensure that the actions of public agents respect people’s cultural rights, that is, their dignity and their capacity to freely choose their cultural practices.
This professional posture also requires attention to possible confusion between agents’ personal practices and their professional practices, particularly on social media. When we publish content related to our professional activities, we represent the institution and must ensure the coherence of our messages with institutional policy.
Building a coherent youth cultural policy
To develop a truly effective youth cultural policy, here are several points of attention:
- Communication and accessibility of proposals are crucial. It is not enough to make an activity free if the information is not clear and easily accessible.
- We must think about accessibility in all its dimensions: financial of course, but also temporal, geographical, and informational. Some free offers require so many procedures or availability at specific times that they actually exclude the audiences they claim to target.
- Pedagogy and support constitute another essential axis. Explaining why certain activities are paid, introducing cultural sector careers, gradually accompanying toward cultural autonomy: so many missions that give meaning to our action.
- This pedagogy also involves valorizing all forms of cultural practices, including those that young people develop autonomously.
- Finally, transversality and coherence between services appear as indispensable conditions for policy effectiveness. Regular exchanges between colleagues, sharing successful experiences, collectively building innovative proposals allow us to move beyond silo logic to offer young people a cultural policy that is readable and adapted to their needs.
Toward a balanced and benevolent approach
The fundamental mission of public agents is to accompany young people in their personal and social development through cultural practices that make sense to them. This involves recognizing the diversity of forms of engagement, adapting proposals to the multiple realities of audiences, valorizing all cultural practices including the most contemporary ones, and building policies that are both ambitious and realistic.
The challenge is not to definitively decide between free and paid access, between traditional and digital practices, between artistic requirements and accessibility. It is rather about finding, situation by situation, the right balance that will allow the greatest number of young people to flourish through enriching cultural practices. This search for balance requires continuous collective reflection, nourished by field experiences and oriented toward the superior interest of the young people we accompany.
Ultimately, our role is to create conditions so that each young person can find in the public cultural offering spaces for expression, construction, and encounter that correspond to their aspirations and contribute to their development. It is in this open and benevolent perspective that it will be possible to build youth cultural policies that are truly inclusive and emancipatory.
Cultural offerings are sometimes brutally questioned by the “young” audience. A challenge that manifests itself notably through indifference towards the prescriptions of cultural institutions, or even through disinterest in cultural venues. Over 15 years, digital technology has also revolutionized young people’s, and everyone’s, relationship to time and private space. The very definition of culture and its mode of access have been transformed.
To become capable of rethinking projects adapted to the real needs of contemporary youth, which falls under the mission of cultural policies, I believe we must first deconstruct our preconceived ideas, the judgments we may have without knowing. This involves taking the measure of new representations of the world and new cultural practices closely linked to digital technology.
How to do this? I believe that going through “doing,” precisely, is a very rich path for professionals. Experiencing through one’s own experience the stakes of cultural practices in the digital era, by participating in workshops with young people, by “playing” with digital technologies, by exploring new cooperation mechanisms, etc., with the aim of surpassing one’s usual criteria, in order to be enriched by youth’s ideas and uses. This is not about demagogy, but about weaving connections, which enables mutual transformation, creative hybridization.
Action-research on cultural policies for youth has always been one of the main areas of work for Benoît Labourdette, in cooperation with numerous actors from the cultural, educational and social fields. We propose here methods, accounts of actions and training, which we hope will be inspiring for actors from the cultural, social and educational fields at all levels. To offer an analysis of the stakes, as well as sociological, psychological, cultural foundations, to create solid supports in service of public service missions for youth.
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