Our youth are not the problem, we are the curriculum they learn from

There was a time when the relationship between the state and young people was relatively uncomplicated. Young people were primarily students. As long as the school doors were open and the fees were manageable, the terms of engagement were clear: study, pass, grow, contribute. The state provided. The family trusted. The child complied. That arrangement was fragile — built, in many ways, on optimism and relative stability — but it held.

It no longer holds.

The quality of education has fallen — and the young people living inside that fall know it better than any ministry report. They are taught by teachers the system has demoralised. They are not imagining the decline. They are inhabiting it. And when a generation is required to sit quietly inside a deteriorating institution, silence becomes harder to sustain.

Access to education has thinned. Economic hardship and shifting funding models have pushed many young people out of schools and colleges. They are not dropouts by choice but casualties of unmet state promises. Their energy does not disappear; it is redirected.

Perhaps the most decisive shift is this: in the age of information, young people know what they should be getting — and when they are not. They are not passive consumers of knowledge; they are literate in their own deprivation. They speak the language of accountability, equity and merit. They have watched an opaque state reward corruption and corrupt the rewarded. This generation has become a political force not because it was recruited, but because it was left with no choice.

Technology has done the rest. The spaces where young people speak — social media platforms, digital communities and viral content — reach millions locally and globally. They mobilise real bodies and shape real outcomes. The state has little meaningful control over them. The megaphone has changed hands.

The family unit has been stretched to breaking point. When parents cannot feed, educate or clothe their children, authority shifts. More young people now fend for themselves, some even supporting their families. In some cases, children have taken to the streets to fight for their parents’ futures. The parent–child hierarchy has not only weakened; in many homes, it has quietly reversed

The structural complaints of this generation are legitimate. Their anger has legitimate address. They have been let down by institutions that should have honoured them.

But honesty requires us to say something else as well.

There is a growing tendency in our culture to romanticise youth — to treat the category as if it were synonymous with freedom, innovation, and hope. That instinct is understandable, and in many cases, well-earned. But it is not the whole picture.

Youth is not a single story. It is a tribe with many dialects — some coherent, others in tension, and some deeply destructive. We have goons in the streets. Killers in schools. Fraudsters in offices. Master exam cheats. Con artists operating from their parents’ homes. Hackers on the web. Some of these dialects are lethal. We wish young people were only innovators of good. But they are also, in some cases, innovators of evil. And many live in the in-between spaces — where direction is still being formed.

These are not accidental outcomes. But no orientation emerges in a vacuum. Mindsets are cultivated, encouraged, and learned. They are socially authored — mimicked, normalised, and in some cases refined. Destruction is not instinctive. It is taught.

Formation

So when violence erupts, when institutions burn, when young people turn on one another or the public, the question we must not dodge is: where are they learning this? What examples teach them that power is exercised through fear, that revenge answers grievance, that fire responds to fire?

When adults normalise corruption, young people learn that systems are for capturing, not serving. When leaders mock accountability, young people learn that accountability is for the weak.

When elders reward cunning over character, young people learn that character does not pay. When the state treats citizens as threats rather than people to be served, young people learn that the state is an enemy, and enemies are to be fought.

We are not neutral in the formation of this generation. We are its curriculum.

The temptation is to reduce young people to a political calculation: are they for us or against us? Can we capture them, deploy them, and discard them? This is a moral failure disguised as strategy. When we treat young people as instruments rather than persons, we are doing precisely what we accuse the street goon of doing — reducing a human being to a function. The deeper question is not alignment. It is formation. Who are they becoming? What are we shaping them into? And who among us is asking these questions with enough urgency to actually change something?

Proverbs 22:6 says: “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” The emphasis is not on the child but on the trainer. Formation is an adult responsibility, not a child’s achievement. When that responsibility is abandoned — through weak governance, moral cowardice, institutional dishonesty and domestic disorder — no vacuum is created. Instead, a curriculum of chaos takes root. If we are serious about preventing the next fire, the school that burns, the street that erupts, the life cut short, we must do more than extinguish the flames. We must confront the fire that teaches others to burn.

That fire is not only in the streets; it is in boardrooms, pulpits, Parliament and failed parenting. The young people of this nation are not the problem; they are the product. Products always reveal the truth of their making.

To the state: do not gather evidence of broken homes, absent fathers and struggling mothers to deflect responsibility. You have impoverished families, underfunded schools and normalised corruption in institutions meant to uphold integrity. Create conditions where formation is possible. That is your mandate. To the church: do your work. You are not a chaplain to power or a social club with a cross on the wall.