Stedsløse slaur - Ungdom, skole og lokal forankring

Abstract

The study investigates a common assumption from previous decades of educational sociology: Educational resistance seems to go hand in hand with strong local identity and belonging. In the early 1990s, the Norwegian sociologist Gunnar Jørgensen (1993) analysed how young people developed certain social roles in interactions with school and the local community. Based on school survey data from 2018, we present a quantitative analysis where we compared school rootedness and local community rootedness among students according to their educational resources. The study population consisted of students in upper secondary schools in Telemark, South-Eastern Norway (N=3510). Research questions: 1) Do students with less educational resources express less school rootedness and more local community rootedness compared to students with more educational resources? 2) Do students with less educational resources participate more in e-leisure, compared to students with more educational resources? The analysis showed that students with less educational resources expressed less school rootedness compared to students with more educational resources. Contrary to common assumptions as well as findings from Jørgensen’s study, students with less educational resources expressed less local community rootedness compared to other students. Furthermore, such students had higher frequencies with heavy e-leisure participation compared to other students, and more of them had friends with whom they only stayed in touch through the Internet. We discuss results in relation to “the schooled society” thesis (Baker, 2014), youth culture, and place theory. Finally, we question whether the classic geographical term placelessness (Relph, 1976) is appropriate to describe young students in lack of educational resources.