YOUTH HOUSES AND CINEMATIC EDUCATION

Flemish youth work is unique globally. In no other country does youth work have so much freedom and funding to create specific spaces for young people. This article examines one example from Flemish youth to make an argument that youthful places should be cultivated. This argument is made following one of Walter Benjamin's earliest essays 'The Metaphysics of Youth’ in which he defends and elaborates on the specific ontological dimension of youth. This article examines this ontological power of youth in relation to the use of technology in one Flemish youth house and how this can lead to a form of cinematic education. Ultimately, youth works straddles a thin line between being a constant goal-oriented educational environment and mere senseless diversion. While the cultivation of attention is an important part of a formal classroom, in the informal environment of youth work pure attention would be an anathema to its collective cinematic educational environment. Therefore, youth work is an important space of resistance to many of the neoliberal and noneducational discourses winding their way through education today.