Abstract

How one tells the story of the development of youth identity in South Africa (and indeed elsewhere) in relation to schooling has been dominated, understandably, by the great theme of race. This paper, drawing on a range of sources, attempts to develop an analytic narrative for describing youth development, and the different trajectories it takes in South Africa, in a wider psycho-social frame. This analytic narrative shows <p> i) that young people are in a complex engagement with a range of formal and informal structures to produce identities that are at some levels continuous with those of their apartheid antecedents, but </p><p> ii) that new forms of identity are emerging that are troubling and unsettling conventional (both conservative and radical) understandings of what appropriate youth forms of address, deportment and engagement with the new South Africa might be.</p>