English Abstract

This thesis is about youth and education. It is about how young recipients of welfare experience their present situation in a society, where education takes precedence, and at the same time which consequences this societal focus on education has on the youths. With this thesis our intent is to contribute with a knowledge based on the young people's stories of their lives. A knowledge, which can be used in the development of social work. The political goal concerning young people is that 95% of all youths in 2015 should have an education and in order to reach this goal much economic founding has been used. However, facts show that Denmark has not come closer to reaching this goal even though many initiatives have been taken. One of the initiatives is to impose education on some of the young people and the intent for the young people, who do not get imposed is to work towards an education in the long term. We have chosen to interview young people, from both groups thereby getting knowledge about the entire group of uneducated youths. We have had the assumption that the young people were very different in terms of background as well as qualifications. At the same time we had the assumption that the focus on education could have negative consequences on the young people without an education and we have therefore stayed critical towards this idea of education for all.

The research is based on the life stories of ten youths. Concerning the young people's stories we have used a phenomenological approach combined with a structuralist/constructivist approach. Throughout this thesis we have used sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as our theoretical frame and have at the same time based our work on his approach to research and knowledge. This means that Pierre Bourdieu forms the epistemological as well as the theoretical frame of our thesis. We take our starting point in the following of Bourdieus concepts; field, position og habitus and our goal is to uncover if there, in any of the young people's stories, are traces of what Bourdieu calls 'Social suffering', which is about the disproportion between the objective structures and the individual practice. We have reached the conclusion that many of the young people are in a contradicting position , as they take on the idea of education but at the same time find it difficult living up to it in practice. In that way, we have traced social suffering in many of the young people. Apart from that, our research show that the young people put great value in social relations as well as in not feeling different. A lot of the young people see themselves as being different from other youths and have a difficult time finding their place in both the educational system as well as in society in general. A characteristic of the life stories is also that the young people are at a time in their lives where they need a break from the education. The young people who get education imposed on them cannot see the point of it, as they feel they would have started their education even without it. We have discussed this knowledge in relations to social work in our last analysis and have reached the conclusion that a unilaterally focus on education may have the effect on some young people, that they are unable to find their place in our society. In social work it should therefore be considered whether the