There used to be several paths a youth could follow to reach adulthood. Youth could enter the labor market through several ways, allowing them to turn whatever experience they possessed into budding labor skills. Today, education is the key – the only key – to the labor market in Norway as well as in the rest of the western world.  We face a dramatically changed situation in which the educational system takes the center stage in the life of every youth.

The advent of the knowledge society and the fall of the industrial society it replaces, has been going on for a long time (Frønes 2013). But it is only recently that the educational system acquired its dominating position. One may argue that the youth revolt with the arrival of flower power and the hippies in the late 1960s and the following upheavals at Universities across the Western Hemisphere (and beyond) made youth cultural expressions the first carriers of the knowledge society. By the end of the Century the scales started to flip. The PISA tests alone has made countries across the globe compete fiercely over meritocratic improvements making academia again take the center stage of the knowledge society. In Norway this is reflected in a dramatic change in the ways of youth recorded in a number of surveys (Hegna, Ødegård et al. 2013).  The youth of today consume less alcohol, smoke little tobacco, hardly ever commit criminal offence and focus on their academic careers compared with the youth of only a decade ago.  The situation has made some question the continuing importance of youth culture (Øia 2014).

Poverty and outsider positions used to reflect lack of participation in the labor market. Today marginalization starts at school. Currently 71 000 youth at the age 15 to 29 are neither at work nor in education, that makes up 7 % of that age group in Norway (Bø og Vigran 2015). They make up a group of silenced youth. Youth who seem to be alienated from the large majority, yet, if the current research projections hold true, they will find no reprieve from their outsider positions in subcultural communities or alternate movements. In the past such belongings would offer pathways and careers that would eventually take them to adulthood and reinstate them in the labor market.

Our paper looks at the stories of youth who dropped out of school in Norway. At the time of the interview they were all 21 years old or younger, had started sixth form at college at 16, but left before completion.

The question we ask ourselves is:

What are the careers of silenced youth who are outside school, training and employment today?

The research question is as follows:

What do the life-story of youth within the category “silenced youth” tell us about their actual pathway to adulthood?

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