Are Youth at Risk, Juveniles or Just Kids? Analysis of the Current Educational Resistance of Minors from Attendance Centers in Culturally Diverse Societies

The phenomenon of educational resistance shown by minors from disadvantaged backgrounds and placed in attendance centers is the main subject of interest in this article. This is a special group of students, because their attitude towards education is shaped by factors determined by dysfunctional families, antisocial pressure from peers, poor neighborhood, poor infrastructure, experience from the foster care institutions and a school curriculum, implemented without taking into account their specifics. Resistance is a reaction to their educational experience and perceived as a manifestation of a dominant culture associated with a form analyzed by Paul Willis. According to this concept, the connection between the hegemonic culture and subordinate groups is created not only by ethnic or national, but also by socio-cultural and economic factors. Young people from the underclass, shaped by various cultural patterns, norms, values, language and socio-economic conditions, reject the educational offer of the cultural hegemon, generating behaviors leading to school abandonment and truancy. Based on the research material collected during in-depth interviews, the educational resistance of minors was analyzed with particular attention to its causes, patterns and trajectories.

The subcultural style of`lads' described in the classical work of Paul Willis [10] is built on the attitude toward school, which is manifested in the reproduction of a position in the social structure, which is determined by developmental limitations and lack of access to environmental resources, but also a manifestation of resistance. The most significant regularity noted by Willis with regard to resistance was that their attitude to compulsory schooling is peculiarly interpreted in accordance with the specific street pedagogy of survival: participation in formal education with a minimum of their own efforts, manifested in violating boundaries that outline not only the role of a student, but also the authority of the teacher. School and traditionally defined education are important for``cissies'' --school colleagues from the upper classes [10].
Willis notes several typical behaviors of the characters described. The so-called having a laff' is a crucial element of the school counterculture, which in itself is perceived as a source of fun, a panacea for boredom and protection from difficulties encountered in school [10]. Denial of school education also entails a decrease in mental activity and leads to a cult of strength and masculinity. According to M. Brake, educational resistance arises from the fact that the real functions of the school are at odds with its supposed goals [11]. For the boys studied by Willis,``anti-school culture'' is the desired source of DOI  a space of knowledge and resistance, as well as the product of their environmental culture, which reproduces their position in the structure of the social class [11].

Methods
This article is aimed at analyzing the experiences of minors in juvenile detention centers.
Their educational experience in an open environment before isolation is examined.
In the context of resistance, this serves as the basis for building relations between representatives of subordinate groups (underclass) in relation to the school, an institution that represents the dominant culture, which is part of conflicts in a culturally diverse society.
In this study, the structural description method proposed by F. Schutze [12] was used, which enables analysis of the educational experience and activity patterns of the respondents. These trajectories are viewed as entanglement in resistance mechanisms.
Data was collected using the in-depth interview method [13], [14], [15]. This is a useful tool for collecting information about the participants' live experience [16]. This type of interview is quite commonly used in social or cultural studies, including cultural conflicts, social deviation, or resistance [17]. This is a particularly useful research method when respondents use similar language or slang and when the accepted analytical model entails collecting the same information from each participant (in this case there were minors from rehabilitation centers, which served as the basis for an a priori assumption about their significantly similar experience).
For conducting interviews, one rehabilitation institution of each type was randomly determined (a home for detained juveniles, open, half-open, closed, with intensified educational supervision, therapeutic facilities (all for boys) and facilities for girls). Six to eight interviews were conducted in each of the selected facilities with minors aged 15--19, which were verified using triangulation by comparing their contents with the facts from the participants' profiles (to minimize the possibility of confabulation). During the analysis, ethical requirements related to the field of research were observed (anonymity and confidential principle, minimizing the identification of the interviewees, which led to the assignment of codes to each participant) [18], [19]. Due to the specific nature of the study area, the preservation of genuine utterances turned out to be problematic, therefore synonyms or contextual notes were added in italics in square brackets. The minors' experience of psychiatric treatment is a particularly difficult educational challenge in the analyzed context. One of the side effects, aside from the stigma of having been at the so-called`rathouse', may be disruption of the educational process. In the case of the interviewee's (A/5), the isolation caused an interruption in his education. A side effect of their spending time in institutions is breakouts and`non-returns' (a situation where a minor does not return to the institution from the leave granted to him). In both cases, a long stay outside the educational environment leads to the notorious evasion of compulsory school obligations. One example of the modus operandi described is the interviewee (D/6), who, for the above reasons, had a 1.5 year break in training. Therefore, according to the analyzed narratives, the aversion of minors to school obligations stems from environmental factors, of which the characteristics of the family of origin and the experience of institutional education play a key role.

School and resistance
The essence of the minors' resistance is specificity of their functioning at school, which is reflected in their interpersonal relationships. Regarding to peer's relationships, they don't conceal their antipathies toward``normals'' (students functioning correctly at school).

Truancy
The minors note that they gained their first experiences with truancy in primary school. In the context of peer relationships, a so-called`bad company' is a significant factor shaping minors' attitude to school. This is noted by the interviewee (A/5): Everything was fine until the end of the first semester, then I met some people I shouldn't have met and I started to play truant. The cited statement shows that his new friends met at school (in this case, middle school) contributed to his truancy.
The impact of the peer pressure in the analyzed aspect is particularly strong on minors growing up in foster care, which has been underlined by one participant (E/6): Therefore, truancy is a model of behavior that is a unique example of resistance, which not only leads to absence from school and exacerbates the problem of repeating grades, but also begins a series of antisocial actions leading to juvenile crime.

Conclusion
Based on the collected material, it can be assumed that school is an institution that generates a model (or rather, stigma) of`problem youth' among teenagers living in the socio-cultural periphery [20]. The model comes down to attempts at educational effects, which are characterized by low efficiency and inadequacy in the living environment of minors.
4th СTPE 2019 According to the cited literature, confrontation and the so-called`laff' are the weapons of educational resistance, exerted chiefly against the teaching staff and, to a lesser degree, against (as they were called in the text)`normals'. The context of the statements analyzed shows that it gives them experiences identical in nature to those gained by their predecessors.
In general terms, the characterized mode of action does not differ significantly from that originally described by P. Willis [10]. Its updated version (expanded at the suggestion of J. Terpstra) consists of the unique nature of socio-economic and structural transformations that reinforce the underclass model and the poverty culture model typical of modern culturally fragmented societies [9]. Psychoactive substances are an additional factor that is a modern novelty in resistance (compared to previous studies): cheap and easy to buy.
In the light of the analyzed narratives, the teacher's reaction to education is especially difficult: how methodically they are prepared to respond to problem students and work with them, and how many opportunities they have to work with specialized institutions in this environment. In other words (quoting from John W. Maag), this is question about the teacher's ability to cope with resistance [21].
The analyzed narratives expose the helplessness of the teaching staff. This problem is more complex if we take into consideration the above trend and the nature of the local communities in which the educational institution operates. In such case, this may be referred to as the accumulation of`problem kids', which is an educational challenge that the teaching staff has to face. Assuming that the scale of students' problems in a school located in a poor neighborhood is multiplying, it should be noted that this does not directly translate into the school's professional resources (e.g. the amount of employed counsellors). This is also a challenge for school prevention programs developed at the level of normative acts in which the forms of talks, lectures and mental tests take precedence over mobilization models, which significantly reduces their effectiveness. Without taking into consideration the identified regularities in the preventive and educational work of the school, it will be difficult to find a solution to the analyzed problem.