Education in civic participation: Children,seniors and the challenges of an intergenerational information and communications technology program

Introduction

Intergenerational programs that pair children with adults treat children’s civic participation as an important goal. In research on this field, the frame of discussion usually narrows this goal to the mitigation of social stereotypes, internalization of values, exchange of social capital, and so on (Bostrom, 2002; Kerka, 2003; Schwalbach and Kiernan, 2002). This discussion sometimes marginalizes civic participation, even in studies that report broad social implications (Sanchez, 2006). Studies on information and communications technology (ICT)-related intergenerational education programs are no exception (Egan, 2000; Kolodinsky et al., 2002; Lundt and Vanderpan, 2000). Research on such programs, which impart technological knowledge via the young and adjust to rapid changes in technology, community, and family (Vanderven, 2004), does not link the digital domain to the civic responsibility that transcends it.

This article focuses on the Israeli Multigenerational Connection Program (MCP), which assumes the existence of a generational digital divide between seniors and children and links it to the goal of educating children in civic participation. In MCP, the imparting of knowledge allows children to experience an empowering civic participation that may improve their intergenerational attitudes and self-perception.

MCP encourages intergenerational literacy exchanges in school via tasks that seniors (mostly 60+) and children (11–13) infuse with content. Seniors are expected to orient themselves in ICT and share biographical stories with children in order to improve their quality of life and family and social relations; children are supposed to become technology teachers, thereby broadening their horizons and developing cognitive and affective tools of “good citizens.”

In the past 5 years, the Israel Senior Citizens Ministry and the Museum of the Jewish People have been running MCP jointly with the Ministry of Education, giving it a national civic complexion. Today, MCP proposes to infuse the children’s technological knowledge with civic value by enriching the museum’s national database with seniors’ personal and family stories about bygone Jewish communities, elicited by the children.

My earlier studies, like other ICT research, explored the initial contours of MCP and its potential in intergenerational bridging, alleviation of stereotypes, and empowerment of both groups (Gamliel and Gabay, 2014; Gamliel and Hazan, 2014; Gamliel et al., 2007a, 2007b). This article, in contrast, stresses the implications of recent developments in MCP that make it a civic-education program (CEP) that should make a national contribution. Here, the question of children’s social agency is central.

Given the need for research on civic-participation education in Israel (Ben-Arieh and Boyer, 2005), this study asks how well MCP ensures that the children do experience agency. This goal reflects the relevance of child–adult power relations and the difficulty in predicting their nature due to probable ambivalence in the way the children are viewed. In this ambivalence, the ubiquitous assumption that children have technological supremacy and potential as civic agents in this field clashes with their perception as socially marginal individuals (Sanchez, 2006) controlled by the school’s regime (James et al., 1998). The rationale also rests on the possibility of variance in digital knowledge and skill among children and seniors (Kolodinsky et al., 2002) and, in turn, differences in learning dynamics and communication patterns between participating couples and between them and their mediators (computer teachers).

Below, using Devine’s (2002, 2003) theoretical model, I examine MCP’s potential to construct children’s agency as vehicles of a civic contribution in view of the children experiencing their “teacher” role and the challenges of digital communication to intergenerational relations.

Technological bridging and civic participation

The concurrence of population aging and structural changes places both old age and childhood at the forefront of the social debate and causes each generation to assert its social agency (Gilleard and Higgs, 2000; James et al., 1998). Some scholars regard this as a problem that demands a solution—a conflict over the intergenerational allocation of economic resources and “generational bargaining” (Collard, 2001). Others, however, see the growing elderly population, whose vital characteristics are improving (Gratton and Haber, 1996), as a consumer market segment that has singular needs (Gilleard and Higgs, 2000). Embracing the latter approach, some recent studies explore the connection between life quality in old age and mastery of ICT. Observing that seniors are using ICT more and more, they analyze physiological and cognitive impediments in old age that challenge Internet environment designers and computer instructors (Nimrod, 2010; Notess and Lorenzen-Huber, 2007; Segrist, 2004).

Research findings and social stereotypes (Richardson, 2005) reinforce the problematic generalization that young people master technology easily, whereas elders do not (Tapscott, 2008). Bayne and Ross (2007) set “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” within a hierarchical social structure of binary cultural contrasts—playful/serious, fast/slow, digital/analog—that strengthens stereotypes of both generations. Recent studies, however, challenge and even debunk the validity of this dichotomy (Bennett et al., 2008; Hargittai, 2010), pointing to a “grey divide” among seniors (Feriemel, 2014). Some justifiably term the dichotomy of the intergenerational knowledge gap as a myth (Selwyn, 2009) and an exercise in technological determinism or cybercentrism (Buckingham and Willett, 2006) on two grounds: (1) ICT applications neither exclude all seniors nor include all children, and (2) each generation accesses, uses, and copes with technology differently (Bar-Zuri, 2009; Selwyn, 2004). This article contributes to the discussion by noting that while MCP’s leaders cling to the popular stereotype, the program is influenced by consumerist conventions in the ICT market that may blur the digital-divide hierarchy.

The process of structuring the school’s role is inseparable from “generational bargaining.” It interacts with notions that are meant to alleviate conflicts and enhance educational gains. It has been argued that children have become more assertive, threatening the family and school authority hierarchy by demanding that adults earn respect—yielding a “reciprocity” ethic that expands children’s legitimate negotiating room (Holland and Thompson, in Prout, 2000: 308). An additional approach recommends the establishment of a new ideal in intergenerational relationships, replacing “authority” relations and intergenerational “burdens” with “partnership” based on symbols of equality and mutual respect (Gratton and Haber, 1996). The MCP leaders, accepting this change in youngsters’ agency as fact, expect children to serve as “digital contributors” to the national database as they narrow the generational digital gap. This civic participation, defined via the intergenerational process, is expected to enhance intergenerational bridging.

The critical literature on CEP proposes a complex discussion of issues such as the spectrum of civic involvement (passive–active) and the identity of the party that should define its nature (Barber, 2009; Staeheli and Hammet, 2010). This recent literature conceptualizes the topic from a contextual and process perspective that keeps young people’s needs in mind. Kirby et al. (2003), for example, propose to examine youngsters’ participation in six dimensions and allow for the possibility of a range of dynamics that act and react negatively and positively. Another example is an eclectic model composed of three dimensions of citizenship: status, feeling, and practice (Olser and Starkey, 2005). This literature also sees “participation” as not necessarily democratic or egalitarian and notes the tendency among self-defined arbiters of young people’s best interests to “stage-manage” their empowerment and well-being (Barber, 2009: 28).

Devine’s (2002, 2003) model is especially relevant for this case study because it focuses on education in children’s citizenship and the structuring of adult–child relations in primary schools. Education in and for children’s civic empowerment, says Devine (2002), “must take account of the dynamics of power and control which encompass adult–child; teacher–pupil relations within the school setting” (p. 305). Since seniors who share an intergenerational encounter with youngsters are “adults,” we may examine the interrelations that the model suggests among structure, power, and agency in institutionalized practice (Devine, 1998). Drawing on Gidden’s approach toward the structuration of social systems through social interaction, Devine contends that children should be considered able to monitor their own behavior in view of others’ expectations, thus acquiring agency and yielding both intended and unintended consequences that are not shaped by power per se.

By so claiming, Devine stresses the potential of a power dialectic in intergenerational relations, one that MCP substantiates by embodying two perceptions of citizenship—digital and altruistic. Digital citizenship is “the ability to participate in society online” by “us[ing] the Internet regularly and effectively […] on a daily basis” (Mossberger et al., 2008: 1). “Altruistic citizenship” is “educational,” promoting social responsibility in contributing to and enhancing others’ well-being (Granville and Ellis, 1999: 234). MCP promotes both citizenships by having children give digital instruction and hear seniors retell the history of the Jewish heritage and state. The difference between the two citizenships is akin to the difference between two approaches to children, being versus becoming. MCP, like the “new sociology of childhood” (Mannion and I’Anson, 2004), recognizes children as digital citizens by offering them authentic participation as digital natives (Wyness, 2012). Although MCP urges seniors to socialize for digital civic participation, it steers only children toward civic participation, that is, becoming. The result is tension between agency and empowerment: although children are considered agents of knowledge, MCP empowers them as “teachers”—imparters of digital knowledge—to catalyze civic participation. This tension may escalate if unforeseen identities emerge that deviate not only from the essentialist generational labels of the digital divide but also from the frame of the foregoing critical discussion, which makes sure to ask who possesses technological capital. If so, there is good reason to deal with the performative potential of the negotiating self in the intersubjective encounter amid a knowledge–power structure that, while being self-evident, clashes with the need for self-esteem by those who are placed at the bottom of it—the seniors. The implications of the resulting situation, in which some seniors adopt the non-educational “digital consumer” role and some children eschew the “teacher” function, are discussed below.

This dialectic corresponds to Devine’s (2002) view of power as exercised in two ways: transformation (empowerment) and domination. Empowerment and control send conflicting messages that may challenge children’s agency. The question is whether and how these challenges counterweigh the vision of empowerment and civic participation.

Research methods

In 2007–2009, my research assistant and I (the principal researcher) spent a year as participant observers in two Israeli schools (one researcher per school) that voluntarily offered MCP. ¹ The principal researcher supervised the assistant closely. Data were gathered from computer teachers, principals, children, and seniors in observations in computer classes and elsewhere; semi-structured and unstructured interviews; focus groups at the beginning and end of each semester; school encounters and special events; and semi-structured interviews with the MCP director and Ministry of Education inspectors.

Interviews with seniors and computer teachers covered themes such as generational roles in information exchange, contribution to community and national group, and education in civic participation. Seniors were also asked about personal needs and attitudes toward digital knowledge, computer teachers about their role as mediators in technological knowledge exchanges, and children about their contribution to relations with the senior, personal knowledge and well-being, the role of the “young teacher,” and attitudes toward seniors and old age.

Information exchanges between seniors and children were examined by monitoring computer classes, seniors-only classes, and focus groups; observing communication among children and among seniors, with and without members of the second generation present; documenting events in which seniors were involved; documenting and tracking reportage from participants in the intergenerational encounter; and following Websites that children and seniors visited and MCP’s Facebook page.

The data were subjected to thematic analysis to establish primary, secondary, and theoretical categories following Strauss’ (1987) model. The analysis used (1) open coding, each interview or observation receiving a preliminary code (child–senior relations, child–computer-teacher relations, generational knowledge gaps, children’s teaching strategies, children’s and seniors’ attitudes toward MCP, perceptions of civic participation); (b) axial coding, generating themes and subthemes and identifying relationships between concepts (authority of knowledge, knowledge exchanges, manifestations of power, identification with role, expressions of empowerment, self-control, and types of responses to intergenerational interaction); and (c) specification and modification of codes, each grouped by main themes, to capture the breadth and depth of the content.

The research revealed a subversive relationship between participation as a research strategy and children’s civic participation as an educational intention. Our assimilation into the research setting and rapport with the research subjects were indispensable for obtaining reliable information about the quality of relations among the three generations as a foundation for present and future civic participation. Two matters stood out concerning participation as a data-gathering instrument. First, when children were temporarily absent and “their” seniors asked us to instruct them, we were able to assess and reflect on the challenge of teaching seniors. Second, we considered our sensitivity important to the children; from their standpoint, we were more than “non-strangers”—we were also people who should communicate with them, unlike school personnel. Our observations did much to expose the gap between the educational statement and its application and the responses to it.

Several manifestations of this gap prompted intervention under guidelines from the Ministry of Education Chief Scientist. The principal researcher informed the computer teachers in ethically exceptional cases and, at the end of the research, suggested to the program coordinator that teachers’ in-service activities and preparatory workshops should include discussion of MCP’s ethical aspects. ²

Contexts and participants

MCP has been running in some 150 primary schools annually since 2000. Each school is free to apply it in accordance with its sociocultural nature and pedagogical outlook. Its guidelines encourage schools to tailor activity to the levels and preferences of students and seniors, school resources and character, and participating subgroups’ ethnic heritages. The schools’ interpretation of these guidelines mirrors Israeli multiculturalism.

The similarities among the schools—support from the education system, middle–high socioeconomic status, and ethnic diversity—yielded focused insights on the pedagogical process. Both schools are Jewish, each is in the country’s central metropolitan area, and each participates in several long-term educational projects apart from MCP. Each is well connected with the Ministry of Education and is considered a top-notch school in its city. According to the national inspectorate, these schools allowed MCP to advance “quite a few levels” in their district relative to MCP models in other districts and for other population groups. The children and seniors in both schools (400 pupils on average, 12/16 classes) were ethnically diverse and largely socioeconomically middle-class. Seniors and children’s parents had secondary or higher education; some practiced liberal professions. Both schools complied rigorously with MCP’s socio-educational agenda, reflected in ongoing professional relations between computer teachers and the MCP administration, participation in in-service activities and conferences, representation of the entire population of schools on the MCP Website, and assimilation of democratic educational techniques in managing the child–senior encounter.

The schools also applied specific instructions concerning MCP’s objectives and operating guidelines, chiefly:

Notably, MCP expects only two formal achievements: documentation and creation of brief biographical stories by seniors in a Word file, with the children’s guidance. This reflects MCP’s essence, the intergenerational swapping of digital knowledge for general/biographical knowledge. “This way,” the Central District MCP director explained, “each generation’s hidden treasures will be carried forward and the children will realize that they belong to a Jewish chain that they are to preserve, create and promote.” The other elements of the knowledge exchange (e.g. email skills and general life experience) are less focal in the computer teachers’ eyes, although they are considered integral in bridging between the participants’ worlds and encouraging children’s civic participation.

Although voluntary, MCP was usually fully subscribed in both schools throughout the term and turnover was low. A total of 26 children aged 12–13 years participated at one school; 30 did so at the other. Most were proficient enough in digital technology for MCP’s purposes. The discussion, however, relates to 70% of them (Group A, N = 39) in terms of empowerment and 30% (Group B, N = 17) in terms of disempowerment (see below). In total, 28 seniors (average age: 70 years) participated at one school and 35 (average age: 75 years) at the other. Many seniors did not attend all classes, and sometimes two seniors were matched with one child. The seniors had no prior acquaintance with the children; they heard about the program by word-of-mouth or through golden-age clubs and joined mainly on the basis of available space. They varied widely in digital proficiency: eight were Internet surfers who wished to learn new software, 30 lacked the most basic knowledge, and the rest (N = 25) were in between. This distribution, however, was partly related to the distribution of their identities as “immigrants” (N = 48) and “consumers” (N = 15)—which, in turn, were rooted in the interpretation of the findings of the categories, power relations, authority of knowledge, exchange, and identification with role.

Gender representation was balanced among seniors and children at both schools. (The largest difference was 4.)

Civic participation: MCP’s message and children’s responses

MCP’s message about the importance of encouraging civic participation by children is communicated top-down during the program and is applied in the intergenerational encounters in school. Thus, a national inspector explicated MCP’s view of children as social agents who can wield influence in the present, just like seniors:

I think the children will be better citizens who’ll know how to give and receive. Even the smallest of the small has mental strength and positive virtues with which to influence those who are great. Everyone is both a teacher and a pupil […]: influencing, being influenced, receiving and giving.

One principal stressed the effort that the children were asked to make by contributing ICT knowledge: “They revealed their inner mental strength”—and urged them “to sustain this strength and help to make our society better and more refined.”

A conference moderator representing MCP’s seniors emphasized the children’s effort and alluded to their status in the program:

I thank the seniors and, most important, you children, who worked so hard; it’s by your merit that we’re here.

The computer teachers agreed about the civic significance of MCP. One expressed this to the seniors in the opening encounter:

It’s important for us to educate the children to be good citizens who value the state and are connected with it and do not remain in their little box, me and me alone, but rather giving, going out to the community.

The pedagogical-mediation strategy aims to facilitate knowledge exchange and base intergenerational relations on involvement. Accordingly, both computer teachers saw themselves as mediators in the intergenerational knowledge-exchange process instead of authoritarians. Thus, they demonstrated their adjustment to change in the children’s status as hegemonic possessors of knowledge without compromising their own status (Bennett et al., 2008).

One teacher said,

Every couple decides for itself how to do things. Otherwise, what intergenerational connection takes place?!

When a computer teacher did wish to show a senior how to carry out a task, she consistently asked the senior’s partner, the child, for permission.

Despite the constructive potential of the mediation strategy, the tri-generational structure of MCP was found to complicate the children’s empowerment process. In the MCP population’s family habitus (grandchild–grandparent relations), now “imported” into the program, intergenerational respect usually prevails (Gamliel and Hazan, 2014). When a computer teacher mediates the encounters, she may meddle with these relations and draw out the power dimension that exists between them by subordinating the participants to the school’s rules and supervision. One teacher, for example, occasionally took over all the computers to force the participants to listen to her explanations, squelching interaction between the participants. Arguably, institutional modes of participation may refine the identities of professionals who work with children (Wyness, 2012). Still, teachers tend to stress moral and social aspects of behavior (responsibility and social control) over democratic participation in citizenship programs (Bailey, 2000).

My perspective in examining children’s empowerment in MCP focuses on their experiences—the challenge of assuming the teacher’s role within a framework that both disciplines them and rewards them by confirming their achievements. The significance of empowering children to the point of changing their attitudes toward civic participation rests on the view that participation takes place vis-a-vis a socio-generational milieu that appreciates the transformation of the individual’s power (Barber, 2009). In Devine’s (2002) model, children’s empowerment requires reflexion processes, critical involvement, and negotiation, whereas typifications that attribute ignorance, vulnerability, and similar characteristics to children may impair their self-esteem and autonomy. The children displayed two conspicuous response patterns that had clashing implications for their empowerment. Group A (70%) strongly identified with the teacher’s role; Group B (30%) did identify partly or not at all. Group A expressed empowerment mainly in “pedagogical performances.” Most developed teaching strategies—repeating explanations, adjusting their pace of teaching to the seniors’ absorptive ability, and refraining from touching the mouse—that attested to a transformation of identity and confidence in their capability and empathy as teachers. They acted independently by asking seniors to repeat their explanations, giving homework, demanding repetition of actions, using examples and metaphors, and asking questions to identify topics that the seniors would find interesting. They also encouraged seniors to express their needs, for example, “Should we go over this more slowly?” sometimes in their own teachers’ tone of voice. To reinforce seniors’ sense of their teachers’ responsibility, they gave the seniors their telephone numbers in case of necessity. They even defended the seniors’ new “pupil” image: when one senior reported that her grandchildren had mocked her technological proficiency, her “teacher” retorted, “You already know more than just how to play solitaire. That’s what you ought to tell them.” These examples indicate that MCP reinforces children’s self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997: 382). The seniors rewarded the children for this by praising them, for example, “She’s an experienced teacher.” The MCP leaders did the same, concluding the program by ceremoniously awarding the children “teaching certificates.” The children attributed their empowerment to themselves: their own contribution of teaching skills, knowledge, and assessment of the seniors’ suitability to their own computer world. MCP allowed them to translate their advantage in digital literacy into the traditionally adult status of “teacher.”

In the focus groups, the Group A children were interested in remaining in MCP next year, indicating that they had developed more cohesive and realistic expectations of seniors as students and realized that the seniors value them as teachers. They also expressed appreciation of the seniors’ knowledge and were much less inclined to stereotype seniors generally. These findings, reinforcing those of Kolodinsky et al. (2002), attest to the potential social contribution of psychological empowerment.

Group B found it hard to identify with the teacher’s role although some were willing to try. In their coping strategies, they repudiated the teacher’s role. First, they feigned participation in MCP due to fear of the computer teacher’s supervision, their penchant for group conformity, and fear of failure. Although they acted like teachers, they tended to seize the mouse and, without the seniors’ permission, perform relevant tasks while explaining and encouraging the seniors to visit together sites of interest to them. If the seniors did not cooperate, they exploited the lull to make eye contact with friends and mock the seniors behind their back. “Show me what you’re doing,” a senior asked a boy who had decided to do a complex task for him. The boy replied, “It’s complicated!” and kept going. A girl who had been discriminated against by her partner glanced at another girl nearby and made a hand gesture indicating that the senior was stupid. When the senior asked her a question, she immediately switched expressions and reverted to answering. Second, children adopted escape strategies such as focusing on a vacant computer screen, switching partners, and finagling temporary leaves from class. Third, children asked to quit the program mid-way. The computer teacher asked them to wait until replacements could be found.

In both schools’ focus groups, Group B children expressed disinterest in participating in similar future programs. They belittled the contribution of seniors’ knowledge to the young generation and were more inclined than before to stereotype seniors as “impatient,” “old,” and less in need of digital technology than young people.

How can one explain MCP’s success or failure in attaining its goal of education in civic participation? In previous articles (Gamliel and Hazan, 2014; Gamliel et al., 2007a, 2007b), I analyzed the relationship between participating couples’ respect and emotional intimacy and children’s empowerment. Here, I focus on challenges to the fulfillment of children’s knowledge agency that are specific to the ICT encounter. Alongside the agency-versus-control tension that the school context creates, the findings illuminate the psychosocial meanings of MCP’s structural digital divide and indicate the need to rediscuss its related images of young and old people.

Interactional manifestations of digital divides and related images

Children and adults in MCP evinced different degrees of digital divides in ICT skills, to the children’s advantage. The findings below connect the children’s unquestioned digital “nativity” (agency) with the wide gap they experienced between their digital practice and the pedagogical practice that the information exchange required. The section that follows links their empowerment with the seniors’ identities as “immigrants” and “consumers.”

Discussion

MCP’s civic-education vision accommodates a change in children’s social status that theoreticians have long identified: the ascent of childhood agency in Western countries due to population aging (James et al., 1998) and tougher children’s rights legislation, inter alia (Bar-Yosef, 2000). For some, the change in status marks a shift from perceiving children as a social category to recognizing them as individuals who should be understood in terms of autonomy, individuation, knowledge, ethics, involvement, and visibility (Prout, 2000; Wyness, 2006).

This article furthers the critical discussion of children’s civic participation (Ben-Arieh and Boyer, 2005; Burgelman, 2000; Livingstone, 2003; Mannion and I’Anson, 2004; Norris, 2001; Wyness, 2012) by focusing on the challenge that generational digital divides pose to education policymakers. Its analysis of MCP subverts the view of the technological knowledge gap as definitive in establishing young people’s supremacy in the generational-relations hierarchy and demonstrates the need for caution in using civic empowerment in school to treat it.

By probing MCP’s processes and outcomes, the article reveals a weaker connection between digital-divide stereotypization and the valuing of children’s potential agency. Namely, the MCP leaders assumed that all the children would transition from native knowledge possessors to knowledge imparters and did not expect the senior “immigrants” to adopt a consumer identity within which they would treat the children demandingly. Given the participants’ socioeconomic, ethnic, and gender characteristics, the study pinpoints unique challenges to the intergenerational technology context—controllable factors (transcending factors such as self-esteem or social “chemistry”) that may disempower knowledge-agent children.

Following Devine’s model, a distinction is made between children’s agency (knowledge) and their empowerment (as teachers) and between digital citizenship and altruistic citizenship as covert and overt orientations that, when manipulated, preserve the school’s approach and ability to exert control. The validity of this model, which warns against the dominance of school control, is particularly evident given the anchoring of the children’s agency in the real knowledge advantage that the MCP leaders and the youngsters have over the seniors.

The case study shows that intergenerational ICT programs may be paradoxical places for the construction of intergenerational bridges. Given that digital technology is representative (stereotypically or not) of the intergenerational cultural gap (Prensky, 2001) and that an intergenerational encounter requires digital communication even if physical proximity exists, such programs amplify children’s and seniors’ age characteristics and, in turn, their experiencing of the generation gap. Since the schools supervise children’s performance but not that of seniors, progress in narrowing the digital divide depends more on meaningful coping by children with seniors’ characteristics than the other way around. This intergenerational inequality in MCP recurs in the program’s failure to take account of differences in the valuation of children’s and seniors’ prior generational knowledge. Although digital knowledge is both generations’ main concern, MCP expects only children to pay personal attention to historical stories that they can easily locate online due to their digital knowledge, as they well know. It follows that MCP encourages seniors to adopt the “digital consumer” identity ex post while urging children to assimilate the value of voluntarism. In the resulting encounter, children “cope” while seniors, as consumers, “negotiate” with the school’s backing, enhancing their advantage in the ensuing power relationship and casting doubt on the reciprocity ethics that the change in the children’s status should invoke.

The adoption of a consumer identity may broaden the discussion of the generational digital divide. In accordance with Turner’s (1990) role-as-process theorization, the self’s creativity in constructing its identity, thereby giving the subjects of the discussion a voice of their own, should be taken into account. If it stands to reason that the seniors are familiar with the consumer-rights ethos (equality, choice and autonomy)—a quintessential element in ICT—and if about one-fourth of the seniors import this ethos into the program bluntly, one cannot disregard its influence in the intergenerational encounter, a setting that attracts stereotyped images and perspectives on the digital divide. In the demand that it makes, this identity, instead of challenging the dominance of the tendency to appreciate real technological capital in discussing the seniors’ status, undermines the ideological connotation of education in civic participation by affirming, paradoxically and not empathetically, the children’s identity as servile teachers.

For the children, the teacher’s role entails empowerment work—a strong challenge that did not escape the awareness of MCP’s leaders and the seniors. As I showed, both the elderly conference moderator and the principal noted the children’s hard work and the “mental strength” that it involved. The implicit and covert message to the children is that their civic empowerment depends more on their resourcefulness than on anything else—expressed not only in obeying rules but also in meaningful physical and mental mobilization for information exchanges between partners who are expected to reach out to each other. The intergenerational encounter in MCP demands nothing less than the acceptance of the other with his or her separate paces and interests—an exceptional test of self-discipline for a child. The positive side of this psychological ruse is that the depth of the demand for “emotional work” (Hochschild, 1983) of this type matches the depth of the change in self- and other-perception and the likelihood that children’s efforts in MCP will cascade to additional areas of their lives (Yair, 2006). Research indicates that an individual’s tendency to self-efficacy in specific tasks and situations scales to more general tasks and situations and boosts confidence (Chen et al., 2001). Moreover, “What generalizes is the belief that one can mobilize whatever effort it takes to succeed in different undertakings,” and this “transformational restructuring of efficacy beliefs that is manifested across diverse realms of functioning […] serves as transforming experiences” (Bandura, 1997: 53).

The problem here is that the teacher’s role is disproportionate and, for 30%, difficult. Children who quit MCP due to difficulty or failure (those in Group B) receive no external support. In emotional-management terms, this is a steep mental price for children to pay for the “crime” of finding their participation in the program disempowering. Many children do prove their mettle as adaptive performers and agents who cope with seniors’ powers that are inimical to them (James and Prout, 1995). However, they are denied the possibility of negotiating and decision-making (Kirby et al., 2003). The definition of children as “teachers” is a prophecy that fulfills civic participation only in part.

MCP presents the children with a twofold civic challenge that is bound into one: narrowing the intergenerational digital divide and expanding a national database. Thus, it allows no differentiation between granting authority to children’s technological capital (Selwyn, 2004), something that derives its psychological empowerment value mainly from the reversal of roles in school, and the civic-national horizon of this authority. If the two could be separated, children’s disobedience might be viewed solely as noteworthy acts of self-agency. This is unlikely to happen, however, due to the way these rejectionist manifestations reinforce stereotypical attitudes toward seniors and exclude children from the group of “good citizens.” MCP is unique in its “socialist” educational strategy toward the leveraging of children’s technological capital. By assuming that the purely utilitarian boundaries of this capital should be breached, MCP channels most of the ICT encounters, and the two-way correction of attitudes that they are expected to create, toward children’s participation in a long-term national project. While this may be an appropriate way to transition from a discourse about rights and legal status to the making of a social contribution, its contribution to broadening the incidence of the citizenship concept among children should be examined (Ben-Arieh and Boyer, 2005).

With manifestations of intergenerational alienation, longer life expectancy, and seniors’ demand for social and psychological compensation all around, the civilianization of the generational digital divide via an intergenerational ICT program is socially welcome. If so, the burden created by the senior population’s accelerated growth (Andrea, 2012) seems to acquire additional significance in this article. MCP is, in effect, an in-school working context that formally confirms children’s knowledge and abilities and is backed via informal confirmation by the seniors, who are not only familiar with the consumerist stance but also describe it as a solution to the problem of their grandchildren’s “impatience” and, for some, a way to hire youngsters as paid tutors.

Looking to a future that may not be far off and given the spread of intergenerational ICT programs in Western countries, ³ there is good reason to consider valuing “children’s educational labor” in school as something more than a self-investment by future participants in an educated workforce (Qvortrup, 1995: 23) and to see children as workers whose output has real value in satisfying others’ real present needs. This argument dovetails with Wyness’ (2006: 47) proposal to convert “needs” into “interests” as the image of the new child takes shape. A discourse about children’s rights is important here for the striking of a balance between self-investment and self-utility, a relevant issue in civic-participation projects. I propose that children’s contribution to others will fail if its rewards and costs are determined by the educational agent alone, especially if one of the costs is steep in self-development terms. When intergenerational programs are invoked, they should be adjusted in ways that will lift children out of their “otherness.” Civic empowerment will become an even worthier goal if children’s agency includes the right to negotiate, and participate, in decision-making (Wyness, 2006)—especially in an educational context.