Imagine you are 15 years old again. You live in a small country in one of those many towns that are not exactly up-and-coming. There is not much entertainment to be had except for smartphones and the internet, which offer some diversion and allow you to keep in touch with the "outside world“ from what feels like the middle of nowhere to you. As to what you want to do with your life once you leave school, you don’t know. Maybe you might become a medical doctor or a mechanical engineer. Or you might want to work with a bank. Definitely you want to live “your” life, to go somewhere where there is something “going on”.

Or perhaps you’ve considered becoming a politician or taking up a job with a big responsibility for your country’s economy? What do you answer when they ask you: Are you actually aware that you are part of the future of your country?

Tough questions, especially when you live in a small state: In Luxembourg you are a bigger part of this future than in Germany, France or the USA. In Luxembourg you are one of only 190,000 under 30 years of age. From this group, someone will become prime minister, somebody else foreign minister, others will be working in managing positions in important companies, or become volunteer board members. If you take into consideration factors such as a more limited age group, necessary qualifications and motivation, that leaves an even smaller set of candidates to occupy these important positions over the next few years. For comparison: in Germany there are approximately 25 million under-30-year-olds. So there is a huge set of young people from which to choose for each position in a big country, but – despite foreign specialists – a much smaller number to select from in a small state like Luxemburg.

To put it in a nutshell: The smaller a unit, the more important the role of each member of this unit.

Puberty as a chance

During puberty, our brain undergoes tremendous changes, in particular the areas of the hippocampus and frontal cortex. These are the areas where the ability to store information into your long-term memory is located, as well as the ability to plan the distant future, pursue long-term goals or defer short-term rewards. 

During puberty, the hippocampus forms an increased number of receptor cells which react to inhibiting neurotransmitters. This means that known stimuli do not trigger the cells in this area in a way that makes learning easy. However, give an adolescent brain new, unknown stimuli and they will create what is known as positive stress. This raises the level of the stress hormone THP and causes maximal activation of the hippocampus. 

In other words, long-term learning and especially the acquisition of such complex things as cultural excellence may be extremely difficult at puberty, if you do not get the “right” kind of input. This is also the reason why most young people do not feel like school and its rules and routines. Ask teenagers, their parents, their teachers what teenagers are into  - the answer will most likely not be school. And yet, there are things in which teenagers can lose themselves, spend astonishing amounts of time and effort on - things that teenagers consider “interesting”.

Considering all this, it makes sense to offer young people a temporary alternative from school. The idea: Investing in small countries’ future through exceptional education through a teenage exchange programme!

This articles is a synopsis of the research paper A teenager exchange programme by Florian Feltes, Doctoral Researcher in Development and Interaction at the University of Luxembourg. Read the full article with organisation framework and potential benefits for Luxembourg at: http://bit.ly/1RbGUAS