Youthful transgression, education and training of talents: Promoting positive deviance to prevent negative deviance

Abstract

Despite the modernity of its reflections on educating young people to a healthy citizenship, the Delors Report (1996) lacks an explicit reference to the phenomenon of juvenile delinquency.
What role can education play in preventing the opportunities for negative deviance, which have so much influence on young people?
Problems such as youth unemployment and the steadily increasing violence, which pose the same school security at risk, need adequate answers within the larger educational area.
Through the cross-analysis of the international scientific literature and research results on the ambivalent relationship between education and deviance/crime, it has emerged that the phenomenon of juvenile delinquency, if we consider the natural adolescent tendency to deviate from the main road, can be better addressed in generative terms of positive deviance, i.e. grasping the possible roots of a developing talent or a capacity for innovation, in the particular connotations that deviance assumes for the single individual.
A part of the educational literature that highlights the link between opportunities to engage in generative acts and desistance from crime has emerged recently.
In this sense, the development of competencies can be a preventive strategy for social maladjustment.