Today's teenagers have the makings of model citizens

Despite its cheesiness, Generation C makes a welcome change from the media moniker I once saw attached to my own contemporaries amid the pages of a rightwing paper – the "F**k-it generation" (their asterisks). Contrary to what the media might have you believe, teenagers aren't all about neknomination, dick pics and goading one another into suicide on Tumblr – some of them are actually quite nice. Even their teachers, in a study by Schoolzone, agreed that teenagers seemed more concerned about social issues. And yet 81% of teenagers felt they were negatively represented in the media and that this was having an adverse effect on their lives.Their portrayal is probably, to some extent, the fault of my generation of millenials. When young journalists are given the opportunity to share their voices, it's either in the context of achingly edgy pieces about wanton misbehaviour, such as "My first K-hole" or "All the people I've ever slept with have chlamydia". That, or it's all very western problems (take recent internet sensation "There are no black people in my yoga classes and I'm suddenly feeling uncomfortable with it"). In this BuzzFeed-driven journalistic climate, there's very little space for young people interested in writing about education and poverty issues in any depth; and yet, according to Demos, these are just the things that today's kids care about. It's time someone catered to them.My first real political engagement came late, during the 2011-12 student protests, and even then I was struck by how much more passionate the 14- to 16-year-olds who marched alongside us seemed to be. At the same age, all my friends and I were engaged with was trying to work out how to roll the biggest, most ostentatious joint possible without it collapsing in the middle. But their education maintenance allowance was to be taken away: no wonder they were angry. Now, it's looking as though this generation of young people will be the first to be poorer than their predecessors. And 84% of them say they are planning to vote. They are putting me to shame.There is little more that we could ask for, in these times of austerity and inequality, than a new generation of politically engaged, socially minded young people. Without wanting to sound supremely patronising, whenever I visit schools to talk to students about sexism in the media I am struck dumb by how much they care. When I started blogging about these topics, I perhaps arrogantly thought that, much like many people in their mid-20s – my own age – teenagers would think that feminism had done its job and was no longer needed. And yet it turned out that many of them knew it all already, and were sitting there patiently waiting for others to pick up on it.The same can be said of political engagement. Young people in this country are taught depressingly little about our political system and how it works – an alarmingly high number of people I meet seem to think we have proportional representation, for instance – and yet many of them care deeply about the policies this government is making and plan to participate in the next election. Those in power and those in opposition alike would do well to engage with them.In the Sunday Times report of the Demos survey, a young lad who has set up his own social enterprise mentions a teenage girl who wants "to give birthday cakes to people who don't get birthday cakes". The sweetness of this gesture made my heart swell. People like her have had so much taken away from them and yet they still want to share a piece of the pie. If that doesn't give you hope then nothing will.(theguardian.com)ANN.Az