What are the qualities of ‘tomorrow’s people’?

I’ve long had strong views about the education system. Paradoxically while it failed me in so many ways, both of my children excelled academically. In the late 60s I found myself a bright kid with attitude, in a school where failure to conform meant marginalisation and exclusion from opportunity.

It was realising that even today, bright kids who want a different future from that mapped out for them by their school, suffer the same exclusion from opportunity that led me to found social enterprise Swarm Apprenticeships a couple of years ago.

Swarm is already changing lives, but today I want to reflect on an aspect of today’s education system even I had rather overlooked. I was shocked, but then not desperately surprised, to learn that over the past four years, the number of school children admitted as emergencies to psychiatric hospitals has doubled.

So what prompted me to reflect on the impact of our education system on young people’s mental health? Well I’m just coming to the end of a week’s holiday in the sun and my chosen poolside read was ‘A Way of Being,’ written in 1980 by renowned psychologist Carl Rogers. I know that most people would choose lighter reading material, but for me, it was the perfect thought-provoking read.

‘The qualities include openness, a desire for authenticity, a care for others

and a healthy distrust of authority when it contradicts one’s own moral judgement’

That’s not to say I’m odd, but when a psychotherapist I know well and trust implicitly mentioned the work of Carl Rogers, I had to add a couple of his books to my reading pile. Now I don’t want to lose sight of my passion for social and community enterprise, or your expectation that I’m going to express some strong view about the UK education system. But for a moment, allow me to continue.

You see Rogers was one of the founders of modern psychotherapy. He demonstrated over his career, often by illustration, that the way to help people discover their true self and purpose, involved creating a safe space within which they can unpick and move on from their past self perceptions. In short, as Larkin so aptly summarised, parents really can f*ck you up, even though they rarely mean to.

What Rogers also clearly points out in a book written 35 years ago, is that false concepts of self are created in the minds of children not just by well-intentioned, but directive parents, but by the education system too. And yet our education system’s drive for exam grades and university admission is clearly making many young people ill as they struggle to reconcile expected goal and preferred ambition. Why else would increasing numbers consider themselves failures and suffer declining mental health as a consequence?

Rogers also spells out what he saw as the ideal qualities of what he called ‘tomorrow’s people’. These resonate strongly with me and include what I now know to be qualities that define many successful social entrepreneurs. They include openness, a desire for authenticity, a care for others and a healthy distrust of external authority when it contradicts ones own moral judgement.

Now I know from recent experience of building Swarm Apprenticeships, that most employers want to hire young people with a can-do, will-do attitude. They value this far higher than exam grades and it is just this businesslike attitude Swarm’s focus on enterprise training instills.

Not surprisingly young people given the confidence and ability to measure the impact they have on their employers’ businesses are happy and fulfilled young people. Those who strive for exam grades to the exclusion of appreciating how that knowledge might be applied are, as the statistics show, increasingly becoming ill.

Which begs in my mind a very simple question. Why do we continue to ignore the obvious and continue to damage young lives?