The lie of the land

I looked down the garden and saw my then three year old son poking around in the long grass looking intently for something. Thinking Teddy might have made a bid for freedom from the daily indignities imposed on him by a three year old boy, some other special toy had been lost or there was some particularly interesting cat pooh I walked down to talk to him and see what he was doing. 'I'm looking for the fairies that you and Mum said were at the bottom of the garden' he said. Yeah that's right, in a moment of whimsy the previous day one of us must have trotted out, unthinkingly, the myth that fairies could indeed be found at the bottom of the garden.

So what other untruths have we told our kids I wonder?

Father Christmas
Snow at Christmas
Peace on Earth
The tooth fairy
The Easter bunny
The DFS sale will finally end one day
You can do and be anything you want to be
Education is the route to success, happiness and wealth

Let's examine those last two.

Can you be anything you want to be? This is the line peddled to children as they grow up. Hard work, focus, dedication and a commitment to your dream will make it come true. Except of course, for the majority of people it simply doesn't and you can't. I mean you can't have more than one President of the USA at the same time (unless the Americans come up with an innovative job share scheme), or British Prime Minister and if they then get re-elected then you end up as old as John McCain hoping that, in his 70's he's going to make it to the POTUS at last but, darn it, some youngster pips him to the post. You might want to pilot a 747 but if you have spectacles with lenses that are as thick as double glazing and you can't see the the ends of your fingers let alone through the window then your options are sadly limited, though I suspect the pilot that landed the aircraft that bought me back from Paris the other night on Ryonjet might have slipped through the net. I think he thought we were the Mole from Thunderbirds as we tried to drill into the runway on landing rather than bowl along it as is normal practice.

That's not to say we shouldn't encourage our youngsters.
We tell them that they should always try hard, they should be the best they can be, that very few things come easy in life, that things you worked hard for are much more worthwhile than things that come easily, that if they do not clean their bedroom we'll have to declare it a health hazard with the World Health Organisation, that teenage spots really do not mean the end of your life and girls really don't mind, that school shoes do not clean themselves and that drinking more than six pints of Best Old Badgers Piddle is bound to have severe consequences the following morning and you can clean the toilet. No, we perpetuate the myth that you can do anything and, if you can't make the dream, then you are, by definition, a loser.

We then compound that by defining success as money or possessions. We don't say 'Wow fabulous bunch of great friends you have there, they'll stick by you through life and never let you down' or 'What a fantastic appreciation you have of art/literature/philosophy' or whatever or even 'What a lovely partner and beautiful kids'. No the emphasis is on salary, house, car marque, possessions and, if you don't have them, then you must be a failure. Instead the world seems to favour the arrogant git that has a large German prestige car, is on his third wife, his kids hate him but, because he is the MD of Consolidated HooHahs and Tinkly Winkly Bits Inc and lives in a large Tuderbethan new build on an anonymous but strangely desirable estate built over an old plague pit, it is a good thing. How come?

But by not being honest and telling our kids the truth that, yes some people do make it to the very top (and that they just might) with even fewer making it to the top without trampling over the souls and lives of many others to get there, and actually luck plays a huge part in what happens in life seems to me to be just wrong. I am surrounded (well not literally of course because that would make this room very uncomfortable and far too warm and I'd have to keep making them all coffee and offering biscuits) by irritatingly smug people where I live (and they are usually men) that say such things as 'S'funny the harder I work the luckier I seem to get, anybody without a well paid job is just shirking and doesn't want to work' and then looking at me in a meaningful way. If I were given one super power I would wish to be able to shrivel to the size of a gherkin anyone who says that. Do they not realise that they have been supremely lucky not to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time like so many others? It's not your innate skill and loveliness that has kept you in a job matey boy, it's largely luck and having had opportunities. Oh how I'd like to kick some butt like a bad ass mother sometimes. But being British I just tut, tut.

Let's consider education. I can count to ten in Latin, vaguely remember stuff about ox-bow lakes and Pingos (as opposed to Pingu who is far more interesting), recite a few poems by John Donne and Wordsworth and recall the periodic table. However what people who pass exams are very good at doing is repeating back some barely analysed information you've been told to the very people who told you it in the first place. You could argue that it is the 'University of Life' and what you learn after you leave the education system that is more important. You get older and wiser in the ways of the world and discover that knowing the structure of an iambic pentameter is not helpful when Sales are telling you that the order bank has fallen off the edge of the known world or HR want to sack 50% of the workforce. Lots of people are very intelligent in some ways but stumpingly dim in others. Have you noticed that the IT support team can often fix a networking problem but have no idea how any real world application works i.e in other words the very thing you need to finish the quotation for a very important customer who wants to give you large amounts of money. "Just reboot and that will fix your Excel problem'.

Then, armed with all these qualifications, you enter the world full of hope and badly managed expectations: 'You can be anything you want' and a B.Sc. degree in Badger Care and Squirrel maintenance is a passport to wealth, success, regular sex and a new iPod every six months (might get one of those degrees then). And then you find that half the world is anti-academic 'Oh no I don't value those GCSEs and degrees, everyone has them, give me someone from the School of Hard Knocks, Illiteracy and Obsequious Fawning' or 'Look, this is my opinion OK that's all you need, just find me supporting arguments to back it up and make me a coffee and take the dog for a long walk while you're at it'.

So older, wiser and vastly experienced we 50 + year olds are, with much eclectic and valuable business knowledge at out fingertips (and I can still complete the declension of mensa, mensam plus discuss elementary badger care as well). So why is so difficult to find a full time job after a certain age? Is it something uniquely British not to value enthusiasm, experience and knowledge and do we all have to emigrate to somewhere like the States where they seem to do so, although they also value personal ownership of assault weapons and powerful handguns which is much less of an attraction.

Remember I am going to get that superpower. Then there'll be a lot more gherkins around soon.

________________________

I've just read a review of a new book, 'Outliers' by Malcolm Gladwell that goes into this topic in more detail. For example 'Bill Gates was lucky enough to attend a school in Seatle that, very rarely for any school in those days, had a computer connection to a manufacturer...his talent for programming was given an...opportunity to flourish...came of age just as personal computers became a reality...he had talent and entrereneurial vision...but also opportunity and luck.' The Times: Books: Saturday November 22 2008. So there.

And this (thanks Neil) - you couldn't make it up could you?