Aspirations
Having coffee with a common friend and TEDster Juliana, I had the pleasure to meet David McQueen this afternoon. He does a lot of work – counseling, mentoring – with young people in London, and said something that really struck a chord. He said that one of the biggest issues he faced when trying to help these teenagers was a lack of aspirations, or aspirations unnecessarily (and unrealistically) narrowly defined: model, footballer…big brother housemate…
as*pi*ra*tions – a hope or ambition of acheiving something.
I’m not suggesting this is some incredible non-intuitive insight, but it made me think. Because it was so obviously true. Because it is so obviously sad. Because it only takes a second to realize that without aspirations, the world takes on a completely different hue. Our society, our world is built on the assumption that its citizens aspire to achieve in some way, in some context. It doesn’t work otherwise. Alienation is a logical outcome. Think of everything you do, every day. Now ask your self how these things make sense devoid of your own aspirations. Exactly, they don’t.
I’m not an anthropologist but I suspect that a child’s aspirational abilities are not predicated on genetic pre-disposition, but are shaped by their environment, especially their parents. It’s unsurprising that there doesn’t seem to be any easy, obvious, scaleable solutions to fixing bad parents (based on a long history of governments trying to find such a solution and so far failing…) But I wonder (I hope) if perhaps there are ways to use the power of the web, social media, ubiquitous and cheap communication to open previously closed horizons to young people who haven’t had the good fortune to be born in the right place, to the right parents. To afford them the self-evident right to have ambition. To dream. To allow them to discover possible futures beyond ‘footballer’ or ‘model’ or bust. To swim in the sea of possibilities that surrounds us constantly but – unlike for readers of blogs like you – is invisible, seemingly unknowable to these kids. To let them discover the dignity of a job well done, no matter the job. Aspirations should naturally be a “long tail” distribution, not an all-or-nothing ultimatum. And yet it seems that for many children, this is what they see.
As JP would say, this is a very provisional post: unfortunately I don’t have any clever ideas to illustrate my thinking.
But I can’t wait until I do.
