Radical: and not just because we actually work

Workingrite has received an award as one of Britain’s top 50 Radicals – as judged by The Observer and NESTA – a London based think tank. As Geoff Mulgan, the Chief Executive of NESTA said: “a radical is someone who struggles against the odds to achieve something where others give up”. Geoff quoted Churchill who apparently commented to someone he met – “So you have enemies. Good. That means you stand for something”. I like that. In these days of popularity contests and media lovies I either see public figures bending over backwards to say what they think their audience wants to hear, or attention grabbers courting controversy just to get noticed. Principle is the enemy of cynicism and cynicism, the sickness of our age, needs strong enemies.

We in Workingrite stand for something. We stand for the worth of learning from elders. We stand against the domination of peer group ghettos where youngsters are told that the past has little or nothing to teach them and only the new counts. We stand for learning through experience, not text books and classroom tests. We stand for the character building virtues of hard graft. And it’s what the youngsters want and thrive on too.

Academia is in crisis. Too many youngster have been tricked into thinking a degree will secure their futures, only to emerge with bits of paper that few employers respect and loans to haunt them into their middle age. Too many practical energetic youngsters are pushed back into the classroom when all they want to do is work. And too many professionals are leading them astray by telling them they are destined for a dead end future. What kind of dead end is it that teaches them how to get on with adults, learn from experience, and take responsibility for their mistakes. These days there is much talk of building resilience in young people. But resilience by its very nature is about knowing how to handle things when they go wrong and bouncing back, older and wiser as a result. It’s a nonsense to try to teach it in a classroom.

So yes we are radicals. We are radically fighting for the wisdom of the past to be put to the service of our young. For without a strong practical link between elders and the emerging generations, society has no future.