Ambition and achievement in perspective

Lucy Kellaway has a brilliant article about her impressions of relocating to the poor North East of England  from London (HT: Ananth). It will count as one of my reads of the year. 

This contrast between the students in her schools in Hackney and up North East is fascinating, 

The first difference is that in my last school barely 2 per cent were white; in this one it is about 90 per cent. The second is that they have lived in the same place for generations. One day I was talking about structural unemployment and giving an example of the region’s defunct coal mines, shipyards and steel plants. On a whim, I asked them if all four grandparents were born nearby — almost three-quarters of the class raised their hands. I remembered a related question being put to my Hackney school where an assembly hall of students were asked if both parents were born in London. Out of 200, barely 10 put up their hands, most of them of African-Caribbean heritage... According to the University of Essex’s Understanding Society study, the North East is the least mobile place in the country, with 55 per cent of survey respondents living within 15 miles of their mother — more than three times as many as in the capital... It seems to me that London’s extreme mobility and the North East’s lack of it explain so much about the differences between the two places and the best and the worst things about each.

She writes about its consequences,

This stability cuts across everything. It may account for the lack of curiosity. It may also lead to insularity and innocence in how they view the world. All London schoolchildren know a lot about different cultures; my students know only their own. When last year their beloved Newcastle United football club was bought by the Saudis, in a surge of joyous exuberance some of them took to the streets wearing tea towels on their heads. They were baffled when the club put out an announcement telling supporters to leave all tea towels at home. Any London teenager could tell them about cultural appropriation, but when I tried to explain, one shook his head in disbelief: “Miss, we were showing respect! We were saying thank you for buying our club.” A bigger difference concerns competition. In London every day 9 mn people fight it out for scarce resources: for a seat on the Tube, a flat to rent, success, jobs, money or fame. Everyone is striving for something — and immigration intensifies this. When families travel thousands of miles from their homes to make a better life for their children, they don’t let them sit around doing the minimum. 

The Hackney schools I taught in were monuments to striving and, as a result, the children did very well indeed. Last month, I did a Zoom call with some of my most driven students and heard how they were applying to Oxbridge and the London School of Economics and Russell Group universities. I felt a sudden pang for my current students who, despite going to one of the best schools in the area, have few such ambitions. They mostly do the work I set them and mostly do it more or less adequately. But, for most of them, that’s as far as it goes. Early on, in a bid to change this, I told my Year 12s that to do well at A-level they would need to do six hours’ independent work a week per subject. The class gawped in disbelief. Patiently, one explained he couldn’t do that because he worked weekends in a restaurant in the Metro Centre and needed to see his mates and watch football. I replied that, in that case, the best grade he’d get would be a C — or maybe a B if he was very lucky. “What’s wrong with a B?” he said. “I’d much rather get that than spend six hours every week on business studies.”

And the toll associated with pursuit of ambition and achievement,

In my current school the teachers seem happy and have no plans to quit. Many have taught there for 20 or 30 years and educated the parents of the current students. Indeed, teacher turnover is so low that I very nearly didn’t get a job. When I started looking last spring, there were 120 vacancies for business studies and economics teachers in London; in the whole of the North East there were only three. In the highest-achieving London academies a quarter of the staff quit every year — not just because they can’t afford flats but because they are wrung out by the scale of the work. This is the trade-off: this sort of system gets the best possible GCSE results, but the teachers, and sometimes the students, get burnt out achieving it.

The dynamics and structures of free market capitalism elevate the unbridled pursuit of ambition, efficiency, incomes/profits, and wealth. There is an increasing monotonicity associated with these pursuits. This, in turn, is fuelled primarily by excessive individualism. 

The problem with all these four pursuits is that apart from their increasing monotonicity, they are almost unconstrained. The extant norms are self-reinforcing. Prevailing management theories and econometric models are primed to maximise efficiency, incomes, wealth etc. Resilience, sustainability, social stability, and other qualitative considerations of human well-being are absent in these narratives.