Is Britain wasting its talent?
I think the answer is yes.
Every day, people with ability, creativity and ambition are prevented from becoming who they could be. Not because they lack talent, but because they lack opportunity.
For generations, poverty, discrimination and privilege have limited people's chances in life. Many never receive the education they need. Many are forced into work that leaves no room for personal development. Many find their ambitions fading because society has decided that simply having a job is enough.
The result is a loss that we can never measure.
We cannot count the discoveries that were never made.
We cannot count the businesses that were never created.
We cannot count the works of art that were never produced.
And we cannot count the lives that might have been transformed if people had been given a fair chance.
This is not an argument for equality of outcome. People have different ambitions, talents and aspirations. The issue is whether everyone has the opportunity to realise their potential and become who they are capable of being.
Too often, the answer is no.
In this video, I explore how poverty, inequality, discrimination and privilege continue to waste human talent in Britain today, and why a politics of care would instead seek to nurture potential wherever it exists.
A society that wastes talent makes itself poorer.
The question is simple: how much talent are we wasting, and what could we achieve if everyone was given the chance to flourish?
This is the audio version:
The Debate Ammunition for this video is available here.
This is the transcript:
I often wonder how much talent the world has wasted. We celebrate people like Albert Einstein and other geniuses, and it may be that genius really is rare and deserves special recognition. But the question I'm asking is how many geniuses never had the chance? And how many brilliant minds were never discovered? Come to that, how many people did not realise their potential? We can never know, because opportunity lost is gone forever. But my point is, we are letting that opportunity go to waste, and that is a scandal.
Many people have been denied education over the years.
Many people have been denied the chance to learn because they're too poor or have been discriminated against.
Many people have, as a result, never discovered their potential, which, as far as I'm concerned, is a crime. For them, ability alone has never been enough to achieve the outcomes they would have desired for themselves and from which we would have benefited. Their circumstances have often determined their outcomes, and not to their benefit.
The fact is that desperate people need to work, and this has often buried human potential. Some people have dug mines. Some people have worked in fields. Some people have tended machines, and all because survival came before self-discovery for them. Their potential remained unrealised. Now, I'm not saying that those things aren't important, but there are some people who are doing the wrong things. That's the point I'm making. And the loss to us, of people doing the wrong things, might have been enormous.
We cannot measure what was never realised.
We cannot count discoveries that were never made.
We cannot know ideas that were suppressed.
And society has lost as well as the individuals involved.
And let's be clear, this is not all about geniuses. Brilliance matters too, but so too does wider potential. Many people, the world over and here, could have achieved much more if poverty and a system designed to deny opportunity had not existed.
And prejudice, too, has denied opportunity to far too many people because discrimination always denies opportunity. That is its purpose.
The UK has this problem today. We do not provide a level playing field. Education here very clearly does not unlock the potential of everyone. Our society is not designed to unlock people's potential after education has finished. Many barriers remain in place. Opportunity is still unequally distributed, and that is deliberate. We have a system that wants elite education for a few and wants the rest of us to simply do what we're told.
And let me stress, this is not about equality of outcomes. I'm not talking about that here. People do not want all the same things. People do not all have the same abilities or aptitudes. Assuming equality of outcome can be as patronising as the neoliberal desire to only truly educate a few people. The issue is instead about the ability of a person to realise their potential, to be what they're capable of being. That to me is what matters. And this is all about the ability of everyone to develop their talents to the full, and that everyone should have the chance to succeed as a result. But too many people can't do that in the UK; they are denied that opportunity. Too many ambitions are abandoned as a consequence.
I see this every day.
I see talented people who haven't achieved, and they've got to later life.
I see young people who are not achieving their potential. I see graduates serving coffee because they can't find any other work.
And many of these people, young or old, had very different aspirations, and they are fading because they're being forced into a role they never wanted.
But, for young people in particular, the capacity to do so much more still exists in our society, but it is being denied.
We have had governments that too often have not cared. They have decided that employment, any employment, is enough. As long as a person can be treated as being in employment, they tick the box and say, "That's that problem solved." But the quality of work is often ignored. Human potential and the need to fulfil it is too often ignored in that whole process, and fulfilment is very rarely, if ever, considered.
At the same time, discrimination is also destroying opportunity, and this is a reality in the UK today. And there are politicians who are trying to increase this.
Women and girls are still being denied chances.
Race and ethnicity still create barriers.
Belief and culture still do so as well.
And sexual orientation is still an obstacle for too many.
Potential is being lost because prejudice persists, and that is a cost to society. It never increases our well-being to deny people their fair chance.
The result is injustice that harms everyone. It harms those who are excluded. It limits personal achievement. It wastes talent and creativity. And society loses what people might have contributed. We are all poorer as a result. And in all of this, privilege protects itself. That is what it always designs the system to achieve.
Power is concentrated in a few hands, and those with it want existing advantages preserved. So social barriers are often maintained deliberately, and people are told directly or implicitly to stay in their place. Potential is sacrificed to protect privilege. And no wonder so many people in our society are very, very angry as a result. And that's because they know a better goal could be achieved by delivering on people's potential.
We do not need everyone to be the same. In fact, the precise point is we do not want everyone to be the same; we want them to be themselves.
We don't need identical outcomes because difference is what makes us valuable.
We should help people become who they can be for precisely that reason, and education should recognise individual strengths, and nobody should be left behind.
Future generations, all of them, need their chance. Einstein and Mozart realise their gifts, but what about today's children and what about your grandchildren or those of your friends, if you don't have children or grandchildren of your own? Are they being given the opportunities that they need, or are the odds being stacked against them?
A politics of care would change all of this. It would invest in people. Relevant education will be provided to everyone that would suit their needs. Potential will be nurtured wherever it exists. Every person should have the chance to flourish because society benefits when talent is realised. That surely is the least that we owe to each other. We can't waste talent anymore.
That's what I think. What do you think? There's a poll down below, as ever. Let us have your comments. Please like this video if that's what you do, and please do share it because that helps us with YouTube. And if you'd like to buy us a coffee so we can make some more videos, that would be great.
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[…] The video that this Debate Ammunition supports is available here. […]
Critics/neoliberalisms often claim that we can not afford to pay for all this creative output.
What they ignore is the value of the output that could be created.
This is where the economy grows and wealth is created.
Agreed
It starts in primary school. Classes are 30. That’s too big a class to teach, especially when many pupils have differing special needs. The government won’t pay for adequate education. They won’t pay for teaching assistants. They won’t pay adequate teachers salaries. They won’t pay for the physical fabric of the school and the necessary running costs.
The consequence is that children get left behind. They get disillusioned. They give up. Their talents and potential are wasted. The teachers are not to blame; they have an impossible task. They try hard but they inevitably fail too many of our children.
Some of best and brightest, who want to teach, and who we need as teachers, never start or quickly leave. They do so because pay is poor, working conditions are poor, the likey future in teaching is poor. And consequently we, as a society, fail too many children.
It is the government’s fault. It doesn’t have to be this way. Our society does have sufficient resources but the government chooses not to provide them. It could but it doesn’t. It’s a disgusting political choice. They say there is no money, there is no alternative. That’s not true it is their choice.
That’s why the work of this blog is so important. Explaining how the economy actually works. That we do have enough money. That we could choose to use it. Exposing the lie that there is no alternative.
Keep up the good work.
Thank you.
And now I am going for coffee and to begin the day’s thinking
I remember at the age of 15, ironically back in 1984, the government sent to our comprehensive inner London school a team of careers advisers with a computer database of possible career options. After informing them of my achievements so far, ie, top set, top of my class mathematics, physics, chemistry , top of my school in Art, Design, computers and British champion canoeist, the number one career option that they suggested was “Postman”.
At that time in history, only 2-3% of people went to university and only 10% did ‘A’ levels. the rest, like me were considered do’ers. The comprehensive system was not set up to help achieve potential, it was and probably still is, set up to produce workers.
Agreed
I’d love to know how your life worked out after this discouragement.
Might the suppression of talent enablement be an essential facet of Neoliberaism?
”Withholding/distorting valid information and genuie choice are essential instruments of tyranny. Control of information and political choice are the tools of choice for oligarchies.”(From George Orwell)
Yes, it is
Dont get me started on Education right now………..
Last Sunday afternoon I was in the engine room of the paddle steamer Waverley as she came into Ilfracombe, watching the Engineer manoeuvre the engines. The engineer was a young woman which begs the obvious question, and OK its a pretty niche occupation but how many women over the last 100 years or so were not able to become paddle steamer engineers, Doctors or Economics Gurus as a result of a combination of discrimination – read ‘My life and remarkable times’ by Victoria Drummond, lack of Education opportunities etc.
Secondly what was the impact of that? What could all that lost talent have done and what the wider impact have been?
My father was an Army driver during WW2, so knew what he was talking about, his comment was that he preferred women bus drivers as they didnt ‘throw the bus about so much’ something I can vouch for more recently as well, so its not just the absence of power steering on the old Bristol RE’s.
But its something that has a practical impact both from a bus mechanics point of view as women drivers have a much better safety record.
So there has been a massive amount of lost talent coupled with a missed opportunities for men to learn positive things from how women do things……..
And thats before you start on everything else
Indeed….
Bristol RE. ECW body?
Yes
My wife and I hired one when we got married to take the wedding party into Bath
A driver had already explained what they were like – you set yourself up to take a particular line round a junction and god help anyone who gets in the way
Our driver was working the wheel like he was steering a ship in a rough sea
🙂
Well, well, a vintage bus fan club as well………………..this blog never ceases to amaze me I must say.
I wrote two books on buses a long time ago….
I wasn’t going to vote because I think all of the above play an important role, but I think that education is the most important, not just to develop talent but also, eventually, to deal with the other issues as well.
My sister in law was born in Scotland in the 1950’s. Her father was a cook in the army. She became a consultant paediatric neurosurgeon. She overcame 3 of the difficulties listed above because she had a brilliant (state) education.
🙂
The UK’s primary, middle and secondary state school system has been privatised. They are called academies. They are run for profit, funded direct by the Department for Education.
UK universities are run to make a profit. I recall a history professor from one of the London colleges in the mid 1990’s recounting how then 60% of the history students at their college were non UK/EU. No wonder it was/is so difficult to get into 40% of the places left.
Our local university has had its Humanities course funding cut by 50% because it is not offering enough STEM subjects. As one of their now ex lecturers told me ” where are we meant to find STEM lecturers from”. From thin air apparently.
UK businesses have a history of not being prepared to run decent apprentice schemes. They want the government to pay. Granted a minority see the value of training staff.
UK governments do not value education for the majority. They can do the low value jobs and to hell with the consequences.
I have never managed to understand why the rich elite want to suppress the rest of us. If I were rich I would want to invest in talent of all sorts to make me even richer.
I cannot really believe it is fear or insecurity.
Why not?
They are terrified of losing what they have.
Now Mr. Bezos just needs to read this to understand that his “1000 Mozarts and Einsteins” do already exist.
No need for fancy space stuff at all.
And the solution to achieve this is very simple:
Those rich people just need to stop standing in the way of real progress.
I get though what the problem for them is as well:
Besides Mozarts and Einsteins you’ll also get 1000 Keynes.
And the “(industrial) reserve army” Marx talked about will suffer heavy loses, as hope and chance will guide the people out.
Thank you.
I agree.
Wasted talent and unfulfilled potential was the spur to Thomas Gray’s famous Elegy written in a Counĺtry Churchyard. I often read through it and think on what is your theme for this blog.
It took him 5 years to polish it up. It is a masterpiece..He recognised that talented people often leave this world without having fully used those talents- like beautiful desert flowers that are unseen – they remain unknown to fortune and fame
It is our duty to encourage and nurture whatever talents we come across as employers, teachers, colleagues and friends. Of course, time and chance are also involved, but we can always try to help. As a teacher, I was often moved to tears by students trying their best to make their mark and their way in life.
As you say, it is often the poor who are most disadvantaged, which is a national shame when considering what is lost to society as a whole when talents are not allowed to flourish. I also remember that we only ever hear the stories of success; the unsuccessful may have their stories, but they are not heard.
I’d like to see a mnisteriall department given the role and funding to specifically foster talent among the disadvantaged. This seems to be left to philanthropists which is helpful, but the state should be more involved.
Thanks, Alan.
I voted for education as Finland has a cooperative learning education system compared to the U.K. competition learning: with a winner and rest are losers. Quickly children are conditioned/ indoctrinated that they are not good enough.
Finland is ranked a happier society: https://smartmoneymindset.com/living-in-the-happiest-country-a-comparative-look-at-finland-and-the-uks-happiness-and-cost-of-living/
I think there was a movement in the Thatcher days to repel those who were dynamic from breaking into the workplace and instead to encourage the ‘grey’, uninspired and malleable.
I remember working at an Arts Centre in the Modlands where they were advertising for a youth outreach worker. Of the shortlisted candidates, there was one clearly brilliant, inspirational and dynamic contender.
He was rejected in favour of a dull, weak candidate who had learned all the jargon but had no charisma and proved to be simply unable to connect with the young people on the streets.
It was a tragedy. The kids of the town lost out for sure. They were never engaged by the appointed youth worker, in spite of his well-worded weekly reports about his failed attempts. And I saw it repeated again and again in other areas.
The managers of the time did not want competition: they were there to downgrade the entire system with a stable of obedient lackeys. And so it has continued…
I am cognitively struggling today so please forgive any errors.
As I understand disabled people achieve less educationally, have less chance of being employed and are more likely to live in poverty than the general population.
If I recall correctly, only groups such as Bangladeshi Brits and underclass white men do worse.
And Farage wants to remove protections you have.
Good luck.
Gatekeepers. One problem is the people often self-appointed who spend their time keeping people out, illustrated by some of the stories above.
Celebrity culture. Another is the associated issue of celebrating a few winners / geniuses at the expense of all the people who have the potential to contribute to a broader shared culture. We’ve seen it so often in the field of popular art and music. In the sixties and seventies there were opportunities for working class kids to get into art school where they proceeded to invent themselves in myriad fields of creativity where they could realise their potential and make a decent living. There were the celebrated few but so many, many more enjoying fulfilled lives in creative communities.
Much to agree with
To me it’s about more than access to education.
It is about what that education is designed to deliver.
I do not believe that the aim should be to fill young heads with information and enable them to jump through exam hoops.
It should be about empowering people.
Empowering each person to find their enthusiasms and talents so that they can make a positive contribution to the wellbeing of their fellow citizens, with each contribution being recognised as of value.
Empowering each person to think critically about conventional narratives and power structures so that society is built on informed participation rather than passive, often resentful, acquiescence.
The Finnish seem to show that this empowering approach leads to a more creative, productive and cohesive society. https://www.techclass.com/resources/education-insights/beyond-academics-how-finnish-schools-teach-life-skills-empathy-and-critical-thinking.
I know the cry will be that it such a system can’t be afforded, even if was desired, but as you say it is what is lost under our current approach that truly can’t be afforded.
I agree with you.