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Peter Honey

By Peter Honey (June 2008 Issue)
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Imagine yourself at a large conference about reaching ‘unreachable’ learners. There are workshops on a variety of different topics: tips for teaching the unteachables, for managing the unmanageable, the work of the Urban Academy… and so on. There are also seven keynote speakers.

Four out of the seven speakers start their pitch by announcing that they have come from a working class background and were brought up in a rough part of the East End.

They cheerfully go on to explain that they were sexually abused as kids, had alcoholic mothers, absent fathers and wicked step-fathers. They were bored at school, played truant, got expelled, joined violent street gangs, got into drugs and prostitution and went to jail.

Eventually they saw the error of their ways, started to study, got some O- and A-levels, went on to university and got a first. They did a postgraduate qualification and now work with disadvantaged kids, helping them to find themselves, improve their self-esteem and become worthwhile citizens.

Now imagine that this isn’t a description of you. Through no fault of your own, you were born into a middle class family. Your parents (yes, you had two of them!) were caring and supportive. Naturally you went to school and, while you found some of it boring, you never played truant and, by and large, you did okay and worked hard enough to pass the usual exams.

You progressed on to university, enjoyed yourself and got a 2.1. You smoked and drank, grew your hair too long and experimented with various things you shouldn’t have experimented with, but you were never in trouble with the law. Since leaving university, you have had a number of jobs, and have now found your feet as a trainer.

Now the question is: would you feel strangely inadequate as you listened to the four speakers who are able to boast about their struggles? Would you even feel, absurd though it sounds, a little envious? Is there a bit of you that would like to be able to impress people with tales of how you overcame terrible hardship and adversity and clawed your way up life’s greasy pole?

As you might have guessed, the second description fits me far better than the first. The contrast between my background and experiences and those of the four working class speakers is the equivalent of coming from different planets.

As I listened to the descriptions of the splendid work these dedicated people are doing with alienated, angry, excluded young people, I marvelled and I found myself wondering if coming from a disadvantaged background is an essential qualification. Could someone like me, white and middle class, who has had it easy, ever be capable of really understanding and reaching out in the non-judgmental, ‘start where they are’, ‘speak their language’, ways being described?

I asked one of the speakers if someone like me could do what he does, working with damaged young people and winning their trust. He gave me the polite answer (just shows what all that education does for you!) and said yes. I didn’t believe him (but was polite enough not to say so; education again!).

No, I think the best I can do is keep at arm’s length, enabling these remarkable, passionate, ‘been there, done that’ people to do their stuff. Being a trustee of Prisoners’ Education Trust – a charity that gives grants to prisoners who want to do some distance learning while they are banged up – is just about right for the likes of me.

That means going to numerous committee meetings; writing up the three-year strategy; proof-reading the annual review; attempting to monitor our impact; supporting the hardworking, dedicated staff; recruiting other trustees with skills to offer; worrying about where next year’s funding will come from; occasionally visiting a prison to see what it’s really like to be one of our customers. This is the sort of work where I feel I can make an appropriate contribution.

But, you must admit, it doesn’t sound a fraction as exciting as the rough and tumble of the work being done with the ‘unreachables’. I can only console myself by saying ‘each to his own’. But there is still a bit of me that wishes I had been born working class and poor – preferably with an alcoholic, promiscuous mother.

Dr Peter Honey, FRSA, FCIPD, FIMC is a chartered psychologist and founder of Peter Honey Publications. He can be contacted on +44 (0) 1628 633946, at peterhoney@peterhoney.com or visit www.peterhoney.com.

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