It's everywhere at the moment… Everything is ‘inspiring' or ‘inspirational.' Apparently, there are inspirational people on the loose and young people are out there, constantly being inspired to achieve amazing things.
It may be that I live in a country building up to the 2012 Olympics and that I'll just have to get used this kind of rhetoric. But it sounds as if exposure to a single ‘inspiring' person or experience will transform a young person's life, regardless of their socio-economic or family circumstances. According to the rhetoric, anything is possible and anyone can do anything. All you need is inspiration.
The idea is lazily apolitical, implying that economic hardship isn't the real problem: instead of going to properly funded schools and being taught by properly resourced teachers, young people will be transformed by some accidental meeting, some life-changing experience. I suspect that when we're not prepared to pay for all young people to have a good education we offer them ‘inspiration' instead. That way, they can educate themselves. That way, it's up to them what they do with their lives.
But what if I'm a young person who's not inspired? Does that make me a bad person? A lazy person? An unappreciative or selfish person?
Interestingly, it's a word used by adults rather than by young people. I've been watching a recent television series in the UK. ‘Jamie's Dream School' sees a famous television chef setting up an educational experience for young people who hate school and have gained no academic qualifications so far. Jamie wheels in all sorts of famous people from different walks of life to be their teachers. The implication is that, because these famous people have achieved such a lot in their professional lives, they'll surely inspire a group of disaffected young people.
They don't. They're mostly terrible, either because they have little interest in young people or because they can't teach. Or both. They prove that being good at something doesn't make you ‘inspirational.'
At the school where I work, we've been visited this year by the actor, Sir Ian McKellen, and by the Olympic gold-winning athlete, Denise Lewis. Both of them spoke compellingly about their achievements but I doubt whether many of the young people listening felt particularly inspired to new thespian or athletic heights. Rather, what came across was the warmth and kindness of these two people and their genuine interest in the lives of the young people they met. That's what the young people remembered afterwards, that's what moved them and made them feel good about themselves. "He was actually interested in me! She listened to what I was saying!"
Our motivation to succeed is the result of complex psychodynamic processes and our confidence comes from supportive relationships. Ask young people who inspires them and they'll come up with names like my granddad, my mum, my friends, Mr Buckland my Physics teacher who explained electricity so I can actually understand it now… Everyday names, everyday relationships.
Wherever we work with them, young people feel more confident, more encouraged and better able to do things for themselves because of a painstaking quality of relationship which usually develops over time; because of a daily experience of feeling interesting and worthwhile and understandable to another human being — whether that be Sir Ian McKellen, Denise Lewis, my mum, my friend, my Physics teacher or my counsellor.
