The Hungry Spirit: New Thinking for a New World

by Charles Handy

  This process, like most of the important things in life, cannot be taught, only encouraged. The lessons learned cannot be graded, because each journey is unique to ourselves. Because small children learn very fast these lessons cannot be postponed until the children go to school. Parents have to be the coaches. That is hard, for the parents are learning too. I once commented that there were three hugely important jobs in society for which neither training nor qualifications were required – those of managers, politicians and parents.

  We have since, in Britain, started to do something about the training of managers instead of assuming that managers were born, not made. Politicians will always escape the competence test, I expect. Parenting, however, is now being taught in a few areas. Some educational authorities in Britain are encouraging parents of children in primary schools to attend discussion groups, and the number of books on good parenting is proliferating. There are even those who would like to see such training becoming a precondition of marriage, but in a free society this will remain a pipe dream.

  Although Edward de Bono maintains, convincingly, that we can be taught to think, learning to learn about oneself is more subtle. It does not fit easily into a formal curriculum, but can emerge from the enveloping culture of the school. I once complained to my son’s headmaster about what I saw as the excessively academic slant of the school. He replied that, because society, and his pupils’ parents in particular, regarded examination results as important, he was determined to meet their wishes as efficiently as possible. ‘But, that done,’ he said, ‘we get on with the real education, the individual search for identity and meaning. We all know that that is what we are really about, but we need to get the numbers right first in order to be free to do it.’

  The underlying lesson there was that real life, and work, has its constraints. We have, most of the time, to operate within those constraints but move beyond them. The challenge for the school is to make up its mind where it wants to go when the constraints have been met. The journey of life is as relevant to the institutions of education as it is to their participants. It is not enough to survive.

  7.Learning is experience understood in tranquillity.

  We learn by reflecting on what has happened. The process seldom works in reverse, although most educational programmes assume that it does. We hope that we can teach people how to live before they live, or how to manage before they manage. Little of the teaching sticks. Simulation is the best approximation we can hope for, and where mistakes cannot be allowed it is essential. No one would want an airline pilot to fly before being trained. But no amount of role-playing, case studies or projects can compete with real life. The process of education, therefore, is fundamentally skewed. Most of it comes before, rather than after, experience. We need to build as much experience of reality as we can into schools and universities, but we must also provide more opportunities for reflective learning and requalification after school.

  It doesn’t end with school or with university. Life itself provides all the learning experiences we need. What is lacking is the time and place and people to help us learn from those experiences. We need to think of the whole educational system as a University of Life, in which everyone is entitled to study, sometime, for free, or almost free. This is, in fact, possible in many countries, but it is not presented as a universal right. It should be, particularly as universities and colleges get more modular and globular and virtual, in the process becoming more accessible.

  The big danger of a front-loading educational system is that it turns into a one-chance experience. If at first you don’t succeed, you don’t, usually, try again. That is particularly hard on those whose aptitudes and talents don’t fit nicely into the classroom curriculum. In a credential society, where everyone will need a credential or qualification of some sort, an easy-access perpetual college system is essential, and should be made both glamorous and unthreatening.

  We should, therefore, be more adventurous in our thinking. I like the idea of a University of the First Age, as pioneered in Birmingham, England, which provides out-of-school experiences and classes for young people. Calling it a University makes it sound respectable, while the work it does is more reality-based and more unconventional than the regular classroom studies. I like, too, the notion of a University of the Community, in which students are apprenticed to approved non-profit organizations and earn a diploma at the end of a period of successful work, licensing them for similar work elsewhere. Here the college is the work organization and the faculty are the officers of the organization, validated and approved by an outside body. The use of the word University confers respectability, while the setting brings reality. The idea of a University for Industry, as advocated by the Labour Party in Britain, has some of the same overtones, although it should more properly be a University of Business, to reflect the idea that it is Business, not just Industry, that matters today, and that it should be Business itself that provides much of the material and the faculty of the University.

  We could think more adventurously still and, as part of a Universal University of Life, endeavour to offer to every young person a mentor from outside the educational system, someone who would take a positive interest in that person’s development and progress in life. Mentoring would need to be voluntary or it wouldn’t work, and the relationship would have to be acceptable to both parties, but any opportunity for more one-on-one relationships between the generations is worth exploring. Young people lack a variety of adult role models. They meet few adults other than their parents and their teachers, authority figures whom they may well reject in adolescence. It is hard for them to form a realistic view of life ahead from their peer group or the role models of sports or music stars, the only other adults of whom they know anything. The first step to respecting yourself is often to have earned the respect of someone you respect.

  One large comprehensive school in London, with 1,450 pupils from 50 different nationalities, has set up a mentoring scheme involving 40 consultants and support staff from a large management consultancy. A visiting executive from another firm was impressed by the early results of this project. ‘The confidence and aspirations of the students have clearly been increased,’ he said. Another London school is starting a similar scheme with a neighbouring publishing house. These projects are part of the ‘Roots and Wings’ scheme set up by Business in the Community. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that every teenager could have the option of a volunteer mentor from the world outside. It might be the most useful single thing that business could do to influence the education of our young.

  Change in the Anglo-Saxon tradition comes not by edict but by case law made fashion. There are no sure recipes, only an invitation to create new types of schools for life and work, schools that are appropriate for a new kind of world. It is a world where, more than ever before, we shall each be responsible for our own destiny, our own definition of success, our own journey of discovery.

  The danger is that our traditional schools and colleges will lag behind, designed by people from a world that used to be, for a world that will be no more, rather like our armies, which were always well trained for the last war. If we fail, this time, to leap beyond our own experience, we will fail our youth. It is indeed a time for bold imaginings, for reinventing what we understand by education. It is also time to realize that there can be schools in unlikely places, places which we never thought of as schools before. Only in that way will young people acquire the self-confidence that is the prerequisite of self-respect and responsibility.

  ELEVEN

  A PART FOR GOVERNMENT

  IT IS NOT enough to promote responsibility and autonomy at work and at school. There is little point in developing the ideas of a full citizenship at work if they do not apply in the wider society. Government has many roles, from the defence of the realm to the provision and care of the infrastructure of the land. Here we are only concerned with the part it can and should play in the promotion of individual responsib
ility, both for oneself and for others.

  But first we need to consider the implications of the following fact: capitalism thrives on inequality. Markets separate out the successful from the less successful in a very thorough way. This competitive process creates wealth for the country as a whole, but it doesn’t spread it around. Money is like muck, said Francis Bacon, centuries ago – of no use unless it be spread. The responsibility of government is to use some of the riches created by the market, not to make life easy for everyone, but at least to make life possible, not to share out the money but to invest that money, in order to build a decent society. You cannot leave it entirely to those who have the money to do the spreading, because many of them won’t, and we have already noted that the money doesn’t trickle down or spread itself fast or far enough.

  We all want a decent society, and we know that it costs money to build it. Our affluent countries are disfigured by poverty at the edges, by ignorance, anger and violence. We are creating a generation of thuggish young men who see no place for their muscles in a world of brains and fingertips, or for their macho selves in what will be mainly a service economy. It is hard to see where they can go other than into a world of criminality, or drugs or aimlessness. We can talk of personal responsibility, but without the education or the help to do anything for oneself such talk becomes meaningless for many.

  We can each work out that it would pay us all in the long run to have better education for everyone, that help given early to struggling families saves us from spending money later on more police in our cities, more prisons and more carers. It is, in a sense, only properly selfish to want a more decent society and to be prepared to pay for it. So why don’t we vote for higher taxes? The answer seems to be that we don’t trust our governments to spend the money the way we want it spent.

  A 1996 study from the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London produced an interesting graph. The richer countries became, the more they saw the state as the servant of the people, instead of the people being the servants of the state. China and Iraq, for example, are down at the bottom, with the state as the master, while the USA, Canada and Australia, hotly pursued by Germany, France and the UK, see the state as the servant. The line of argument of this book would suggest that there is an intervening variable here. As we grow accustomed to a little more affluence, we want more control of our own lives and, as a result, want the state to facilitate our life, not to manage it. We want more responsibility. The British will soon formally declare themselves to be ‘subjects’ no longer, but citizens instead.

  The thesis of personal responsibility and proper selfishness will be an empty dream for many, unless we can equip them with the resources to achieve some sense of ‘enough’ in material terms and then to go beyond that to reach their goal in life and find their white stone. It is one of the main obligations of government as servant of all its people to make this sort of responsibility a realistic possibility for everyone. This chapter is concerned with how governments might do that, in addition to their other obligations.

  A servant government should provide the infrastructure of life, not its superstructure, but should tilt that infrastructure to make it more accessible to those who have fared less well in the market economy or who might do so in future. To build on the infrastructure remains our own personal responsibility. Exercising that responsibility is what gives life its meaning. Any attempt to do it for us is well-meant theft, even if it means that, left to ourselves, we live our lives badly.

  The first task must, therefore, be to work out what is meant by the infrastructure of life in a modern society, what should be left to the individual, and how the infrastructure should be tilted. Governments which think it right to control and administer half of a country’s annual income themselves have probably got the balance wrong. Restoring a proper balance is likely to be the most important social change in the West in the early years of the next century and will be one change where government has to lead rather than follow.

  A servant government must also be under the control of its citizens if it is to be a proper servant. Information – the right to know what is going on – Involvement – the right to participate in decisions rather than leave it all to ‘them’ – and Individuality – the right to certain freedoms and protections from that government – are the three essentials of proper citizenship. Governments which say ‘elect us and leave it to us to act, always, in your best interests’ are turning democracy into elected paternalism or, less generously, into an elected dictatorship.

  Responsibility which is exercised once every four or five years in a polling booth is so minimalist as to be meaningless. Since, under that system, we can’t make much difference to anything, we might as well not get involved or, if we do, settle for what’s best for us alone, not for the country. Apathy and Cynicism are the real enemies of democracy. By insulating us from any real responsibility for what happens around us, a paternalistic democracy makes us, literally, careless of others beyond our immediate group. Our ambitions then become too narrowly focused, selfishness easily becomes improper.

  RESTORING THE BALANCE

  What counts as the infrastructure? How much should be left to us, and how much should governments spend on our behalf?

  Take some numbers first. In the fifteen countries of the European Union today governments spend between 42% and 59% of their countries’ GDP. In America and Japan it is ‘only’ 35%. In Singapore and Hong Kong, countries which are now richer than Britain and with longer life expectancy, the take is under 20%. It is the same in the tiger economies of the rest of Asia. Who is right?

  It gets more complicated still. The RIIA study, referred to above, also calculated that the average middle-aged worker in the OECD countries will draw something like $100,000 more in benefits from the state during his or her lifetime than they will have paid in. Their children, however, will have to pay $200,000 to $300,000 more in taxes than they will receive in benefits of one sort or another in the next century. In other words, if we were properly honest, if we weren’t borrowing from the next generation, without their knowing it, our governments would be spending even more of our money and, if nothing is done, they will have to spend still more in the future. Should they?

  It is not, in the final count, only or even mostly a matter of how much money is required to pay for all the things that are needed, be they our defence forces, our police and prisons, hospitals, schools, roads, sewers and railways, and, most of all, our pensions, but of who pays it out and therefore has the responsibility for it. By taking that responsibility away from its citizens, governments are implicitly saying that we can’t be trusted to look after our own lives. Some suspect that they might be right, that we would be improvident and wouldn’t save enough to provide for our old age or for periods out of work, but the danger is that that assumption soon becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We become improvident because we don’t need to be provident, with the result that the state is left to do it all, while our irresponsibility is encouraged.

  Western Governments have now realized that they have walked to the edge of a cliff and that if they continue as they are they will fall into a bottomless pit because their promises far exceed their ability to pay. As a result of this economic impasse every government is being forced to return responsibilities to its citizens. The first step backwards from the edge has been to get rid of all the activities which they shouldn’t have been doing anyway, running businesses which the private sector could run perfectly well, and usually better. It helped, of course, that the proceeds from this privatization went into the state coffers, reducing the money which they would otherwise have had to borrow or raise from taxes.

  The next step is to take the state monopolies of things like water, gas and electricity supply and sell them off as private monopolies, but regulated by the state. Note the conjuring trick – the customer still pays much the same but the money doesn’t go through the government books. Until these private monopolies become true bu
sinesses, with competitors who can offer choice to the customer, this form of privatization does little to increase our sense of personal responsibility. The hope is that the lure of gain for the new managers and shareholders will increase the efficiency and the care of the customers – a good start, but not revolutionary enough.

  The third step could be more promising, even though it does little to change the government accounts. Take things like health care and education and provide citizens with a mechanism to choose between the different providers, perhaps by giving them something like vouchers, the equivalent of cheques signed by the state, for them to spend on the outlet of their choice. The underlying idea is to turn the providers, be they hospitals or schools or universities, into sorts of businesses, so improving their incentives and their efficiency.

  I have argued earlier that the concept of businesses in these areas carries unintended consequences, because it allows the providers to choose the customers they want just as much as it allows customers to choose providers. If the providers are sensible business people they will not choose the old, the stupid or the incurable. It would be better to forget the business angle, but force the providers to compete on standards of service across the board while allowing us all a choice within limits, limits which would need to be both geographical and financial. The sense of responsibility for major decisions in our lives will be fostered.

  It is in these areas of health and education that the infrastructure needs tilting, to bring more of the benefits of wealth creation to those who were left out. If we gave bigger vouchers, or their equivalent, to those who need the most – children in inner cities, the chronically ill, the unskilled – these would become the preferred customers because they would carry with them the possibility of more resources.