AT THE end of last week, the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, and the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, wrote in The Daily Telegraph that children needed to be more resilient, and that it was part of the job of schools to help them to develop the “grit” needed to tackle life’s ups and downs.
The writers were, obviously, concerned about the levels of poor mental health in schools, and the sheer numbers who go on beyond school to be so crippled by anxiety and depression that they are unable to work. Of course, there have always been children who struggle with school because of long-recognised medical and developmental issues. The pandemic and repeated lockdowns have made things worse, alongside increasing parental detachment from schools, and the fact that so many young people know human connection mostly through the internet. The real world has become, for many, a truly scary place.
But there may be a further reason for childhood distress. One of the results for cultural secularisation is the increasing tendency to medicalise ordinary human suffering. What Mr Streeting and Ms Phillipson did not address is the fact that we have largely erased the religious instinct that life is a struggle, an ongoing test of will and endurance.
This loss of perspective has social consequences throughout society. The able, those with supportive and encouraging families, are often still surrounded by high expectations. But, if they are not fulfilled, these expectations can lead to a crippling and lasting sense of inadequacy. Young people from poorer backgrounds, where financial and cultural resources are low, all too easily absorb the conviction that the odds are stacked against them, and it becomes almost impossible to succeed, even if they try. Neither situation is conducive to the development of grit: that mix of courage, endurance, and hope which enables the more fortunate of us to get up, at least most mornings. Hope is a virtue, one of the three that “abide”.
During the summer term at the school that I attended in my teens, our daily assemblies focused on Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. I remember, vividly, the horrors and obstacles that Pilgrim encountered on his journey, and Bunyan’s imaginative metaphors, such as Doubting Castle and the Slough of Despond.
Such vivid language speaks far beyond its Puritan context, and illuminates universal struggles that children and adults can still recognise. Secular-minded people sometimes fail to acknowledge the things that religion is really good at: helping individuals to acquire a sense of moral purpose, offering resources that lead towards personal integration, and the practice of the virtue of hope. Secular approaches more often aim at identifying causes for misery and requesting special consideration. Long term, this can be crippling.
In the end, resilience comes from self-respect, and self-respect leads from hope to courage. True grit is as much a spiritual issue as it is a medical one.
