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A young Mentee recently wrote the following to me.

Maybe mistakes never exist –

only lessons and experience

providing opportunities for growth

Back to school and university after the break, it is time to ask what the young think of the education they are receiving, how it might be improved, whether they are making the effort expected by those who have worked to bring them such excellent resources and what learning is all about in the Google age.

Looking back on my own youth I can list the things that made a lasting impression on me and what I have done about them since.

Because of unfortunate and (partly due to the war) dysfunctional home arrangements I wanted my early schools to be a home from home, something they were, and are, not designed to be. Expectations like that inevitably lead to disappointments and I recall my childhood and youth as lonely, forcing me to become extremely gregarious and to seek company wherever it was to be found.

My early friends were all older than me, sometimes very much older. The consequences were not universally good but on balance I learnt more about life and its purpose than my contemporaries, and certainly much earlier. It was clear to me that communicating with others was a key need for everyone and even when still a child I regarded all literature as a way to connect with those I would never otherwise meet.

Well known authors from Hardy to Pepys, from Shakespeare to Dickens become as close friends as I had in my youth. It was inevitable that my interest in everything became philosophical first and material a long way second and for this I have always been very grateful.

Being of a naturally rather conformist personality I learnt painfully and slowly the importance of disobedience, something in which I still have quite a long way to go. It has made my mentoring of others focus on selective disobedience and contrariness as crucial to fully developed lives. Indeed, many Mentees will attest to the habit I have of asking ‘what if we turn everything upside down and look at it quite differently?’

Are the young learning the purpose of life, the ways to enjoy it without excessive damage to others and the planet and how to ‘fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run?’ I have asked some Mentees to ponder these questions and, with their permission, I shall bring their answers to you in the coming weeks.

Comparing those answers with what the world leaders think we need may be an interesting lesson.