Force resilience on young people and expect bad results

Opinion: A secondary school principal attracted some attention at the weekend when he expressed a view that “resilience” was lacking in many young people and they needed to toughen up. Secondary schools are not something I have direct experience of for well over half a century so I tread carefully here but taken too literally I see real dangers in this view.
The sentiment is clearly part of the current political environment. It sits comfortably with the approach to social benefits based on taking “responsibility” as individuals and application of sanctions for failure to do so. It has its counterpart in views on employment issues being expressed by the responsible minister. It echoes in disdain for those expressing a preference for ‘green’ over ‘machine’ in any sphere.
The narrative being promoted is one of a strong, independent, innovative, growth-promoting class being held back, undermined and dragged down by those lacking the intestinal fortitude to join them. This has a strong colonial tinge to it, a modern application of an earlier self-image which attached itself to land theft, environmental destruction, and construction of a small European country somehow tethered at a huge distance from mother.
This self-image, largely a male and Pākehā one, found literary expression in novels such as Man Alone and A Good Keen Man. It was matched by male models (no, not the fashion kind) in various fields in sturdy, taciturn, resilient form.
Of course, like many such societal self-images, it was representative not of the great majority of citizens, nor even of the dominant elites (who were rather more pudgy, grasping and reliant on the work of others), but a caricature which served to perpetuate the elite dominance in part because most could never live up to it.
This image of the resilient ‘Kiwi’ has broken down over recent decades as it slowly dawned on us that very little of how our society worked bore any real resemblance to that caricature. We turned out to be a whole lot more female, brown, urban, communal, sensitive and expressive. Breaking free from such an image has been great for so many of us. The last gasp should have been the facile attempt to convince us that somehow there was conflict rather than kotahitanga between the ideas of ‘Kiwi’ and ‘Iwi’.
But it does keep trying to reassert itself in various forms. It is the image that surrounds the idea that gaining even partial recompense for stolen land and mana is somehow reflective of dependency or a grievance mentality. The image that supports closing down emergency housing which will mean that whānau will have to find their own housing somewhere, somehow, sometime. The image that is crippling the welfare system founded on a right to support and asserting a new image of privileged support, justified only by an economic return to society.
An image that says “we will force you to be resilient”.
It is consistent that the principal who sparked this reflection described some young people as needing to be taught to be “less fragile”. I think this is a misunderstanding of what fragility and resilience in society really mean. The essence of both is not individual but social.
Life in our communities is full of diversity, challenge, and opportunity. The makeup of our communities is changing all the time as are our technologies and other patterns of life. The worst thing we can do in this situation is try to impose or protect old models of acting, to get “back on track” to preconceived ideas of how to behave. Imposing rigidity on change is what causes fragility. Things break, and young people break simply because they are developing and growing. They are busy being born, not busy dying like the old elites trying to impose behaviours on them.
Fragility is a social phenomenon more than an individual one. It is created socially and experienced individually if that is how order is imposed and expectations created. It is pointless and even dangerous to expect individual resilience in the face of social fragility.
What we really need to be doing, for rangatahi as well as others, is not to enforce one model of what we call resilience on them as they experience the fragility created by rigid social systems experiencing great change. If we do, then the responsibility for the damage lies with those imposing rigidity, not those suffering from it.
It’s a matter of letting kids express who they are, where they are, and to create the world they want.
It’s a matter of recognising that real resilience is a social thing which emphasises flexibility and adaptability of our social systems and away from the rigidity that creates fragility.