The concept of a role model has always rankled with me.
Role models aren’t simply to be admired. A ‘role model’ is someone you wish to emulate and respect. A person who you actually want to be like , A person whose contribution to society has made you feel you would want to make that same contribution yourself.
Yes, all very worthwhile. But it still rankles with me.
It’s a notion that society often fruitlessly peddles to its youth, but in terms of preparing under 18s for a world of work and responsibility, in my view, it’s not helpful or realistic.
Projecting ambitions of a better life onto someone who’s still living their own life makes little sense. It’s as pointless as pinning your CV to a passing badger in an effort to secure the perfect job.
For example: if your child informs their teacher they wish to be a ballerina when they grow up, this seems rational - there’s a clearly delineated path that child can follow to achieve this dream (willingness to wear pink, energy to leap up and down, practice to point of virtual mental disorder, , capacity to cope with broken and bloodied toes without weeping etc). Same with a wish to be a fireman, a dentist or a horse whisperer.
Now imagine the scenario if that child’s wish is to be a ‘role model’:
Teacher: ‘A role model? ... Well, as long as you work really hard at something, and do really well, then there’s every chance that people will like you for that, and want to be like you too.’
Child: ‘OK. Well, I’m going to work really hard to be in all the papers, pictured drunkenly hanging off the arms of emaciated deadheads with a tiny blanket of class A residue nestling beneath my schnozzle. I may also sing a bit.’
Teacher: ‘But how will that make you a role model?’
Child: ‘Well, I can think of plenty of celebrity models, musicians and sports stars who are deemed ‘role models’ despite public transgressio…GET OFF ME DARRYL’
(Teacher grabs Darryl who is bellowing obscenities in child’s face and shoving her in the chest)
Teacher: ‘What’s got into you Darryl?’
Darryl (after gobbing noisily to the floor): ‘I’m emulating my Premier League football ‘role models’, obviously. Now: any ideas where I can find an octogenarian hooker with her own teeth?’
Scenes like this aren’t happening at a school near you. But it’s arguably what social commentators would have you believe: a Britain broken by youths let down by their so called idols. Communities crumbling due to the irresponsibility of adequate ‘role models’.
One national newspaper wrote: “Football is the major sport. Players are celebrities…it’s only natural that you could hope they could be role models.”
A leading City broker listed ‘new role models’ as one of the key factors towards reversing social and political malaise. Another website criticised a string of pop stars for not speaking out about rioting youth (headline: ‘Where is Tinie Tempah?’).
Footballers do not choose to become role models. They choose to become footballers. Same with pop stars, film stars, businessmen and women. Expecting human beings in the public eye to willingly adopt the status of ‘role model’ is unfair.
What else is unfair? Believing young people automatically look up to successful people and think ‘tell you what - I’m going to be just like them’.
Looking back at my poorly-dressed self in the 80s and early 90s, if I was likely to have had a ‘role model’, chances are I’d have plumped for Trevor McDonald or Normski of BBC’s’ non-fame.
Like most of my peers though, I didn’t slavishly look to TV stars for an idea of what I could achieve. And 15 years later, I’ve done alright, despite failing to become a knighted newsreader or , um, a former presenter of Dance Energy.
I’ve followed my own path. Good thing too, as ‘role models’ who were Northern, male, black and working in financial public relations were pretty thin on the ground.
Today’s generation of young people are not so different. Let’s take the late Amy Winehouse.
There’s no doubt millions, young and old, admired Winehouse’s music.
However, the (glib, oft-made) assertion that young people saw her lifestyle as that of a ‘role model’s’ is harder to swallow.
It’s far from scientific, but if young people were so influenced by Winehouse’s lifestyle, you could argue you would see a concomitant increase in crack addiction – instead, most recent figures suggest crack addiction is declining and the average age of users is getting older.
Just because the media surmises that someone is an influential ‘role model’, it shouldn’t automatically be assumed that young people see them the same way.
Pushing the idea of following a role model, in my mind, is flawed. Rather than aiming to be the facsimile of a lachrymose X-Factor contestant or a beer-guzzling cricketer on the newspaper’s back pages, surely it’s better for the impressionable to follow the example of those around them.
It’s that direct influence that will have the most marked effect on young people. Naturally, the family is a prime source of influencers. Another? Try looking in the mirror. This city’s business community could make a profound contribution to the development of the region’s young people.
By this, I do not simply mean internships As professionals we should ask, ‘do we know what interests the next allegedly disaffected generation, the potential employees of the future? If they’re not interested in following a career like our own, why not? What’s more attractive to them, and why?’
We have to ask: are we as a business community doing enough?
There are excellent initiatives, like Uprising, which provides disadvantaged young people with mentoring support from the professional world, or there are the leadership development courses found through Common Purpose. Nevertheless, I sometimes wonder if we as individuals, or as a collective, can do a little more.
An interesting discussion point was brought up in the aftermath of the riots when the disparity between the vision of prosperity within the Colmore Row vicinity and the deprivation found on the other side of the ring road was the subject of a blog.
Maybe we, as professionals, don’t have a responsibility to develop our surrounding environment; maybe the fact we’re generating wealth and opportunities for the core of Birmingham means we’re already doing our collective bit for the city.
But even having said that, we do have a wealth of skills, experience, personality and knowhow that could help fill the ‘role model’ gap that our city’s youth is said to be suffering from.
I’m not suggesting we should be specifically become ‘role models’ (God forbid anyone should wish to literally follow in my footsteps – for a start, I wouldn’t wish my hairstyle on anyone), but greater engagement with the world outside the B3 postcode could reap considerable benefits for the city.
Could more effective engagement with young people be the undisputed answer to Birmingham’s ills? Don’t know. But it’s certainly worth exploring.
And definitely, it’s a better bet than relying on Wayne Rooney to prevent a child from chucking a brick through a shop window.
* Keith Gabriel is a Midland-based PR account manager. The views expressed in this column do not represent his employer.
