RECENTLY, I worked in a school for deprived and vulnerable pupils. Its walls and corridors contained a litany of inspirational quotes from gurus ancient and modern. This blu-tacked, laminated  treasure trove included: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”  

Another read: “Believe you can and you’re halfway there.” There were so many of these they became a running joke with the cynics among us, staff and pupils alike.  

I didn’t realise I was waking up to what  teachers are now calling “toxic resilience.” Not dumbing down, but numbing down.

The first aphorism is by Winston Churchill, a man born into luxury, wealth and privilege: protected from any risk of failure. He famously got into Harrow by failing the entrance exam. The second is Theodore Roosevelt; raised in money, he attended Harvard and Columbia Law School.  

Neither were children who overcame poverty and paucity of aspiration through resilience. It is easy to believe in yourself when a whole society is designed for your class to succeed.

I remember my simmering anger at Liz Kendall’s Labour leadership campaign in 2015.

She promised aspiration classes to “teach girls and boys, particularly from white working-class communities, about the chances in life they may not even know exist — like being an engineer, a chemist and even leader of the Labour Party.”

Skin colour and class didn’t stop me from dreaming as a child in the 1960s. What affected me and many like me, was a lack of material resources, money, and networks of people to help. Unlike Churchill and Roosevelt.  

But in the ’60s we didn’t have “aspiration lessons” or positivity posters plastered over our walls, because we knew there were decent jobs and careers to be had.

Society could find a productive place for nearly all of us. And it was no social utopia at the time either. Far from it. So why now do we bombard schoolchildren with constant exhortations to be strong, bounce back, and be unafraid of failure?

I believe much of this relates to a bestseller by Paul Tough in the mid-noughties: “How Children Succeed.”

Tough thinks that children (like laboratory rats) if nurtured correctly, have greater resilience (he calls it “grit”). This results in curiosity, optimism, conscientiousness, self-control and persistence. Tough summarises these as “character.”

Of course in Churchill’s day, character was built, in Africa or on the playing fields of whichever public school one was unfortunate enough to be bullied and fagged at.  

Tough’s work disregards poverty as a deficit model and reinforces the individuals within disadvantaged neighbourhoods as actors with personal agency. Individuals are capable with the right training of rising out of their disadvantage.

These individualistic, neoliberal notions have conditioned sociological research. The New Right love this stuff.

The World Bank wants poverty defined as $1 a day and for us to believe the cure to such poverty is “parents and caregivers” teaching their children to be resilient.

The term “resilience” originates in engineering where a distorted substance can return to its earlier shape. But children are not lumps of memory foam. They distort, cave in, feel cold, hungry, fearful, mentally and physically sick. They protest, and damage things and people. They offend, self-harm and self-destruct.  

Sociologists cannot come up with a universally acceptable definition of what resilience is. It means different things to different people, at different times and in different societies. One constant, however, does remain: poverty tends to pass from generation to generation and it harms children the most.

Nobody would be foolish enough to exhort children to give up, reject new experiences, cry all the time or blame others.  

So why do we feel the need to constantly bully them with propaganda that takes no account of their material circumstance? In the school I mentioned earlier, some of the children being loud-hailered into resilience and aspiration turned up with ripped footwear, no coat in winter, hungry, depressed, traumatised, unwashed, neglected, bereaved, unloved, and abused.

Poverty was the problem for most of them. Maybe the wall displays could have been a bit kinder, more understanding, easier on the eye, less preachy?

Toxic resilience is the switching off of injustice, righteous anger, the desire to change or even dismantle injustice. It says nothing of these things — of the damage, the trauma, the stolen pensions, price gouging, low wages, poor diet, forced pre-pay meter installation, and ambulance queues. It just tells you to keep on going regardless. Turn that frown upside down!

Since 1978, my class has become more anxious and depressed, more obese, more unequal, more insecure and fearful. Lately, it has become much worse. Hunger has reappeared, life expectancy has stalled and in the poorest areas, it is in decline. So now we are told to be more resilient and aspire. But never to rebel, organise, resist or demand change.

I wonder if the halls and corridors of Harrow — Churchill’s alma mater — have laminated aspirational resilience phrases clagged to them?

If we are to seize a future free from neoliberal barbarism, compliant resilience and warped notions of individualism will not be enough. We should remember the words of the great Scottish socialist John Maclean: “The only way to achieve real progress for the working class is to rise with your class, not out of it.” Wouldn’t that be an aspiration to place on our walls?