Hard work, tenacity and talent can clear most hurdles

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 16: Occasionally you read stories that just make your soul sing even in these times of doom and gloom.

Take the recent headlines about three young Bermudian lawyers who have all become barristers. Kimberly Caines, Shannon Dyer and Kamal Worrell are shining examples of how hard work, tenacity and ambition can take you to the top of the most competitive professions.

According to reports, Kamal Worrell is a young man who describes himself as coming “from the back of town” and the first lawyer in his family. And he urges young people who may not see that opportunity is out there “to continue pressing against the odds.”

Another great success story has been young Bermudian dancer, Krystal Smith, who has been accepted into the associates programme at the Welsh Ballet Company.

In stark contrast to these uplifting stories was a claim by Adolph Cameron, of the Jamaican Teachers’ Union, that boys from Afro-Caribbean backgrounds in both Britain and Jamaica perform relatively poorly at school because high academic performance is considered ‘feminine’ or even ‘gay’. He adds that many young black men in Jamaica often turn to a “hustle culture” to make money rather than targeting careers which require real effort and achievement in education.

This “hustle” or easy money culture isn’t just confined to some young black men either. White working class boys in both the US and UK also underachieve in education with high truancy levels and early drop out rates. For this group, educational and professional attainment just isn’t seen as “cool” and the downturn in the world economy has done little to help them change this view.

You could argue “Big deal, hasn’t it always been the case?”

While this is true to some extent, a recent US study has suggested that upward social mobility — which is largely achieved by better education and entry into the professions — appears to have got worse over recent years. In 1978 a study showed that 23 per cent of adult men who had been born in the bottom fifth of the population, (as ranked by social and economic status), had moved up into the top fifth. 

Class ladder

Earl Wysong of Indiana University and two colleagues then decided to update the study. Comparing the incomes of 2,749 father-and-son pairs from 1979 to 1998, they found that fewer sons had moved up the class ladder. Only 10 per cent of the adult men born in the bottom quarter in that period had made it to the top quarter.

Should we be bothered that the opportunity for upward mobility has declined amongst the lower socio economic groups? If you believe in true meritocracy — summed up as a group of people whose progress is based on ability and talent rather than on class, privilege or wealth — then yes it should matter.

Young people like Kamal Worrell, who come from “the back of town” usually get to the top by overcoming social hurdles, demonstrating incredible focus and above all raw talent. To get to where they are, they learn that they have to be the best of the best. It has little to do with luck and everything to do with tenacity, hard work and sheer ability.

Higher education is not — and never has been — a guarantee of a job in your chosen field, especially if that profession is fiercely competitive. But to enter the professions, a degree or higher qualification is what you need just get you in the race.

Of course one of the biggest threats to meritocracy is the rising cost of higher education and the fear that this will add an extra barrier to education for those from poorer backgrounds. This should concern us all for as the commentator Kishore Mahbubani observes:

“The simplest way of understanding the virtues of meritocracy is to ask the question: why is Brazil a soccer superpower and an economic middle power? The answer is that when it looks for soccer talent, it searches for it in all sectors of the population, from upper classes to the slums. A boy from the slums is not discriminated against if he has soccer talent. But in the economic field, Brazil looks for talent in a far smaller base of the population, primarily the upper and middle classes.”

Something to think about as we lose true meritocracy at our peril.

Maggie Fogarty is a Royal Television Society award winning TV producer and journalist currently living in Bermuda.