This is the first of a three-part series based on my keynote, A Wider Answer, to the Bangkok CIS-EARCOS Institute on International Admission & Guidance in September 2026.

When I was about eleven, my mother arranged piano lessons for me after school on Wednesdays. I hadn’t asked for them, and I was not a good student. I would walk slowly up the road and arrive ten minutes late and bash the keyboard clumsily for Mrs Gardner, who had a habit of shutting her eyes during my playing. At the time, I thought she was sleeping, but now, as a teacher, I realise it was to hide her disgust.

After some months, I told my mother I wanted to give up. “You’ll regret it when you’re older,” she said. “You’ll wish you could play.” “Maybe,” I said, “but I still don’t want to go next Wednesday.” The lessons ended. And my mother was right; I wish that the eleven-year-old had chosen differently. And to make matters worse I’ve said much the same thing to my own children.

But ‘my mother was right and the boy was shortsighted’ is a standard reading that I want to interrogate. Because the boy also understood something true: whatever the piano might give his future self, it gave him very little in the present. And he was not prepared to make his present merely a means to a future he had not chosen.

My regret is genuine, now. But so was his refusal, then. Both were right, just about different things. And this is my thread here. The thing that was beyond both me and my mother that day was the real reason to play; not for the future I’d use it in, and not just for the pleasure of the present. But because the playing might change me. Make me, in some small but real way, a different person. We couldn’t see that so things came to an argument about the future she wanted and the present I wanted. 

This issue is broader than me and my piano. It runs through many systems we work in – schools, universities, guidance, admissions, entry jobs, careers – and most of those systems lean towards my mother’s side of the conversation. Plan ahead. Invest in your future. Don’t waste your potential. It’s old advice, and I don’t want to dismiss it. But there might be – should be – something else too. 

Here is a moment when two cultures put their competing ideas of education on the table. It’s 1744, pre-USA, and we’re in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. There’s real tension between the Native Americans and the colonial settlers, and as they negotiate a treaty, well-meaning Commissioners from Virginia offer to educate six Iroquois young men at the College of William and Mary, to be instructed in all the learning of the colonists.

The Iroquois’ reply – as Ben Franklin later recorded it – is both gracious and devastating:

“You who are wise must know that different nations have different conceptions of things and you will not therefore take it amiss if our ideas of this kind of education happen not to be the same as yours. We have had some experience of it… several of our young people were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern provinces… but, when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger, knew neither how to build a cabin, take a deer, nor kill an enemy, spoke our language imperfectly, and were therefore neither fit for hunters, warriors, nor counselors; they were totally good for nothing.

We are however not the less obliged by your kind offer, though we decline accepting it; and, to show our grateful sense of it, if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care in their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them.”

It’s tempting to read and applaud this purely as a story of resistance; the Iroquois refusing assimilation, defending their way of life against colonial education. True enough – the power was all on one side. The college’s purpose, recorded elsewhere, was as much political as spiritual: converting its students, but also producing interpreters and intermediaries useful to the colony. So when the reply describes young men who came back unable to hunt, build, endure cold, or speak their own language – “totally good for nothing” – the Iroquois were right.

But note what the Iroquois don’t say. They don’t say the colonial education was worthless; they say it was worthless for their purposes because it produced men unfit to be hunters, warriors, counsellors. And then they make their counter-offer: send us a dozen of your sons, and we will “make men of them.” Fit for the woods. Fit for the life the Iroquois valued.

Both sides are measuring human beings by what they are good for. The colonists ask: will this education produce a useful cog in the colonial machinery? The Iroquois ask: will it produce a hunter or counsellor? Each looks at the other’s graduate and sees someone “good for nothing” – meaning nothing I have a future use for. So “good for nothing” may sound like a sharp rebuke but turns out to be the thing both cultures share. The colonists and the Iroquois both agreed to judge what happens today in terms of what it leads to in years to come. The same game my mother and I were playing about the piano, three centuries later.

We are very good at asking what education might be for in future, and answering it. And we should ask that question – it’s important. But if what is it for? is the only question we ask, we have lost something important as a result.

Where does this relentless pull of the future come from? 

My thinking on this matter has changed over the years, helped by my own children, who have left home now. Seeking to alleviate the pressure they felt, I would say to them “don’t put yourself under so much pressure – relax and enjoy things, it’ll all work out”. They invariably pointed back at me and my work, my planning for the future – at my habits, my hours, the demands and the competitive systems in which we all operate. Their point was a perceptive one – they were locating things both in me the individual and also in the system of which I am part.

I think it’s the same for many of our students and the pressure they feel. Some of it is external – the exams, the deadlines, the league tables and sometimes us, the teachers and parents in their lives. We do what we can about that – schools spend a good deal of time trying to develop ways to mitigate the effect of these external factors. But the trouble is, the pressure is no longer solely from external sources.

Korean philosopher Han Byung-Chul has a helpful way of describing this. In his book The Burnout Society, he argues that we have shifted from being disciplinary societies as they were in the 19th century – enforcing conformity through external institutions like prisons, barracks and factories – to being today what he calls achievement societies, where the enforcement has moved inwards. In his language we have gone from obedience-subjects to achievement-subjects where the institutions are now fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls and genetic laboratories; I might add progressive schools, tuition centres, the conference where I first delivered this as a keynote. We no longer mark our places by rigid social norms set by class and work; but by what we achieve, display, and optimise – the visible signs of self-improvement.

In many schools (mine is certainly one of them) obedience is less in fashion than it once was. We now claim we want new thinking. Think about the language we use with young people. Innovation. Best self. Full potential. Not wasting your talents. Grit. Agency. I have used all of it – with my students, with my own children, and on myself. It sounds like encouragement. But read it back slowly and it becomes something else. It is the language of perpetual inadequacy. It points at the gap between who you are and who you could be, and urges you to close it. The gap, of course, never closes. By definition, it cannot – because you can always strive for more.

And none of this is forced on us. We have moved from external compulsion to something that feels like our own choice. That’s the hallmark of the achievement society: nobody is making us do it. We feel like we are doing it freely, even enthusiastically. Han puts it starkly: “However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide.”

His most striking line: “In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside them.” As a parent and educator, I find that hard to hear. 

Han is describing adults – people who no longer need anyone to push them. Our students are not there yet. For them there is still a parent, a teacher, a deadline doing the pushing. But that is exactly the apparatus by which the external becomes internal. The work camp is not something they are born carrying. It is something we teach them to carry – teachers and parents alike; I have done it in both roles – so that one day they will do it without us. When they return as alumni, some of them may even thank us.

Sociologist Hartmut Rosa captures what this looks like in practice: he tells of the paramedics who increasingly report attending to people who have collapsed, who refuse to go directly to hospital because they have urgent matters at the office, and who demand their laptops once admitted to the clinic. Is this where the internal work camp leads? Give your calendar – or your children’s calendars – to an AI and ask it what seems to matter most.

The consequences of this for our students, for our children, for us, map onto broader social trends we see. And here the evidence is not just anecdotal. Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill, in a meta-analysis across three decades of data, found that perfectionism has risen sharply in university students since the 1980s, in particular the socially prescribed kind of perfectionism, which is to say the sense that others demand perfection of you. That is the achievement society showing up in the numbers. It’s there in the language too: take initiative, fulfil your potential, live up to the person you could be. That language of becoming has become a burden, the burden of feeling that you have not yet arrived. And can never arrive.

I used to tell students they were working for themselves, not for me and I meant it as liberation. But Han makes me wonder whether it simply relocated the pressure inside where no one could see or question it, and called that growth.

Next: if everything is in service of something else, where does it end?

References

• Graphics by Gemini, prompt by Claude
• Curran, T. & Hill, A.P. (2019). Perfectionism is increasing over time: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 145(4), 410-429.
• Franklin, B. (1784). Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America. Passy.
• Han, B-C. (2015). The Burnout Society. Stanford Briefs.
• Moretti-Langholtz, D. & Woodard, B. (Eds.) (2019). Building the Brafferton: The Founding, Funding, and Legacy of America’s Indian School. Muscarelle Museum of Art.
• Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (J. C. Wagner, Trans.). Polity.