THE obvious question arises. Where will Bermuda's coming generations work? Those with the brains, interest, determination, work ethic and willpower will make it in the new business climate in Bermuda.

A very few may even rise to the top. Others with similar attributes and abilities will find work as bankers, lawyers or accountants. A few of them too may rise to the top. More, with fewer of those attributes but with a sufficient work ethic, will find jobs in construction and other service industries peripheral to the international companies.

We will still need hotels, but to work in them will require an entirely different work ethic and attitude to the one that passed muster in the relaxed days of tourism. High-powered business executives, in the island for two or three hurried meetings and a round of golf or two, will require a standard of slick efficiency until recently almost entirely unknown in Bermuda.

To learn how to give this polished, graceful, but exacting level of efficiency Bermudians will first have to go away to train. Being born Bermudian will no longer be enough. It will no longer be enough in any field in the new climate of business in Bermuda. Anyone who has been to Hong Kong will understand our problem.

For the better part of two centuries Bermudians in all walks of life have enjoyed and lived a relatively relaxed, unpressured way of life and of work. It even added to our charm. It also allowed for a remarkable degree of volunteer public service, from membership of the House of Assembly to charitable work.

It is harder now to find Bermudians to volunteer in charitable causes and Members of Parliament expect to be paid a full-time salary. One law firm recently made it quite clear that it would not tolerate even one of its partners serving in Parliament. It is too late to say: "This is how we do it in Bermuda get used to it." We will have to measure up to the standards of international competition.

Without much or perhaps any forethought we are now fully committed to an economy that is neither relaxed nor laid-back as the tourism of time gone by could be. Charm and friendliness will help, but ruthless efficiency and a rigid work ethic will be essential. Is Bermuda now equipped to provide this? Obviously not.

Because of our protectionist Immigration policies and the miserable quality and astronomical cost of public education we are equipped to provide anything but what are now the essential qualities of service for our new economy. Some of us are learning and changing. Many others are not.

Bermuda's development in the last 30 years has turned out to be unsustainable at least by Bermudians. We are not able ourselves to support the business that is now the basis of our rather unbalanced prosperity.

is the case in many other developed countries today, the rich in Bermuda are getting richer and the poor are being left behind. To run the international businesses now thriving in Bermuda requires the importation of many thousands of foreign workers to fill jobs that Bermudians cannot now and in many cases never will be able to fill themselves.

Despite the delusions prevalent in Government, Bermudian birth confers neither genius nor a work ethic. As a population we are no different from any other community of 60,000 people with one exception. It is much more difficult and expensive for our young people to go away to good colleges and universities or to gain the necessary experience at the lower levels in large international businesses competing in a ruthless global economy than for those in a similar sized small town in North America or Europe.

At the moment it is expensive but possible. In the constitutional future proposed for Bermuda by the present Government ? Independence ? it may become far more difficult and much more expensive.

What does the future promise for those who, for whatever reason, are left out of this high-pressured economic world with which we have so greedily but thoughtlessly saddled ourselves?

The inadequately educated, the unmotivated, those with insufficient intellect, discipline, drive and determination could still find ready work in the old, more relaxed tourist economy. There will be no place for them in the new, driven world of insurance and finance and the demands it makes on its peripheral support services.

This gap in "relaxed" employment may well be a large part of the problems leading to the increasing violence and criminal behaviour afflicting the island. This behaviour militates directly against the preservation of whatever vestiges of tourism we can retain. It also militates against a friendly environment for international businesses.

A middle-aged Bermudian man was encountered recently at a local laundromat with two tightly stuffed bags of dirty laundry in Fairmont laundry bags. A surprised question about where the Fairmont was doing its laundry nowadays elicited the following response: "This belongs to a big CEO. He's down on his private jet and I work for him. What he wants, I do."

It's as simple as that. Bermuda must now march to a new and different tune. When Bermudians are told to jump, their only question can now be: "How high, sir?" Those unwilling to conform will be left behind.

If Bermuda doesn't like the situation in which we find ourselves, Bermuda will have to lump it. It is all too easy for the kind of business now forming the basis of our prosperity to move out, almost overnight, if the Bermuda climate should become inimical. We have some control, but not much, over our internal ability to support this economy. We have no control whatever and never will over the larger forces that govern this economic world.

The United States could and, given the current paranoid, xenophobic bully-boy mentality of its administration, may easily pass legislation that would make much if not all the international business operating in Bermuda unprofitable and so untenable.

So too, possibly, could the European Union. If that happened the great question would suddenly become not can we sustain our development, but can we sustain ourselves? The only second string to our bow, a moribund tourist trade, is unlikely to revive in an island covered with empty office buildings and decaying condos.

Sustainable development is not really the question facing Bermudians at all. By ourselves we are already incapable of sustaining the development we have. If the existing over-development vanishes in a puff of smoke, we will be unable to sustain its loss. The future, at least for much of our younger generation, looks bleak indeed.

The able and driven will indeed get richer; the rest will indeed get poorer. Anyone disinclined, unprepared or unable to fit him or herself into this ruthless, driven, business ethic will have to look elsewhere for a rewarding life.

We are already experiencing a brain drain of sorts led by young people unable to afford the high price of housing. They leave for wider pastures where brains and hard work are more easily rewarded. Those less gifted or driven stay behind and expect Government to provide. We are now too small to offer a reasonably full life for anyone of a creative or academic bent.

Our smallness and exclusivity stifles true creative talent; second rate talent is a little rewarded by our wealthy lifestyle solely because Immigration law protects it. Protectionism has a long record of failure.

Because we never considered the sustainability of our breakneck development, it has outrun us. What we must do is figure out how to catch up with it. If we don't, we will find ourselves in increasing difficulty.

The severe social problems that beset the island today will only get worse because the people at the root of the problem have nowhere to turn. They are ill-equipped for our present business climate and we seem to be making little or no effort to better equip the next generation either.

How do we get out of this rut? We have to look with unblinkered eyes at how we found ourselves in it in the first place. Our complacency, the notion that a lucrative tourist trade was our God-given right, one at which we really didn?t have to exert ourselves much, if at all, is the first of our problems.

The Bermuda Industrial Union decided that it was owed a much larger share of the proceeds of tourism and in 1981 struck to obtain it. Then Premier David Gibbons, with his cold, acquisitive eye on the ever more lucrative exempt company business, was unwilling to take the necessary hard line stance to persuade the BIU to a more reasonable position.

Between the one manifestation of greed and the other the rapid demise of tourism was sealed.

The BIU, though more able to learn from experience than Government, still retains some of its sense of entitlement. This can be seen again and again as it gripes, moans and complains and occasionally strikes in an effort to get others to see things its own way. Most recently a headline read: "Union fumes over outsourcing." It wasn't made clear exactly what the fuming was about, but it sounded like the same old protectionist gripe.

The Union, however, has a very real point. Its members, like most of us, are battered by the high and growing cost of living and are in no position to benefit from the core of the new economy.

may indeed once have been "another world" where we could impose our relaxed way of life on a tourist-driven economy and possibly benefit and at least not suffer from it. It is no longer. The old, gentle ways have been submerged in the great sea of global commerce. This laid-back, casual attitude to work has a long history in Bermuda, not only in the BIU, but from top to bottom. It must now change. We have plunged into the world of global commerce too fast and with too little forethought. We are in it well over our head. We will have to learn to swim in it or we will drown.

We have a chicken-and-egg problem. The decline in public education, discipline, public morality, and work ethic has gone on for at least two generations. This has resulted in uneducated, unmotivated, undisciplined youth, both white and black, both male and female who are now themselves perpetuating the problem.

Teenage girls are easily talked into having babies "for" their boyfriend . They are unable to support these babies with the result that the children are neither raised by responsible adults nor provided with a stable home life. They come up by accident.

Unmarried mothers think Government owes them a house and a living purely because they have fallen into the trap of thoughtless, irresponsible childbirth. The fathers, if the mothers even know who they are, are already proven to be irresponsible. This irresponsible fatherhood does nothing to improve the situation. It is a situation they probably grew up in themselves. Bermuda has failed them.

So tightly wrapped is this vicious cycle of irresponsibility inherent in the modern lifestyle of Bermuda's ill-prepared youth that we will probably have to tackle it on two different fronts. The first is the education system, long the victim of self-serving mismanagement on the part of "educationists" in the Ministry of Education who are full of inadequately tested theories.

Their first effort of these educational theorists in the civil service is to make themselves look less culpable for the growing failure of the majority of their students. This is a problem not unique to Bermuda. Like much else that has weakened our national spine it is an imported problem.

Our economically marginalised youth cannot earn the wherewithal to pay our exorbitant prices, let alone our astronomical rents. Ever to own their own home seems beyond possibility. It is hardly surprising that they are becoming more and more disaffected. Much of this is brought about by the unwillingness of Government to grasp the nettle.

Government itself is far too expensive for the people to afford. It could easily be reduced. The Ministry of Tourism could be farmed out entirely to professionals at considerable savings, including the cost of its Minister. Vast sums could be saved in capital outlays by a small increase in maintenance of existing facilities.

If the jargon of the Ministry of Health & Family Services, quoted below, is anything to go by, it is dangerously overweight and should go on a strict diet. Customs duties are a pervasive evil that raise the cost of everything disproportionately to the revenue raised. They could be replaced by a simple sales tax. The huge commercial cost burden of Customs Classifications should be abandoned altogether.

The Westgate Correctional Facility seems to be an expensive school in which we train our young criminals in their chosen trade and provide them with drugs and an easy life in the interim. The Planning Department of the Ministry of the Environment is so slow and inept that it is widely believed that bribery is the only oil that moves it at all.

The same is widely believed of the immigration Department. Streamlining and cost efficiency should be a priority. The Cabinet itself, however, is probably the worst example of useless Government extravagance. Probably 90 per cent of its travel costs could usefully be eliminated. Its oversized cars are a public affront. The Ministry of Education constitutes the major part of the excessive cost of public education and seems to be a major part of the reason for its declining efficiency.

one asks what the purpose of education is any more. Generations ago education was intended to train the young mind to think clearly and to help parents to instil a sense of discipline in the young. Today education seems to have become a tool with which to indoctrinate the young in what they should think and to teach them how to do something specific.

The inevitable result of this misconception, of course, is that if what the youth is taught to do is no longer available, there is nothing else they can do except sit on walls and join a gang and deal drugs. They are taught to think what their teachers believe is the revealed political truth of the day.

If this revealed political truth is supplanted by another one, as is so often the case, the student is left, rather like the unfortunate Alvin Williams, believing in false gods long since discredited and totally out of tune with present reality. In the interim the goal of training the mind in clear thought gets entirely overlooked.

In days now long gone one of the processes of teaching clarity of thought was to teach what are now considered "irrelevant" subjects. The relevance of Latin or Greek, algebra or calculus is, of course, marginal. What it does, however, is to train the mind to think with clarity about any problem subsequently encountered in life.

This is not unlike irrelevant exercise in the case of the athlete. It doesn't apply directly to playing a good game of tennis or achieving an extra few inches of pole-vaulting height for example, but is essential to the general health and strength of the tennis player or pole-vaulter.

The test of this eminently desirable clarity of thought was the essay question, now almost entirely supplanted in the educational system by a hit-or-miss multiple-choice test. What the old system demonstrated was the ability of the examinee to think clearly and to convey his or her thinking to others with the same clarity.

The dismal failure of any other system of education devised by modern educational theorists is more than adequately demonstrated by the catch phrases so often heard on the lips of uneducated youth: "You know what I mean?" and "You know what I'm saying?"

The need for the question is obvious because the answer to these questions is invariably: "No, I don?t." The unfortunate youth clearly is unable to think with any clarity and unable to express whatever muddled thought his flabby, unexercised mind may have managed. Worse still, the catch phrase means he knows quite well that he is incapable of conveying his muddled thoughts.

The Minister of Health and Family Services recently propounded an "update" on the "National Strategy to Counter Youthful Offending". The objectives of the programme were quoted as:

To review the present responses to offending and re-offending by young people.

To establish a delivery mechanism to co-ordinate the prevention of and response to offending and re-offending.

To develop consistent and comprehensive data and information about youthful offending to support effective intervention policies and practices.

To proactively create a sense of well-being and resilience through systematic interventions for youth.

To create appropriate and proportionate response when offending and other behaviours first come to the attention of the police, schools, social or community agencies, with diversion as a key.

To develop a team of professionals that will assist and support our youth to comprehensively and collaboratively address issues.

After reading and re-reading this gobbledegook jargon it seemed to mean, if anything at all, that the Ministry didn?t have a clue about the problem.

Moreover, it had no method of finding out about the problem, but wanted to figure out a feel-good approach to it, and was prepared to pay a new batch of civil servants to wallow around in the confusion a bit longer. This was clearly in the hope that the problem might go away on its own if the public could be made to believe something was being done about it.

What it most clearly demonstrated was an absolute failure of clear thinking in the Ministry and an equally total failure to convey those muddled thoughts with anything approaching clarity. "You know what I'm saying?" might have been tacked on at the end. The answer, as usual, would be: "No."

This is as perfect example of the tragic mess into which our failed educational system has plunged us as could be hoped for.

The Ministry doesn?t understand the problem, has no idea what to do about it, but is desperate to have the public believe it is doing something "pro-active" a favourite Government euphemism for verbose inactivity.

The best activity for Government to pursue in tackling the absurd cost and miserable failure of the Ministry of Education would be to abolish it altogether and pay to have its students educated in the private sector where the education is demonstrably better and the cost demonstrably less.

The financial saving alone would be enormous. Among others we would do away with yet another Minister and another oversized GP car.

Whatever we do must be done with dispatch. What we are doing now has been a conclusively proven failure. We are already failing the third or fourth generation of our youth and haven't had the sense or even the interest to see or care that we are failing.

The same old spineless, feel-good ideas are clearly bankrupt and must be jettisoned completely.

The bleeding heart notion that any criminal act is blameable not on the perpetrator but on the society that spawned him is no more or less true now than it ever was. Our problem is that the notion, right or wrong, is failing society. It is failing abjectly.

If we are to sustain the development we have already achieved our youth must be taught to think clearly and to be able to express what they think with clarity.

This can only be done with discipline. It is time to stop teaching them what to think in favour of teaching them how to think.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste and our public education system is presently wasting the minds of our youth in a way that is demonstrably destroying the fabric of society in Bermuda. Radical change is essential.

Without it we will be throwing the development we already have out the window.

We could do a lot worse than to look at the educational regimes of the Far East for a model. Their schools seem to manage to produce skilled minds, ambitious youth, disciplined people and national work ethics that leave the modern west floundering in the dust.

If we are to flourish in the global economy of international business it is the peoples of the Far East against whom we will have to compete. At present we are completely unprepared to do so.