I walked past a local school last week to be assaulted by its eye-catching entrance signage. Slashed across the colourful billboard was a clarion, diagonally offset, phrase, “Helping every learner achieve their potential”.
“Be the best you can be”… “Aspiring to excellence”… You’ve seen these phrases, you can hardly miss them when you visit school websites.
I asked Gemini AI how many school taglines include the words fulfilling or achieving ‘potential’ and my little electronic twin replied, in so many words, “I’ll get back to you.”
She estimated it would take several hours to work this out and told me to wait – honestly, I was slightly reassured that this is still an available option in the age of responding before you finish asking your question. I have visions of a supercomputer somewhere in California making the huffing noises my overworked laptop makes and quietly starting to make smoke.
It’s a harmless phrase, right? Fulfilling your potential. We should want that for every child, shouldn’t we? And it sounds encouraging, as if we can actually get your kid there.
I’ve come to think that this phrase is wrong on just about every level.
Where do I start? So: ‘potential’. What is that? Potential to make money? Potential to accumulate certificates from academia? Potential to abide by the solemn rule of law? Potential to become champion hot dog eater of Hawaii? Potential to survive a climate disaster? Take your pick, the billboards don’t stipulate.
I wasn’t born with a ‘potential quotient’ any more than you were, or any more than my Auntie Mildred’s pet cockapoo. We can’t aspire to offer an education that realises or fulfils any child’s ‘potential’ without deciding for that child what their potential should be. That’s what our education paradigm does to kids – it tells them how they should turn out, how to reach that destination and how to behave along the journey in the containers that we provide called schools.
If they don’t fulfil the potential that we identify for them, we have a variety of ways to let them know how they’ve failed and, on a normal distribution curve, the majority of them do just that.
Formal education has always existed for the purpose of processing humans to be used in legislative or commercial systems which bring benefit to the autocrat, the plutocrat or the state. In this context, ‘potential’ is very easy to define…reaching your potential means achieving the purpose of the education that is provided to you. May it be a place in the Civil Service in China during the Song dynasty or a seat at an Ivy League University, education systems have always carried implicit definitions of fulfilled potential. That’s why we give grades, isn’t it, to sort out the successful game players from the also-rans?
Today, if a child leaves school without grades, we will say that they have failed to reach their potential. They will, thereafter, be shunned by all and sundry – ‘must have grade C/5 in Maths and English to apply…’ ; we decide the purpose, we define the potential, we hand out the recognition, we stigmatise the failure.
I drew some quite sharp criticism recently for suggesting that one of the particularly damaging axioms, visible on a multitude of well intentioned professional media posts and articles, is the idea that we should:
Put the learner in the centre
You do see this everywhere, don’t you? Arguing with it is right up there with chasing your grandmother round the house with a broom. You shouldn’t do it.
But what is – what has been – the unintended consequence of this thinking? It came from a good place: that we need to engineer learning experiences for young people that afford them agency and teach them critical competencies beyond merely acquiring content knowledge.
But we didn’t change the music to the dance. If I’m invited to be agentic but still clearly given to understand that I’d better end up at point X or I’ll become an unemployable pariah, what help has that been to me?
And let’s go a step further. Why should the child be in the centre? This is an extrapolation from humanistic psychology that sees ultimate fulfilment as being self actualisation. Putting the child in the centre may be well-intentioned, but it also runs the risk of creating a narrative of entitlement and self-absorption. It can be a recipe for greed and for fragility.
If our education systems (including the 250 million children who won’t ever receive a formal education) were fit for purpose, we wouldn’t be in the really horrific state we’re in. We wouldn’t. We wouldn’t have hurricanes lining up like queuing buses, famines, easily eradicable diseases still killing millions, wars, genocide, racism; but solving these problems has never been the purpose of formal education.
Fulfilling potential in our education systems has always been about optimising the capacity for personal gain whilst serving the controlling interests of plutocracy, autocracy or oligarchy.
What if you started from a different place?
Putting society in the centre
What if our curricula were organised, structured and accredited to develop learners who were taught that their potential was to become a citizen who served the communities to which they belonged. What if we educated children to learn that their potential is not to do well for themselves, but to do good for the people around them; and for the earth that is their one home; and for the sustainable future of all species, of which we are just one.
You might call this teaching stewardship, I suppose. The name doesn’t really matter but the intention, the purpose, of education has to become different. As long as the purpose, implied or explicit, is self actualisation, self aggrandisement and a maintenance of elitism, the only ‘potential’ we are en route to fulfilling for our children is self-obliteration.
We need to change what we teach our children and with it, the associated definitions of success. There are many people and organisations working hard to create this change: if you are an educational leader, don’t wait for someone else to move the dial, don’t keep walking in a circle, be courageous, find those change conversations around you and be a part of the solution. As a leader, you actually do have the potential to make a difference.
