Should schools develop children’s full potential?

Borrowed from pop psychology and industry (“industrial potential”), the phrase “developing one’s full potential” is ubiquitous in educational discourse today. During the swearing-in of the ministers, the Prime Minister declared to RDI: the government is committed to doing everything possible to “allow each child to develop his full potential”. Its Minister of Education has since repeated the formula many times. What parent, what teacher, what citizen would dare to criticize this objective? That said, what vision of the role of the school hides behind this commonplace repeated like a mantra?

Every child is born with the same developmental potential and ability to learn. From birth, the child tests his mental structures, his perceptual and motor functions, his language faculties in his environment, through his interactions with others (mainly his family, then his peers, in daycare for example). These various experiences shape their development and ensure that everyone develops in a different way and at different rates in each of the areas of their personality. Children therefore enter school with varied experiences of social interaction.

Instruct and educate

In line with the ideals of equity and social justice of the Quiet Revolution, the school’s mission is to welcome all children and to put in place the best possible conditions to promote the development of each one. To carry out this mission, the school has its own mandate: to educate. As an institution, it must transmit to students a body of fundamental knowledge from the various fields of human experience and knowledge, knowledge that allows them to understand the world, to form an opinion on its major issues. Education then becomes a factor of emancipation. The school must also educate, but differently from the family and other social institutions. educate students, that is to say, to allow them to appropriate civic values ​​which are the basis of the exercise of citizenship for a real democracy. From this point of view, if the school must “allow each child to develop his or her potential”, this ideal must be balanced with more collective aims of education based on responsibility in cultural transmission.

A disorder

One may wonder whether the expression repeated many times by the Minister of Education falls within this vision of the two mandates of the school. Indeed, under its consensual exterior, this insistence on the “full potential of each” introduces an imbalance in the way of apprehending the specificity of the school: it is too centered on the desires of the individual and on his uniqueness, not enough about what makes us alike; it puts too much weight on the shoulders of the individual whose autonomy is overvalued and who must build himself in complete independence of others; it does not insist enough on the interactions that humanize us and on our common responsibility with regard to collective institutions; finally, it devalues ​​the knowledge of the common core (which can be learned in half a day of class, freeing the other for specialized learning: martial arts, dance, music, soccer). This has repercussions on the fate of public schools, which have become a competitive market with the private sector, making parents consumers looking for the program that would perfectly suit the passion of their 12-year-old child.

Moreover, insisting exclusively on the “full potential” of each involves a pernicious drift which consists of focusing all educational efforts solely on the promotion of excellence (we will even soon have a National Institute of Excellence in Education!). Finally, this expression adapts very well to the managerial current of the school system which tampers with its meaning to relate it to an optimization of people and assimilates education to an offer of services. We now develop the student as we develop a resource or a business. Thus, the diploma and the excellence of the academic results are considered as redeemable capital allowing the individual to become more competitive with respect to others in the race for social prestige and wealth.

The choice of words is never innocent. In the spring, we will invite the Minister of Education to debate publicly with the collective Debout pour l’école! the specific mission of public schools, what it means by “developing the full potential of each student” and the measures to be taken to counter the excesses of the school system.