Young people and potential – over-used, clichéd, patronising, misleading and down-right ill-informed
Just a thought, one I've held for a long time though but never articulated it.....as some of you if not many of you will know I'm a youth worker by trade and so many times over the years I have observed so many youth work organisations and practitioners talk about helping young reach/achieve/realise their potential.
This is a grand aspiration of course and one to be admired in many ways because of the wishes and desires behind it but how does any organisation or worker actually know what someone's potential is? How do they know they know when they've realised it? What happens when they do? Do they be there when the young person is on the way down the other side of potential?
We all have ideas of what potential is, as if it were some kind of pinnacle or end of journey. But in reality we don't know, we can't really know because we would have to know the future and thus be able to say to that person, well this is gonna be your high point and this is what you must do to get there and if you deviate from this I will step in but how do we know when to step in if we can't know the future?
I think potential and the context we use it in is one of the most over-used, clichéd, patronising, misleading and down-right ill-informed words we can use. We use it regularly and deliberately, also randomly, as if we know what it is, as if we can tell. Like the coach on the side of a football pitch who sees a good young footballer and thinks, he or she has got potential? Potential for what? Would it not be truer to say I see a good young footballer and with support he or she could achieve much more. How do we know what that potential is for that young person? How do we know what potential is for a young person we work with in the youth club or elsewhere?
By saying we help young people reach/achieve/realise their potential we are creating and perpetrating myths about ourselves, our work and our organisations and I also say this as someone who has used the word many times before only out of respect for or the self-perpetuating idea that we do this because up until a few years ago I never thought about it. It’s so common in youth work, it’s just there and not a word to consider, reflect upon or even critique.
I see a young person, I hear them talk, I see them act, I see them behave in a certain way (and so on) and I think he or she has potential, potential for what? Actually I don't really know....perhaps to be a good person, parent, worker, citizen, etc, but does that mean they even reach their potential?
It's of course ok to say a young person has potential, we can all agree with the generic notion of what potential is because we all think we can spot it and thus we are reaffirming our capacity rather than really knowing the true potential of anyone which of course is made up of ability, temperament, belief, confidence and so on.
What we are really saying (I think) is, I believe this person can 'go places', 'make something of him/herself' because I truly don't know if that will be the case (I can only support them to make healthy informed decisions) but hope that they can perhaps even just dream and I can support them in their efforts to realise their dreams which does not equate to reaching their potential because potential of course is not physical, it’s not visible, but is I argue, something similar to, our own set of expectations based on our experience which informs our perceptions and is our articulated in our judgement which is ultimately about reaffirming our set of beliefs which makes us feel we are good, we are helpful and we ourselves have a talent for spotting someone with talent.
So when we talk about helping young people reach/achieve/realise their potential I believe this statement says more about us and our desire to have identity and to (somehow) make us feel we are good and we are doing good stuff than actually helping young people reach a point which we can't possibly know.
So the next time you use the word potential and young people....please don’t.
