If there were a hippocratic oath for teachers, it would probably be something a little like this:

But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. (Matthew 18:6)

Shall offend here translates skandalizo, from skandalon: the stumbling-block. To offend is to obstruct, to stand in the way, to cause to stumble.

A teacher’s task is to help children along the way, to enable them - in one form of contemporary parlance - to realize their potential. A teacher might fail to help a child and still remain a teacher (albeit perhaps a poor one); but a teacher who actively impeded a child’s development, who caused that child to stumble, would be violating a basic professional commitment.

To realize one’s potential is to make actual something that is proper to oneself, and yet latent; something for which no evidence may yet exist, but which can be held on to like a hope or a secret. The broad outlines of a theory of selfhood are implied in the phrase, and it is a theory that can be distinguished from other theories which take a different view of what a self is and how it changes and develops over time.

A behaviourist for example would presumably reject the notion that changes in a person’s behaviours and competencies were the result of a secret, latent reserve of ability making itself manifest: the only possible explanation for such changes in a behaviourist universe would be that that person’s “self” had been to some degree remoulded by external forces. If I impart some piece of information to you, and you remember it and are able to recall it at relevant moments, then your increase in knowledge is directly attributable to that transfer of information, along with whatever reinforcement was necessary to make it “stick” and to configure the mechanisms responsible for the recall of information so that they would bring that particular fact to mind when the occasion required it. Potential schmotential.

When somebody says that they believe in education as a means of “realizing the potential” of pupils, one of the things they are quite specifically saying is that they are not a behaviourist. (Behaviorism is in this sense a useful anathema in the construction of alternative theories, a kind of domesticated bugbear. No account of a theory of education would be complete without a disparaging glance at the behaviourist in the corner). They are asserting the existence of some hidden wellspring of selfhood, methodologically neglected by behaviourism, that must be being tapped in order for real education (as opposed to, say, operant conditioning) to be taking place.

Within the context of this broad class or family of theories, the “hippocratic oath” described above takes on some additional dimensions. If it is imperative for a teacher not to obstruct the development of a child, then one thing that is quite definitely out of bounds is the imposition of external limits on the pupil’s internal process of educational development. (For “external” one might substitute “artificial”, and for “internal”, “natural” or “organic”). There is no sense in which the setting of an external limit might help with development rather than hinder it, for instance by providing a realistic target for achievement and helping to focus a pupil’s efforts on feasible accomplishments. Because unrealized potential is hidden and interior, it is simply not for anybody else to say what a “realistic” target might be. Who knows what you can do if you only try?

There is a distinction that needs to be made here between temporary and final goals. Even given the admonition against the imposition of external limits to a pupil’s internal development, it is possible to recognise the pedagogical utility of proceeding via a series of small, demarcated steps. What is prohibited is not the periodic assessment of a pupil’s current needs, and the setting of immediate goals for improvement based on that assessment, but the determination of a final stopping point for that process. In particular, the making of categorical statements about a pupil’s future prospects is abominated: no-one is to be told, at age eleven say, that the path to a university education is henceforth closed to them.

What I am trying to indicate here is the strangeness of a recent shift in attitudes, presumably coinciding with the widespread introduction of comprehensive education, to the point where a teacher’s primary commitment to help and not hinder the educational development of his or her pupils is felt to translate directly and uncontroversially into a repudiation of particular organisational practices. Among those practices are some, notably selection by “academic ability” and the streaming and setting of pupils within the school, that were commonplace and perhaps similarly - if not uniformly - uncontroversial a generation or so beforehand.

It may be that we have simply come to realize something that should have been obvious all along: that certain practices are essentially wrong and misguided, and can only be felt to be sound if one is confused or uninformed about basic issues. But that process of realisation, if that is what it was, happens to have coincided with a shift in vocabulary, a change of theories, that deserves scrutiny.

I will carry on with this a later installment, tracking the leap from refusing to impose external limits upon individual potential to declaring, as a matter of fact, that each individual has unlimited potential, and requiring that this fact be “recognised” as a matter of right. I will suggest that the adoption of this “working hypothesis” is both pragmatically useful and ideologically problematic, specifically at the point where it turns into mysticism and begins to adopt a defensive, hostile stance towards the scientific and materialist (by which I do not mean behaviourist) understanding of education.