Should school students be encouraged to do their best?

Abstract

The paper picks up from the widespread use by politicians and some educational theorists of maximising (including optimising) notions about those being educated such as ‘reach their full potential’ or ‘make the best of themselves’ or ‘develop their talents to the full’. The paper discusses then puts some of these ideas on one side to focus on the injunction that school students should be encouraged to do their best. It puts forward a number of objections to this injunction as well as answers to possible counter-arguments. Its final two main sections discuss links with maximising ideas in moral theory, especially utilitarianism; and Michael Slote’s case for satisficing rather than maximising as a guide to personal flourishing.

Keywords:

• School
• maximising
• well-being
• satisficing

Acknowledgements

John White greatly indebted to Patricia White for all the help she has given me in getting this paper together.

Notes

1. https://ioelondonblog.wordpress.com/2017/10/16/helping-the-education-secretary-reach-her-full-potential/

2. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/justine-greening-we-can-challenge-the-impossible

3. See Rose Luckin ‘Collaborative problem-solving and why it matters for learning’ IOE London Blog, November 21 2017 https://ioelondonblog.wordpress.com/2017/11/21/collaborative-problem-solving-and-why-it-matters-for-learning/#more-8432

4. I have already referred to the motif in radical Protestantism that we should work unremittingly in this life as a sign of our worthiness for our salvation in the hope of our beatitude in life after death. And if we trace utilitarian ethics back from the Mills and beyond Bentham, we reach the Church of England minister John Gay, who argues from the infinite happiness of God to the conclusions that ‘he could have no other design in creating mankind than their happiness’ and that ‘I am to do whatever lies in my power towards promoting the happiness of mankind.’ (Gay [1731] 1969, 864–865). It would be good, as I have said, to take this issue further in another place.

5. The concept of satisficing shares something with the notion of sufficientarianism in political philosophy. This is a counter-position to an egalitarianism that goes beyond equality of respect and advocates equality of outcome in goods like income, power and influence, quality of work. For the sufficientarian, what is important is that everyone has enough of the goods required for a flourishing life, not that they have the same amount. The latter is, after all, compatible with everyone having a starvation income, wretched housing, a twelve-hour working day. Among other lines of thought that this paper suggests may be worth taking further is the hypothesis that the similarity between satisficing and sufficientarianism is more than coincidental. Each is contrasted with an ideal of greater perfection, optimising in the one case, equality of outcome in the other. Might a historical study of the origins of these two ideals be illuminating?