Educational potential, underachievement, and cultural pluralism

The term ‘underachievement’ is widespread in modern educational discourse, invoked most frequently in relation to a perceived failure to reach ‘potential’. In this paper, it is suggested that such terms, though widely used, are highly problematic, masking ideological assumptions which concern socially constructed, culturally sensitive, subjective, and relative matters. In fact, underachievement is most often used to mean low academic attainment and the paper argues that this is already better understood in terms of well-known factors such as prior attainment, socioeconomic disadvantage, and systemic biases. paper also suggests that there is a danger of pathologising the low attainer when in fact it may be the system which is failing the learner. Further, the paper argues that the monologic focus on individual academic attainment as the sole measure of ‘achievement’ fails to take account of alternative cultural values and risks the charge of cultural imperialism. Introduction The issue of educational ‘underachievement’ is one which seems to recur as a crisis every so often in public discourse. Quite apart from these more spectacular eruptions of media or political concern, ‘underachievement’ has, in fact, been described as the ‘predominant discourse’ in education in recent times (Weiner, Arnot, & David, 1997). Whitmore (1980) argues that it was the post-Sputnik self-excoriation that transfixed American society in the late 1950s which first brought the term to prominence. The shock of Soviet technological superiority had a significant impact on education in the USA, most notably through Rockefeller Brothers (1958) and Gardner (1961), and through reactive initiatives such as the 1959 Woods Hole Conference from which came the seminal work of Bruner (1960).