Of Human Potential

“Human potential” turned out to be somewhat of an inkblot test. Philosopher Israel Scheffler probes the meaning of the term in a thoughtful book called Of Human Potential. Anthropologist Robert LeVine and sociologist Merry White looked at human potential as it is conceptualized and realized across a variety of cultures and cultural settings; their conceptualization and conclusions are reported in Human Conditions: The Cultural Basis of Educational Development. Human potential becomes the terrain of what biologists and geneticists can conjure up—and what the rest of the population will allow or even encourage. Even though the Project on Human Potential was carried out in a school of education, none of the principals had been trained in that area—the people were drawn from the social sciences and the humanities. While a scholarly work necessarily focuses on those findings that can be generalized, human potential as the people know it is realized in some way in each and every person.