If you were told your life’s potential, would it change how you live? This is one of the questions posed in Apple TV’s series The Big Door Prize (2023), adapted from the MO Walsh book of the same name. The residents of a small town become fascinated by the MORPHO machine that appears mysteriously one night and dispenses small blue cards with the promise of revealing the life potential of the holder. Consequently, the townsfolk embark on a collective odyssey to understand what is meant by “life potential” with sometimes comedic, sometimes tragic, results.
Potential is something that features often in education discourse, probably because education itself could never begin without an assumption that the student has the potential to participate in it.
However, it is not always clear which notion of potential is being invoked in this discourse. Considering, for example, the rhetorical ubiquity of “fulfilling one’s potential”, it could perhaps be said to be a finite void within an individual into which all educational efforts should be funnelled. Such fulfilment may be an admirable goal, but it is less clear what happens when maximum potential is reached – humanistic psychologists such as Maslow may term this rare achievement self-actualisation. Potential itself, though if we take the idea at its root, can only ever be a suggestion of possibility since an overt expression of potential becomes an action; therefore, the potential becomes lost in its own affirmation, leading to a logical absurdity that those who have fulfilled their potential also have none. At the opposite end of the continuum, most teachers would likely balk at any mention of a student with “no potential” – almost as unicorn-like as those whose potential has been entirely fulfilled.
In this seminar, I will embrace this confusion, and follow how the characters’ notions of potential change in The Big Door Prize, from its beginning as a fixed quality held within an individual to its ending as an “arrow” - an ambiguous conceptualisation that I will examine in more detail. I will frame this journey using Israel Scheffler’s (1985) comprehensive conceptualisation “Of Human Potential”.
Nicola Robertson has a PhD in Education from the University of Strathclyde where she currently works as a Teaching Fellow in Education Studies. Her research interests include Philosophy of Education, Technology, and Popular Culture. She was a recipient of the Michael and Madonna Marsden international endowment at the US Popular Culture Association annual conference in 2023, where she presented on philosophies of education in Rick and Morty. Most recently, she presented on popular culture and philosophy of education at ECER 2023, and was appointed to the editorial board of the Popular Culture Review. Full profile available: Nicola Robertson | University of Strathclyde