Creating the Capable Body: Discourses about Ability and Effort in Primary and Secondary School Studies

The ideas above are a rather bold expression of a constellation of ideas about ability and effort that I hear every day. Glimpses of these ideas appear in routine conversations amongst educators and students around the world. The basic tenet of such a discourse1 appears to be that an individual’s ability and effort are inversely related in producing personal achievements, within certain limits. There may be a number of contradictory discourses about ability, effort and intelligence. These ideas have interesting contradictions with concepts such as development and human potential. In this chapter I consider my encounters with these contradictions in the sphere of the primary school and in the world of a secondary school.