Edges Issue 19: It is never too late to discover your potential

EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 19

October 1999

IT IS NEVER TOO
LATE TO DISCOVER
YOUR POTENTIAL

Paula Watson is head of studies at Campion House College in Isleworth Middlesex.
She recently spoke to Edges Magazine

I’ve been working in Campion House ten years, it is a college for men who want to go on to study priesthood in the Catholic Church but who lack the academic qualifications they need.

I think these men are men who have had problems during their schooling, difficulties sometimes that were not recognized, so they may have felt themselves to be quite unable to do academic study, when in fact that isn’t the case. People underachieve for a variety of reasons in school; some perhaps have had very difficult home circumstances. They have had emotional problems and difficulties that were not always obvious to teachers in schools. This may have simply shown itself as bad behavior. Our students often feel that they were labeled as stupid, and that they have felt themselves to be stupid when they were in the remedial classes or put into small groups for remedial teaching.

One of the problems was that they perhaps were dyslexic and that was not recognized. That has been a case I think, up until quite recently. We have every year, quite a big proportion of men who are dyslexic. People who struggle in school and are dyslexic who don’t know that they are, when it’s not recognized, often lose their self-esteem and their awareness of their gifts and their abilities. This is something that they discover, I think, in an environment where they are accepted and helped. When they’re given a great deal of individual help and supported by the students, they can come to realize that they’re not stupid by any means and often can be very intelligent, but they simply need more help. Students can be helped in a variety of ways. Firstly, there’s the acceptance of the problem, and a willingness to see that alongside their difficulties, they bring many other gifts, which again one can use to build up self-esteem. Also, they need to develop tools and strategies for learning, and there are specialist teachers who will help particularly those with specific learning difficulties and dyslexia. Ways of getting round their problems, tricks almost, can be used for helping them to study, to read what can be quite difficult text but to break it down, to structure it so that it becomes relevant and accessible to them.

I think sometimes people underachieve because they haven’t had a very supportive environment in which to grow up. It may just be that they haven’t had the stimulation, they haven’t been encouraged to read the books around, that the whole cultural element has been missing because perhaps the family has been poor and people have needed to work as soon as possible. Maybe people were encouraged to leave school early because the extra money was important, so students didn’t have time for homework and study. This is an example of the kind of difficulty that people can face.

I think it is true that people can feel they were ignored in the classroom. It may be that they were very shy, as simple as that, and couldn’t voice their ideas or make their mark. It may be that they were extremely disruptive, for whatever reasons, and therefore were the most marginalised in the classroom, perhaps excluded from the classroom, and in various ways from the educational process.

The exciting thing about working at Campion house is to see men who come unsure of themselves often feeling very uncertain, particularly about studies, discover for themselves the pleasure and the satisfaction of study. They may be quite sure about their vocation, which is to serve the church, particularly they hope as priests in the Catholic Church, but the studies they can often feel are an enormous obstacle.

What can happen in the course of one or two years at Campion House is that, first of all through their determination I think, and hopefully the classes that they’re given, people very often discover what it is to read and to read for pleasure. People, through reading, can often develop their ideas and come to reflect upon themselves in a much more helpful way. Somehow often, the literary side of their studies will help them and give them great ambition in terms of their own writing, so that they want to explore further, to get over many of the technical difficulties in writing. What they get from this is a motivation to succeed, I think, to overcome the obstacles involved. So many do this and have found such pleasure in it, and that’s the reward of being involved in this process.

The most important area for success is in the confidence of the person themselves, because once they have a feeling that they can do it as other people can do it, somehow they can then go further themselves. I think it also helps them have sympathy for others who have similar or different difficulties. They respond from the heart to people whom they see struggling. For example, people come here terrified of exams, people who can’t face being tested, probably because they’d been asked to do things that they didn’t feel they could do. Because of this the fear of failure is enormous, but gradually over the year, can come to accept the exam situation without enormous panic. That gives something real for them to take away.

In society today, one sees a kind of false confidence because it’s built on rather superficial and external qualities or possessions, the ability to talk slickly, to impress with clothes or whatever, and underneath this still lies tremendous insecurities. I think the man who comes from the bottom, builds a surer and more real sense of himself, what his worth is, what his value really can be, and what he can develop to help others. That’s impressive because it’s grounded somehow in difficulty, in struggle, in a sense of reality that isn’t about external things. In society values are materialistic and people appreciate or admire the person who gets on quickly, gets to the top however he or she does it. In those kind of areas of society people can be pushed to the wall. The person who is concerned about others, or who doesn’t want to trample on others and so on, perhaps won’t get on as easily.

That’s only part of society, I think there are many people who have seen the damage that this can do, perhaps to their spouses or families who can be really trying to live by alternate values, to live more simply and openly in terms of the people around them. Examples of people’s open hospitality, welcoming people into their homes, living more simply, quite deliberately can be very powerful, and something we would hope that our students, by sharing in the community and sharing each other’s difficulties, living quite a simple life, would develop that appreciation. If people come here without having reflected deeply, perhaps they’ve lived with superficial values and in a very competitive world that takes time to shed, to break down. In order to rediscover the perhaps more real values, they often have to be challenged.

This can be a difficult process, it happens in a variety of ways. Sometimes people need counseling to help them become more self aware, sometimes just the daily web of living in community with others who have very different backgrounds and ideas, is enough. For some students, how they are when they arrive can make us a challenge to them. They’re challenged of course by the whole ethos of the place. We try to be open to the people who come here, we see a variety of visitors, and students meet a variety of people in their pastoral work. All those things help to make them more real and to help them reassess the values that they come with, but it can be a hard test. Sometimes they will need longer than they have with us; they will need to go on perhaps not to seminary but take time to do some pastoral work in order to really meet their brokenness through other people’s brokenness.

I think that is something that we perhaps have to discover, that out of real suffering can come wisdom, an ability to empathise with others, and a deeper understanding of oneself and of other people.