In this deep dive essay, you will read my critique of the ego-bound culture we have regarding the pursuit of excellence. I explore how Plato’s, Aristotle’s and Marcus Aurelius’ ideas about the virtues offer a different way of thinking about excellence and the good life. I also reference Julie Lythcott-Haims and her ideas about the harm seeing our children as bonsai trees has on the development of their independence, and Thomas Curran whose work shows the damage ideas about perfection are having on young people.
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Beware the trap
Excellence is an idea enshrined in the NZ education system. Schools proudly commit to the pursuit of it. Our qualifications framework, NCEA, has Excellence as its highest level of achievement.
It’s resulted in an unhealthy dynamic that plays out in secondary school in NZ: for any kid who cares about being successful at school, the only grade worth anything is Excellence. Forget about passing or achieving with Merit. The only game in town, the only way to know you’re on track and living up to expectations, is to get Excellence.
But what does it mean? Is it the same as perfection, or ambition, or success?
And what is the point of all this excellence, exactly? To lift above? To exist in harmony? To save oneself? To become heroic? To attain perfection?
If a kid gets all this excellence, what do we think it locks in for them?
I don’t want to be seen as someone who is anti-success. This is far from the truth: there is so much beauty in something done well. Think of Richard Hadlee at the top of his game, all fluidity and rhythm, borne of having total mastery of the craft of fast bowling. There is real excellence in that.
But this is also the trap of excellence, isn’t it? The places our mind goes when that word is put out there are often to the elite, those people who are masters and high achievers in their field. Those who are excellent at what they do.
We want this for our kids.
We dream of them realising their potential and being excellent.
We push them in the pursuit of it, emphasising commitment and hard work.
Who’s life is it?
It’s a question that’s really worth asking because so much of what stems from this idea of excellence is justification for a smothering involvement in the growth of our kids.
I love the metaphor Julie Lythcott-Haims1 uses to describe this. She argues that we have come to see our kids as bonsai trees, objects to be pruned and shaped according to our vision of excellence; their process of ‘becoming’ controlled and determined not by them but by us.
I bet, when you think about your own upbringing, that feels repulsive to you.2
It does to me. It’s damaging too. Lythcott-Haims argues it undermines the development of agency and self-efficacy - fundamental human needs that allow us to connect fully with others instead of being dependent on them.
“it's my job to provide a nourishing environment, to strengthen them through chores and to love them so they can love others and receive love and the college, the major, the career, that's up to them. My job is not to make them become what I would have them become, but to support them in becoming their glorious selves.” - Julie Lythcott-Haims
Hear the wisdom in that?
I have vivid memories of going through goal setting with students and their parents, and the #1 goal being achieving NCEA with Excellence. It was generally a futile exercise trying to talk them out of it.
Every year I would hear parents proudly say their child was driven to achieve Excellence. Lots of these parents did what they could to support that pursuit, because who wouldn’t? Get Excellence = get an excellent life. How perfect is that!
But our kids are growing up with the idea that everything needs to be perfect, including them, or life won’t work out. They are dependent on other people to create the perfect conditions so that their pursuit of excellence is smooth and its attainment as close to assured as permitted.
And it creates a real fragility in these young people.3 I was always nervous when handing back assessments because it was inevitable that there would be tears for those who didn’t get Excellence. And then emails from parents, asking why I hadn’t xyz …
What are we doing?
Somehow, we’ve created a culture where the pursuit of excellence stifles the burgeoning individual and makes them highly dependent on other ‘more knowing’ others, yet is so tightly bound with the ego that it isolates people from each other thanks to the total focus on individual accomplishment.
“No wonder young people report a strong need to strive, perform and achieve at the center of modern life. They've been conditioned to define themselves in the strict and narrow terms of grades, percentiles and lead tables.” - Thomas Curran
Another way to think about excellence
There is more than one way to think about excellence though. For instance, Plato positioned it within ideas about how to live a good life and tied it to the four virtues: wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice. I like this. It allows us to wonder what excellence might look like if its pursuit was guided by those virtues.
Wisdom and excellence
Anakin Skywalker excelled in the Jedi arts but didn’t have the wisdom to use them justly.
There’s a difference between knowing stuff and wisdom. And yet, when we think about wisdom it’s often associated with knowledge. Assumptions are made, such as: knowing stuff makes you wise, ergo we need to ensure kids know as much as possible, and the more ‘excellent’ their knowledge is determined to be (by tests and assessments) the better; we can then assume wisdom will follow. This is false.
Wisdom is gained through experience. We must do things, and it is in the doing that we find what works, is true, and is worthy. Wisdom develops through being active in the world, not passive, for it is only in being active that we get instant feedback by feeling the consequences of our actions. It gives us skin in the game.4
Yoda was full of wisdom, and it came from marrying action with reflection and thought. He knew that in order to move swiftly and justly he needed to slow down and contemplate the right course of action.
Wisdom is not only knowing what, it’s also knowing when, knowing why, and knowing whether.
No one else can develop that for us.
Temperance and excellence
Martin Guptil has played some spectacular innings, bashing the ball to all parts of the ground, but it’s Kane Williamson with his quiet, steady, consistent, and relentless accumulation of runs who represents excellence in batting.
There’s nothing more spectacular than the extravagant act, the one that’s all-guns-blazing.
Think of the player who opts for the risky move, or the student who pulls an all-nighter to complete an assignment. When it comes off, we are impressed.
But then, so often it doesn’t.
“We are what we repeatedly do, therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit.” - Artistotle
Temperance leads to excellence because it helps us understand that it’s the repeated, consistent willingness to act that helps someone make the most of what they have. It helps us understand that we don’t achieve excellence by betting the house on one extravagant move but by being humble enough to do the hard, unseen work. And yet, we have an assessment system that operates in a way that preferences the extravagant, one-off performance.
No one else can do the work for us; only we can know in our hearts if we have done enough.
Courage and excellence
Are you brave enough to do what’s right?
“Excellence is not a gift, but a skill that takes practice. We do not act rightly because we are excellent, in fact we achieve excellence by acting rightly.” - Plato
How much in life is hamstrung because of people waiting for the perfect plan before they do something? Instead of leading to courage, this tends to act as a way to defer being courageous.
And if we think that it’s those who are deemed excellent who are brave, all we are doing is entrenching elitism and privilege.
Courage comes when people have a bias towards action - to actually do the right thing when the outcome is not certain, whoever they are. In my experience, this is something that people develop, not something they’re born with. So it’s a real shame that so much of a kid’s school experience, especially when they get into secondary, consists of following the paths mapped out for them by others: eg, the tasks and exemplars we show them that describe how to get to Excellence.
No one else can be courageous for us; we have to develop this confidence in ourselves.
Justice and excellence
All the virtues hinge on this, don’t they?
It’s not courageous if I put myself in danger in order to protect someone who has acted unjustly (say, a conman). There is no wisdom in reflecting on how I can further the cause of something that is unjust (for instance, racism).
But how does one know what’s just?
I think it has something to do with the place of ourselves within the wider world. In essence, there must be fairness (any 8 year old will tell you this, loudly). If I privilege myself over others, as the conman does on an individual level and the racist does on a group level, then there is no fairness. For my actions to be just, I need to consider the intersection of my needs with that of another’s and act to harmonise them as much as possible.
“If I remember, then, that I am a part of such a whole, I shall be well contented with all that comes to pass; and in so far as I am bound by a tie of kinship to other parts of the same nature as myself I shall never act against the common interest” - Marcus Aurelius
There are duties we have to others that we cannot ignore just by asserting our individual primacy.
And so, justice is a relational concept. Which is another way of saying all you need is love, as Lythcott-Haims and others have.
No one else can love for us; we are the ones who have to find how we fit in the world and the duties we are obliged to fulfil as a result.
What do you think?
Are the virtues a way out of the excellence trap?
What opportunities do they open up for schools?
Is this just a load of idealist rubbish?
You can listen to her in depth in this excellent :) podcast.
We can see this played out in real-time in the current vaccination drive. So many adults are strongly asserting the primacy of their right to choose and individual sovereignty right now.
If you want to read more about this, I recommend this book by Lucy Clark as essential reading.