Excellence

In my KOA newsletter last week, I wrote a little bit about excellence. My follow-up comments this week are getting some positive attention from the Rochester parents who read my email. That's good, because I need to be concerned about not coming on too strong, or seeming like I'm constantly complaining, or making regular people who just dump their kids in public school without a second thought to their education feel like I'm jabbing them (even though I am, implicitly). Here's what I wrote in today's e-newsletter:

After last week's email, which contained some of my thoughts about excellence, I received several comments to the effect that perhaps one problem is that we've actually been putting too much stress on kids, pushing them to compete and achieve and bulk up their portfolios for the all-important college admissions process. This gave me an excellent (ha!) opportunity to make clear a distinction which I have been thinking about for 20 years: Who gets to decide what "excellence" is? I, too, was one of "those kids"--the stressed-out, depressed, high achievers to whom getting A's and getting into a good college meant everything. Now, don't get me wrong, obsessive achievement at school beats failure any day of the week. But my problem was that all I was left with were the A's--not much knowledge or character, and certainly no good skills at thinking. Nowadays, of course, no one cares where I went to college. Why should they? People care that I do my job well: that I can write, and think, and know what the heck I'm talking about when I put fingers to keyboard. For my kids, my goal is to encourage real, objective excellence, so that they become bright, engaged, and culturally literate human beings--excellent, that is, at living life, not necessarily at living up to some organization's standard of academic achievement. I expect that if David and I can succeed at this, our girls' college-and-career-path issues will sort out themselves.