Excellence: The Emperor's New Clothes

Abstract

I AM FED up with excellence. It's everywhere and nowhere. Googling the word produced more than 100 million hits. Even incorrect spellings yield hundreds of thousands. Claims of excellence surround us. It can be bought; it can be sold. We boast of it in our schools, workplaces, and churches. We attach it to catch phrases promoting our hospitals, middle school athletic programs, and mass-produced restaurant food. Parents despair if they're unable to secure places for their 4-year-olds at preschools steeped in the stuff. Pregnant women search for birthing centers of excellence, equipped with the latest technology. If you break your arm, you might have it set by an orthopedic surgeon with an excellent rating from an excellent medical school who now works in a hospital with a long-standing tradition of excellence. I became interested in the idea of excellence while collaborating on drafting a philosophy of education statement for a college. During the normal give-and-take of this type of collective effort, a well-intentioned colleague piped up, Make sure we throw the word 'excellence' in there somewhere. Why excellence? It didn't change the substance of our statement. When I asked what we meant by excellence, no one seemed to know. It was just the sort of thing that colleges say. Later, I began noticing how hard it is to locate a college or university that does not claim excellence in practice and tradition. (Admissions offices are notorious offenders.) Could our preoccupation with excellence derive from insecurity about our own inadequacies? Shouldn't excellence be its own testimony? Why all the self-promotion? Does talking about excellence really produce excellence? In our enchantment with excellence, we look down on mediocrity, and people need a little mediocrity in their lives. When we pursue only those things we're good at--or have the potential to be good at--we miss out on a host of enriching experiences that teach us humility and integrate us into a community. Let's face it: most of us have plenty of mediocrity in our lives, but those fumbling efforts are an important part of being human. Our society pushes us to excise the mediocre from our lives so that we can get on with the business of cultivating excellence. It's as though personal and organizational efforts were scored on a two-pole continuum with no middle ground: there's excellence, and there's (gasp!) mediocrity. Sometimes we avoid trying things that we might not be able to do really well for fear that our efforts might be, well, average. My wife, a high school guidance counselor, sees bright students choosing easier courses over more challenging ones out of fear that the latter might tarnish their grade-point averages, thereby diminishing their chances of getting into so-called excellent colleges. To qualify as excellent, their grade-point averages must be greater than 4.0. grade-point average, in keeping with our frenzied pursuit of quantification, summarily transforms character, effort, and native ability into an easily decipherable number that can be rounded to two decimal places. What power that number has to distort any educational institution's promotion of meaningful ends. same students who obsess about their excellent grade-point averages select colleges based on reputations for excellence, sometimes irrespective of the suitability of fit and with little real understanding about what counts for excellence. Chasing down excellence sometimes limits our lives. Is this what we really want? Is the excellence for which we clamor really all that helpful? I have my doubts. Excellence and its single-minded pursuit have a dark side that emerges as we go after our individualistic dreams. push to stand out starts increasingly early in life. As I was eating an excellent bowl of oatmeal one morning, Michele Orecklin's article The Purpose-Driven Summer Camp caught my eye. summary reads, Toasting marshmallows is for slackers. …