Are there any products, any corporate mission statements, any garden clubs that don’t make the claim to excellence? As a matter of logic, if they were all excellent, none of them could be. (It’s the superlative conundrum.) In any case, the vast majority of these institutions are not excellent. They may be better than the institution down the road that is filing for bankruptcy, but on average, these institutions are…average. I’d like to see that on a business ad: “We’re Average…our toothpaste will not transform your teeth into mint-pearls.” “We’re Average…our camera will not make your life memorable.” “We’re Average…our new car will not transport you to a mountaintop at sunrise.” “Average” ads would catch my attention. I might buy those products for the mere pleasure of hyperbole avoidance.
When I read “excellence” in a sentence, my impression is the writer has given up on thought. I skim…(Yada, yada, yada…is there content in here somewhere?) The claim of “excellence” suggests the writer possesses no information about his subject material. It’s a space filler, like, “ya know?” or “uh”. Do you have no idea how to explain what you’re presenting? Call it excellent—everyone likes excellent.
Excellent means better than anyone or anything else. In rare cases some things are demonstrably excellent. We can measure SAT scores, home runs in a career, or world tennis rankings. Where excellence can be measured, the measurement is specific and the accomplishment is specialized.
Lang Lang is a virtuoso pianist from China. His father decided for him that he should become the number one classical pianist in China. His parents dedicated their lives to the dream of making him a piano superstar. His father quit his job and moved with Lang Lang to Beijing in an attempt to get him into the prestigious Central Conservatory of Music. Lang Lang’s mother remained at her job, far away from her husband and son, in order to support Lang Lang’s training.
Lang Lang’s first teacher, nicknamed “Professor Angry” by Lang Lang, was not impressed with him. She told him he had no talent and that he should give up the piano. When Lang Lang’s father heard this he said, “You shouldn’t live any more — everything is destroyed.” Then he handed Lang Lang a bottle and said, “Take these pills!” Lang Lang ran onto a balcony and his father screamed, “Then jump off and die!”
Lang Lang was a little uncomfortable with this, as you can imagine. For three months he didn’t touch a piano. One day some school friends hectored him until he agreed to play Mozart for them. After playing he was reminded of how much he loved to play. He talked with his father and they arranged for lessons with a different teacher.
The pursuit of excellence demands sacrifice. Lang Lang’s excellence was more important to his father than Lang Lang’s life. This extreme example demonstrates how the pursuit of excellence can become an idol, and it illustrates how destructive idol worship can be. Here’s the big question when it comes to excellence: what do you give up in order to attain it?
Excel comes from the Latin excellere “to rise, surpass, be superior, be eminent”. When excellence is advocated in an educational setting, does it suggest to students that the objective of their education is to outdo other students? What if being a good student involves cooperative performance? Would being excellent subvert meaningful teamwork? Does the philosophy of excellence undermine social cooperation in general? Where would Lennon have been without McCartney? What can a President achieve without a strong cabinet? Can excellence actually lead to weak performance?
And what is an excellent educational institution, anyway? Is it a school that leads students to perform well on standardized tests? Is is a school that sends a high percentage of its students to college? Is it a school that employs only PhDs as its teachers? (Is it a school that refuses to employ PhDs as its teachers?) Is it a school that offers a wide range of academic and career tracks? Is it a school that promotes the careers of athletes? Does the school specialize in art? In music? In Latin? Is it a school that focuses heavily on character development? Is it a school that encourages creativity? That teaches problem solving? That focuses on technology?
Is it a school that has a strong history of sending its students into the Ivy League? And is this a good thing? Has the Ivy League become the educational model of the narrow gene pool? Has its ingrown production of lawyers and businessmen spawned the privileged politico-industrial caste that is choking the American political system? Is this “excellence” steering our county into a ditch?
With few exceptions, the pursuit of excellence is a bad idea. Instead, we should pursue appropriateness or balance or faithfulness or, maybe the best word for it is integrity.
When we hear the word “integrity” we tend to think of honesty. Certainly honesty is a big part of integrity. Schools and businesses shy away from using “integrity” in their advertising. When integrity is brought up, people tend to look closely at how that integrity is manifested. Ralph Waldo Emerson had a wonderful line: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons”. You can talk up excellence by walking prospective buyers past a trophy case. That will “fool most the people most of the time.” But when you talk about integrity, you have some explaining to do.
Beyond honesty, integrity also means integration, internal cohesion, consistency, stout and strong. A building with integrity would require a well-engineered foundation. A business with integrity would only make true claims about its products. It would not sell products that put customers at serious risk. It would not pay its CEO $10 million per year while paying its average worker $35,000, nor would it make its profits via third world child labor. A school with integrity would not only teach its students valuable information, it would teach its students to think critically, it would teach its students a worldview, and it would carefully explain the validity of that worldview.
The difference between excellence and integrity also holds true for individuals. What if, for example, a person chooses to marry…and then have kids? And what if she wants to be part of a church, and she wants to hold down a good job, and she wants to maintain an exercise regimen? And what if she owns a home? And what if she has extended family? And what if all these things are important to her? It is normal for people to live multi-faceted lives. When life is multi-faceted, priorities and compromises must be employed in order to allow for reasonable attention to all the facets. This is integration. Integration taps its foot at excellence.
Is there no room for specialists, then? Is there no place for “greatness”? There is. People are unique. Some people are gifted to extremes. Some people are comfortably obsessive. But excellence always needs to be tempered by integrity. There’s something perverse about an audience that would rather watch the Flying Wallendas perform without a net. There is something distorted about the workaholic parents who send their children to boarding schools to be raised by strangers. We need to regularly assess whether our pursuits of excellence are retarding other important areas of our lives, or are damaging important relationships.
The Guinness Book of World Records is filled with examples of people who pursued excellence. Their latest spotlighted achievements include such things as: the largest collection of hamburger-related items; the largest flesh tunnel (earlobe); the largest assembly of people dressed as Superman; and the longest human tunnel traveled through by a skateboarding dog. Excellence can be wonderful and it can be ridiculous. Often it’s both.
But living as a human is not a sideshow. To one degree or another, we all need to hear music and/or express ourselves musically; we need to see colors and textures; we need to create and build; we need to ponder and wonder, and expand our vocabulary as we learn new phenomena, have new experiences, imagine new possibilities; we need to touch things and people; we need to know and be known; we need to exert ourselves; we need to embrace reality and all that is true. No doubt, there are other important ways to describe the things we need to do—life is wonderful and complex. And even though it is consciousness that makes life real for each one of us, there is a sense that life happens to us…and it happens in a puzzling rush. But integrity implies the embrace of life’s fullness. Specialization (excellence) is a turning of the back on what it means to be human. We think too highly of it, when we should be setting our sights on integrity.
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