In Pursuit of Excellence: Discarding 'Education in a Box'

November 5, 2009

If you’ve not visited a public school lately, you probably should do so, because things are most definitely significantly changing in the world of education. In today’s world, the concept of absolute fairness in education has become a top priority. Thanks in part to George W. BushGeorge W. Bush, perhaps no child is now being left behind, but then again, no child is clearly in the lead either.

The video clip attached to this article attempts to convey the idea that education can become so standardized and lock-step that mastering the rudiments of material ranging all the way from Baby Einstein to a PhD. are more or less little more than a series of steps which a student takes not alone as a thinking, intelligent individual, but more as a part of a collective group. One need only complete all the required steps, fill in the blank line with their name, receive the same "A's" as everyone else and step out into the world.

The standout student of today can thus be a relative rarity. What academic heroes there are must of necessity truly be exceptional; forever swimming against the tide of mediocrity; of the philosophy that says not so much that everyone should be treated as equals, but that everyone is equal, at least in terms of their learning capabilities. The idea of making winners of us all may sound like a really good idea, but I believe that it can bring with it a number of problems.

When I worked for one of the world’s premier banking firms some years ago, all its employees were regularly and thoroughly indoctrinated using mandatory classes and lengthy emails that supposedly taught us all about the concept of diversity.

With diversity, there are to be found not just people who are different simply because of their race, color, sexual orientation, religion, gender, age – but people who may be different because of their successes or failures. I do not recall, however that this success/failure part of diversity was ever included as a part of the bank’s laundry list of the differing qualities of people which are often used when describing diversity.

In talking about diversity we did seem to go to great lengths in identifying and labeling people as part of certain groups only to ultimately conclude that everyone should be treated in exactly the same way. And insofar as equal treatment is being discussed, I completely agree with that assessment.

My argument here, then, does not suggest that everyone should not be afforded an equal opportunity to succeed. Rather, it looks at some of the reasons why we may be depriving some of our most capable and outstanding learners the chance to excel in our educational institutions by the way we are approaching the learning process itself.

It is perhaps a cruel, yet I believe very true fact of life in general: Everybody is not, in fact, a winner; not every student is truly entitled to always receive top scores; rational thinking itself denies the notion that every student can be number one; and a truly diverse population will always include both its successes and failures.

I believe that going too far in trying to insure equal treatment for all students can often lead to devaluation in scarcity of our best and brightest minds. Effectively we succeed not in making everybody winners, but in diminishing the inherent value that is found in some of our very best minds. There are, after all, still young heroes in all of our schools. There are strong, intelligent minds out there that are in essence our best hope for yet more and better tomorrows.

I believe we need to allow reason to once again enter our discussions about equal opportunity. We need to avoid sending our students down the rabbit-hole of sameness and banality; of asking of them to wander about an often confusing, bland, and less than challenging educational wonderland.

And we need to abandon our legalistic insistence on vetting each and every nuance in virtually every course of study which they must encounter; courses of study that are now so carefully and neurotically constructed and polished to "perfection" that they neither offend nor educate anyone.