Devotion to excellence, part 2

Happy Friday, everyone.

In last week’s note, we talked about the idea of excellence as a necessity. “Just surviving”, or any form of settling for less than excellence, does not lay a foundation for excellence, for rising in the future. It instead establishes a pattern of decline.

This week, I want to explore how excellence relates to our mission—not as a means to it, but as part of its very essence.

Here’s a brief snippet from the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin:

Without knowing anything else, what do you think of it? What’s your reaction? Does a plan to pursue moral perfection seem admirable? Naive? Perhaps even counterproductive?

Here’s another quote, this one from Montessori, about teachers:

“An English poet wrote of a teacher that she should be like an angel, protective and sweet and dignified. The children will feel a sense of security when they are near this superior person. The teacher must be everything that is perfect.” (1946 London Lectures)

Same question. How do you feel about this? If you’re a teacher, do you find it helpful and inspiring, or unhelpful and unrealistic?

I won’t drown you in quotes, but Montessori often speaks of perfection. It’s usually actually not about teachers specifically. It’s more generally the notion of the human tendency towards self-perfection. It’s something she thinks children do, in particular movements and routines. And something she thinks that adults do too, in the same kinds of specifics but also with regards to their moral character. She would definitely not have rolled her eyes, or even cracked a smile, at the Benjamin Franklin quote above.

Today the notion of perfection is actively eschewed, and often by very good people and for very understandable reasons.

“The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Having an unrealistically high bar, the thought is, actually blocks good things from happening. Real artists ship, and shipping means shipping things that are good but not perfect.

There’s even a word for pathologies related to perfection: “perfectionism”. Perfectionism is a bad attitude towards quality. Perfectionism is when you have a detached notion of quality that stops you from starting (or finishing), where quality becomes the enemy of actuality and excellence becomes the enemy of the real.

These aren’t fake problems. Many people struggle with them, and they are very damaging. (And it shows up in particularly unhealthy ways in parents who impart perfectionism on their children.) It’s not uncommon to have disconnected or impossible standards, and it’s not uncommon to let these standards stop you from actually achieving much of anything.

But, there’s also been, in my view, a serious baby-with-the-bathwater mistake here.

Zooming out, we live in a culture that is skeptical not just of perfectionism, but of perfection as such. In fact, the latter is just seen as an instance of the former. The quest for perfection is an unhealthy perfectionism.

Even more widely, we live in a culture that—properly and rightly—valorizes empathy, caring, and sensitivity. Competence and excellence, however, do not get valorized in the same way. They are not given anywhere near the same moral weight.

This feels so normal to us that we don’t often notice it, but it is culturally specific. In ancient Greek culture, notions of excellence—bestness—arete—were central and second-nature, in the same way that empathy and kindness are to us. A version of these ideas of excellence and perfection experienced a resurgence throughout the Renaissance, and Enlightenment, and then the 19th century. Franklin spoke of his own perfection, as we saw, and our Founders codified the goal of a more perfect union into our Constitution. Darwin writes about perfection of function in the natural world. Montessori, writing at the very tail end of this period, is following the trend, not inventing a new one.

There are a few areas of culture today where excellence is still truly revered. Sports is the big one. There’s also hip hop—the only art form that unironically venerates the boast and the brag. What else? Not much. There are little pockets here and there—but nothing that mainstream, and nothing that’s given that much centrality and moral gravity.

In education, we speak so much about how hard it is, about how educators are under-appreciated or how they need self-care and to avoid being over-worked. These are important conversations. But their centrality also reflects a rejection of excellence as a value. Of course it is hard, of course it can be grueling, unremitting work. But why wouldn’t it? It is the work of transforming the arc of a human life, of giving a child the gift of self-actualization, of unlocking human potential. Rather than focus so much on how hard it is, sometimes we should focus on how rewarding it is to get right. It is in my view the most rewarding, and the most important work in the world. And it demands a quest for perfection. (The same applies to administrators, leaders, and those working in the sort of central support structure we have.)

The reality is this: The desire to achieve excellence in one’s work—for us, to provide truly great, nay, perfect developmental experiences for children and their families—to have an ambitious sense as to what is possible and to want to achieve the best possible—to really desire it, to hold the quality of one’s work in that service as a morally serious end—this is to be heterodox. It’s to go against the grain. It’s to be, to that extent, at war with the wider culture. The wider culture is fine with competence—not more than fine, but at least fine—but only so long as you don’t take it too seriously.

But excellent work is serious. It is amongst the most important things. It is right up there with great friendship, great romance, great art. Arguably, it is even more important than they are.

Did you know that Montessori believed this?

Montessori thought that great work was the most important thing in life. Not just the great work of Montessorians, doing Montessori education. But any great work.

Here are a few quotes that will give you a sense.

“Now the little child who manifests perseverance in his work as the first constructive act of his psychical life, and upon this act builds up internal order equilibrium, and the growth of personality, demonstrates, almost as in a splendid revelation, the true manner in which man renders himself valuable to the community. The little child who persists in his exercises, concentrated and absorbed, is obviously elaborating the constant man, the man of character, the man who will find in himself all human values, crowning that unique fundamental manifestation: persistence in work.” (The Advanced Montessori Method)

“All work is noble, the only ignoble thing is to live without working.” (From Childhood to Adolescence)

“The calm, serene child, attached to reality, begins to achieve his elevation through work.” (The Secret of Childhood)

If you mull what this means, what it means to achieve elevation through work, you’ll start to glimpse the depth of Montessori’s radicalism. Individual agency, a person’s independence, is not achieved just through freedom, through having the ability to choose. It’s achieved through learning, through inner discipline, and through practiced, hard-won competencies. Through, fundamentally, an ability to work, persistently and lovingly. Through, specifically, particular skills and capacities that let one do the great work of one’s choosing.

Great work is for all people. It’s for the banker as well as the artist, the plumber as well as the activist. It’s for the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. Montessori saw that at the center of every good life was competence: excellent work: some human pursuit being brought to perfection by the specialized unification of mind and hand.

Your practice of excellence, in your job, is very literally our whole grand mission. Our pedagogical mission, our developmental mission, is founded on an abiding belief in the moral power of excellent work. It is no accident that supporting the developing capacity of the child to do excellent work, is itself a work that requires excellence of us.

Have a great weekend.

Ray Girn
Founder and CEO, Higher Ground Education