End the Rat Race

There's an unspoken assumption behind much of education, and it needs to go away.

For years, I directed dozens of high school productions, both musicals and the school variety show, and in talking to the auditioners, there's a basic point I have always tried to make. Goes something like this:

This is not a competition between students to find the best. For the variety show, we're looking for variety, so you have the best shot if you're offering something unique for the audience. For the musical, remember that someone who's the best singer, actor, and dancer might not be the best for a particular role. 

In short, every student who auditions is not in the same race to the same finish line.

It's understandable that students imagine a singular race to a singular goal because that idea is reinforced by virtually everything they encounter. Their world is soaked in the rat race mentality.

It's not just schools, but lord knows that schools reinforce this notion that all of the students are in a rat race against each other, all on the same track aimed at the same piece of cheese on the same finish line--and there will be winners and there will be losers.

Get the best grades in the best class. Get the best class rank. Collect the most tokens to build your GPA and your extra-curricular resume. Get into the best college. Show all the merit. Win the prize in the rat race and you get... well, something. Besides, winning is the way you avoid losing, and losing means your life is a terrible failed mess. 

Look, there's no doubt that students need to do their very best, that they need to make good choices, that they need to pack up as many tools as they can for the years ahead. They need to achieve and succeed and all that good stuff. I'm no advocate of "sit on your ass and insist that the world take care of you." Drop out and turn on was not very helpful advice sixty years ago, and time has not improved it.

But if schools are a garden (and I like that particular metaphor), then they are a garden filled with a variety of different plants. I used to teach an excerpt of a Ralph Waldo Emerson that includes this line:

The roses under my window make no reference to former roses or better ones; they are what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

And I like that as far as it goes. But our garden in school includes roses and carrots and sunflowers and apple trees and cacti and we too often we approach that garden as if the only thing that matters is who can grow the biggest apples the fastest, and instead of trying to get each growing thing into the circumstances that will best help it grow into the best version of itself, we treat them as if they're all apple trees. 

For most of my career, I taught high school juniors, who get the worst of this. Make your college and career plans. Whatever the top students are doing, you do that too, only do it harder. So on they race, shooting frightened side-eyes at their fellow students and pushing on driven by the fear that if they finish too far back in this singular race, Something Terrible will happen to them which will, besides condemning them to a sad, stricken life, confirm that they are Less Than, somehow Not Worthy. 

Nothing filled my heart like a student who knew who she was and who moved along a path aimed at making the most of that, whether that path was Ivy League scholar or top-shelf welder. 

I've described education often as the work of helping students become their best selves while growing in understanding of how to be fully human in the world. That's not necessarily leisurely work; we don't live forever and the clock is ticking for us all. But it's not the work of a frantic rat race, scrambling toward we're-not-sure-where for we're-not-sure-what-reason, running out of fear and anxiety instead of hope and aspiration. 

Fear is a terrible motivation. It makes people run, but not toward anything. But sometimes we just want to see them move, dammit. Sometimes we are afraid for them, and we project that fear at them, like a screaming siren. Sometimes the rat race is just the easiest, laziest way to try to motivate.

W. Edward Deming was crystal clear that an organization works best with a system that drives out fear and builds up trust. I wish more schools, more parents, more public figures really understood that. The rat race is all about fear. Our children deserve better. We all deserve better.