What? I’m not special?
This, from the Washington Post, is an excerpt of Wellesly High School’s most recent commencement address, delivered by David McCullough, Jr. (yes… it’s that David McCullough’s son). The whole speech, in context, is worth a read.
Walt Whitman tells me Im my own version of perfection! Epictetus tells me I have the spark of Zeus! And I dont disagree. So that makes 6.8 billion examples of perfection, 6.8 billion sparks of Zeus. You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless. In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point and were happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect thats the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole.
No longer is it how you play the game, no longer is it even whether you win or lose, or learn or grow, or enjoy yourself doing it Now its So what does this get me?As a consequence, we cheapen worthy endeavors, and building a Guatemalan medical clinic becomes more about the application to Bowdoin than the well-being of Guatemalans. Its an epidemic and in its way, not even dear old Wellesley High is immune one of the best of the 37,000 nationwide, Wellesley High School where good is no longer good enough, where a B is the new C, and the midlevel curriculum is called Advanced College Placement. And I hope you caught me when I said one of the best. I said one of the best so we can feel better about ourselves, so we can bask in a little easy distinction, however vague and unverifiable, and count ourselves among the elite, whoever they might be, and enjoy a perceived leg up on the perceived competition. But the phrase defies logic. By definition there can be only one best. Youre it or youre not.
via Commencement speaker blasts students – The Answer Sheet – The Washington Post.