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here is no substitute for excellence or the expectation of excellence. If conservatives push this point too hard and without compassion, liberals fail to push this point hard enough often exhibiting misplaced compassion. With rare exception, what we aspire to do is inextricably tied to the expectations that significant others in our lives—such parents, friends, teachers, and the clergy—expect of us. And expectations are communicated in a wealth of ways: sometimes by commands and exaltations; sometimes by an ever so fleeting look of disappointment or disapproval, in instance, or a smile of approval, in the other. So it is whatever our sex or religion or ethnicity or sexual orientation might be.
In New York City, there is a school called the Harlem Village Academy that shows cases in a most profound way the truth of the remarks in the preceding paragraph. At this charter school, students of every stripe and color are expected to give pride of place to one goal: academic excellence. This school is not there to learn the numerous forms that sexual identity may take or to assuage feelings of racism or to wallow in feelings of guilt about having committed this or that injustice. No, the operative phrase is academic excellence.
And guess what? Students of every stripe and persuasion are producing excellent work and, most importantly, they are expecting excellence of themselves. This gets to the heart of the matter. Whether they are at a charter school or a university, anything that gets in the way of students expecting excellences of themselves is unacceptable.
I do not know whether Chancellor Nancy Cantor read my blog about her. However, I can now articulate in a more perspicuous manner why I am so at odds with her present policies at Syracuse University: Quite simply, she is a formidable impediment to minorities expecting excellence of themselves because she seems far more interested in minority students wallowing in their concerns about racism than pursing excellence.
This is such a point of commonsense that those who advocate a different point of view simply cannot have the well-being and excellence of students at heart.
The issue is not whether there are still various forms of racism on college and university campuses. Rather, the issue is what does more good for minority students: their wallowing in various instances of racism experienced here and there or their expecting excellence of themselves and believing that they can excel no matter what? Surely, minority students expecting excellence of themselves is vastly superior to their wallowing. Besides, I am at a loss as to just how much racism minority students are experiencing on campus.
Everywhere I turn, people seem to be bending over backwards to accommodate minority students—so much so that such students can often get away with mediocrity. Indeed, on the front row of Grant Auditorium, there 2 Latino students playing tic-tac-toe during one my lectures. Had I been white, it is not at all clear that I could have publicly admonished them, as I in fact did. After all, had I been white my doing so would surely have been racist and a sign of my insensitivity to the pain of minority students. This is the kind of mindset that Chancellor Cantor is unwittingly fostering.
As I said nothing beats excellence and the expectation of excellence. When we have internalized the expectation of excellence then we have given to ourselves, as it were, one of the greatest of all gifts, namely an unending commitment on our part to persevere and to excel, regardless of the circumstances in which we find ourselves. This means, among other things, that we are not easily discouraged if we are prepared to give things the right priority and to make the right sacrifices. And who has not excelled without doing that. Any conception of what it means to be a minority is misguided if the suggestion is that, owing to injustices of the past, minorities should not have to set priorities or make sacrifices. No one has succeeded without doing so. And minorities won’t be the first to be the exception here.
My soul lept for joy as I listened to the news story about the extraordinary success of the Harlem Village Academy. I thought to myself: from the mouths of babes. Whenever I watch a child, the one thing that I see that is common across all children is that they delight in self-mastery.
Robert W. White made this profound point years ago in his monograph Ego and Reality in Psychoanalytic Theory, as noted that even animals often take delight in the mere accomplishments of tasks. Thus, White suggested that the desire to engage in acts of self-mastery may very well be akin to an instinct. Children naturally crawl and climb and bite and pull and push. This, White would say, stems from the drive towards self-mastery that every child has.
The Harlem Village has tapped into this very simple but every so sublime truth. Show any child the pathway to excellence very early on, and that child will unhesitatingly walk down that path with unparalleled alacrity, determination, and self-satisfaction. Give a child one reason after enough to say “I can do it” because the fruits lie in her or his accomplishments, and one thereby gives a child a sense of self that can weather just about any storm.
We must put injustice in its place; and by this I mean two things. One is that we must work with all our might to eliminate it. But more importantly, perhaps, we must give each child the most precious gift of all, namely the immutable conviction that she or he will not be vanquished by the wrongs encountered, whatever the nature of these wrongs might be.
Democracy is not just about equality; for that is easy enough to achieve. Indeed, there is what we may call fulsome equality, where nobody is doing anything worthwhile. No, democracy at its best, at any rate, nourishes the soul.
Insofar as justice is to ring from each roof-top and in every garden-setting and insofar as justice is to be an inseparable part of the soil of life: then we must first proceed with bestowing upon each child the gift of expecting excellence of herself or himself. For then and only then do we make it possible for justice and other forms of excellence, both moral and intellectual, to have a most secure footing in the reality of our lives.
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