Examining Excellence in Life…

I recently had conversations with some Mulgrave parents about shared anxieties related to our rapidly changing world and our students’ capacity to navigate overwhelming complexity against a backdrop of rising mental health concerns. As we grow further away from the experiences, curricula, pathways, and schooling we had in different countries, and different eras, the advice and life experiences we might normally share to help positively guide our children may no longer be relevant or effective. This has been a significant topic of conversation for decades in schools but it now feels very concrete and urgent. It is no longer a theoretical consideration but a very real one that will affect how we further develop our model of schooling at Mulgrave and equally how we can effectively and collectively counsel our children outside of school.

The tension between ideals and ‘reality’
These conversations often return to a familiar tension between setting up our young people to ‘get ahead’ in the world of work, career development, and the practicalities of life versus the cultivation of their character, values, humanity, and aesthetic sensibilities. There are many ways to address this tension but I was recently reminded of listening to Professor John Dalla Costa talk to school Heads many years ago in Montreal about his work in the world of business consultancy. As both a professor teaching first year business majors at the University of Toronto and a company advisor, he explained the need for organisations, leaders, and individuals to expand their ‘moral and aesthetic bandwidth’ to push back on increasingly ‘transactional societal norms’. Whilst this would not be a surprising message coming from an arts or humanities academic, it was an interesting position for Dalla Costa to notice in a business school. He was responding to the shifting characteristics of the students he was teaching - young people who were increasingly and exclusively valuing only tasks, targets, and monetised rewards over the pleasures of simply being, connecting, and appreciating the richness of relationships, friendships, and social interaction. Since then, he has been evaluating what he calls the ‘aesthetic and moral decline’ of his first and second year students who are succumbing to what he calls the ‘productivity agenda’. He lists his observations:

• They only want to know how to pass, not to learn
• They are highly motivated to succeed but paralysed by fear of failure
• They no longer speak out loud in class at all and the pressure put on them by family, society, and themselves is much more palpable today than ten years ago
• There is little to no curiosity about the world, only about methodology, proficiency and ‘what next’?
• They are convinced they are on the right track but unwilling to think or self reflect, critically 
• They self limit their options based on narrow success criteria
• When asking his annual question “What issue do you care about enough to go and protest?”, the numbers recording a positive answer have declined every year

What is interesting about Dalla Costa’s role in the business world is that he does not address this concern from a theoretical or abstract position, proposing a radical rejection of free market economics or the practical reality of business productivity. How could he, when he is central to that space in his own work and consultancy? 

Nevertheless, he calls for a correction in educational emphasis and leadership focus to produce the type of human beings needed to not only lead the right kind of businesses and organisations for the future but also to achieve inner fulfillment and happiness in an age of anxiety. 

The seduction of productivity…but at what cost?
Unfortunately, many educational institutions have, instead, been seduced by a productivity agenda that has marginalised wonder, curiosity, and learning for learning’s sake. This is also echoed in Rodgers’ influential text, Age of Fracture, where both ‘meaning making’ and ‘human desire’ have been filled by advertising and branding psychology. We have become products of Google, Meta, TikTOK, and other immersive algorithmic environments that not only hijack our attention and time but also erode the very executive function capabilities that might enable us to fight back. When we are released from the dopamine grip of these all-consuming environments, schools now have an even greater responsibility to secure sacred spaces of meaning and curiosity that can serve as correctives to the productivity agenda. I believe this insight and awareness are incredibly important because if both the immersive social media lives of our children and their educational experiences are fixated on comparisons, productivity, and ‘getting ahead’, then this might explain the increasing reports of mental health declines for students at our large, highly competitive universities. Alternatively, we need to focus on the ‘affective’ domains of education that cultivate the inner life and develop moral and aesthetic sensibilities that, as one parent explained to me, are ‘being hollowed out’ by the production line experiences of undergraduates at some of these universities.

Dalla Costa also completed an interesting ‘language scan’ of recent trends in education that he feels is quite telling in terms of where our young people are picking up on these messages and values. Schools and colleges are now dominated by business and military terminology as future planning becomes ‘strategic’ and ‘tactical’ where we ‘target’ groups, identify ‘clients’, and frame educational ‘consumers’. We also commonly talk about ‘human capital’ and even nowadays the ‘knowledge economy’ whilst encouraging our students to ‘self brand’ and become their own ‘portfolio product’. We all know that social media influencers can monetise their own profiles (which may well be a savvy career move), but the question remains whether we are complicit in producing the transactional students Dalla Costa is experiencing at university.

Wisdom is both/and not either/or
Mulgrave quite rightly educates our students in career planning, cultivating LinkedIN profiles, and understanding the necessary literacies of business, economics, and consumer culture. Nobody, including me, is suggesting we ‘deskill’ our students in this respect. Quite the contrary, we have a responsibility to equip young people in the techniques and methodologies required to achieve success. The wider question I am asking is to what degree has the social imaginary of brands and productivity become the imaginary of our schools and universities? This is why during our current strategic planning process we have dwelt for some time on our mission to achieve ‘excellence in life’ and wondered how that term is understood by different community members. From the educator’s perspective it certainly was not intended to indicate the narrow definition of success that might be caricatured as chasing the 45 IBDP points, Ivy League university, and CEO track which sometimes creates the transaction deferral of real meaning making in life that Dalla Costa is worried about. If we do not pay attention to ‘the good life’ or ‘beauty’, ‘morality’ and simply ‘being’, then what are we trying to ‘get ahead’ of? In today’s world, every school should pause and teach concepts of wisdom as opposed to knowledge and ensure that every student has a strong grounding in life. 

This relates to the compelling research on the dangers of extrinsic motivation ‘that is never enough’, that only wants to know how to pass, how to move on to the next task, and then never arrives, because at some point the wheels come off when a young adult realises they do not know who they are or what they really want. Alternatively, ‘excellence in life’ should point us towards Socrates’ famous dictum “the unexamined life is not worth living”. School should therefore provide ample space for the exploration of values, investigating ideas, sitting in discussion without resolution or ‘product’, doodling, and creating without thinking about validating the outcome or polishing a performance. This reminds me of teacher workshops I used to run for the IB to encourage all teachers to integrate bigger questions and big ideas into their curricula. Following James Bond’s famous License to Kill, I called these sessions A License to Digress, giving teachers permission to stop, follow a big idea, stimulate curiosity, and recognise that ‘digression’ is as important as productivity. Remaining in the zone of thought, in unresolved discussion and contemplation is equally valuable as tangible outcomes and products. This is part of the incredibly important work of building a healthy inner life and developing character. It is what professor Cornell West calls ‘soul crafting’ and ironically is perhaps one of the best outcomes we are seeking in making our young people much better at conflict resolution. Reflecting on values, beauty and art, ideas and wonder are the ingredients needed for the clear-eyed thinking heart, the ability to engage emphatically and deeply, rather than merely cerebrally. This observation also connects to our understanding that we all need time at the end of a lesson to reflect on what is learnt and absorb new ideas and information before rushing forward to the next task. That is why schools or institutions that model busy-ness and rush undermine the very values they are trying to instill in young people to pause, reflect, and contemplate. You cannot properly ‘discern’ in these conditions (which might explain why social media is so polarising). 

So what? At Mulgrave…
As such, we are currently evaluating whether we have the right amount of instructional time at school to avoid the rush or the anxiety of having to speed forward to get through material. Encouraging a license to digress requires having the right conditions to enable this for both our teachers and students. It is also why we are building a mature school culture that can comfortably recognise and develop two supposedly contradictory ideas: soul crafting and productivity. This is the mantra of working smartly as opposed to industriously. This means we use research and evidence to ensure we teach in an effective and impactful way that clearly has productive accountability around measurable outcomes. However, this does not need to come at the cost of digression, a love of learning, class discussion, and making interdisciplinary connections that spark student curiosity. We can do both, and we can walk the line that ensures we do not move into the transactional or forget our mandate to create ‘excellence in life’. My convictions as both an educator and a parent are a passionate defense of a Liberal Arts approach to schooling that values learning for learning's sake, that explicitly cultivates values and aesthetics and in response to Dalla Costa’s question of “what would you be willing to go on a demonstration to defend?” should produce a resounding chorus of passionate student responses. That is a metric we should pay attention to at Mulgrave.