E is for Excellence...NOT!
Excellence is a shibboleth among the movers and shakers in education. Who doesn't love excellence? Who shouldn't strive for it, recognize it, reward it, promote it? Excellence is a lot of things, all of them good...or better, or really, really great. The rub comes when one stops to ask with regard to what? And having answered the question 'with regard to what?', does the notion of excellence really add anything to the conversation?
The source of this tomfoolery with words is that we in education are prone to want to move from worse to better, from lower to higher, from OK to really good, all without every clarifying what it is that we are working toward. Phrases like "A World Class Education" are good, I suppose, but at the end of the day we might want to be specific about what that means. What is education, by the way? Can it be reliably measured, and if so, is that measure the same thing as education or does it just stand in as a surrogate for the real thing? And if education is some 'real thing' beyond the measure, in what does it consist, and how do we know that our measures are, in fact, good surrogates?
Excellence. An empty phrase.
Imaginative Education takes a good run at answering the question. Want to get involved in the conversation? Read The Educated Mind. Join in the conversation. It matters that we be clear about our purposes.
