When Jane was in third grade, she learned about a special STEM academy in our school system. It required an accelerated math and science curriculum which would begin in fourth grade and cover one and a half to two grade levels of curriculum every year through high school graduation. There would be special group assignments, like shark-tanking strategies to local industry about how to quantifiably improve the environmental health of our local bay—the best ideas of which would funded for implementation. There would be frequent field trips, the holy grail of which is the annual sixth grade pilgrimage to Space Camp. Jane was excited, but she was going to have to apply for a spot in the STEM Academy, which required not only excellent grades, but high achievement on a battery of tests, a personal essay outlining why she wanted to go, and teacher recommendations. Each class has only 48 spots to accommodate students from our entire county, so acceptance is highly competitive. So my industrious little Jane went merrily about the application process.

She was not accepted.

There were tears.

She survived the disappointment.

At her elementary school’s end-of-year awards ceremony, there was a seemingly endless procession of kids receiving perfect attendance awards, honor roll and high honor roll, and character awards. But there was no recognition of Jane’s two friends who were accepted into the STEM Academy. There was no mention of the STEM Academy at all. Later, I privately asked the principal why the STEM kids had been omitted from the ceremony and she told me that it was because they didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings because most of the kids that applied hadn’t gotten in.

Here’s the thing: I was irked about that ceremony. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not arguing the merits of the awards that were handed out that day. I was irritated because the achievement of those accepted to the STEM Academy had been stuffed in the back of a closet like it was an embarrassing secret. The school aimed to award as many children as it possibly could which rendered their awards meaninglessness. They had awarded kids for literally just showing up, but when there were a select few that met a high bar of excellence, the school devalued their achievement by refusing to acknowledge them because not everyone could accomplish it.

Was Jane disappointed that she wasn’t accepted to the STEM Academy? Of course she was. But it was an excellent learning opportunity. Jane’s experience with rejection taught her valuable lessons about resilience. I loathe to think of anyone’s feelings being hurt, but to prepare our kids for a world in which effort is nonessential for excellence is a grave disservice. Many kids are entering adulthood ill equipped to navigate the world, don’t have tools to manage disappointment, and unsurprisingly, become depressed. Not every person and opportunity are a good match; it’s a fact of life. I have college professor-friends who are baffled to have parents interceding on their adult children’s behalf. We’re so eager to protect our children from the difficulties and disappointments of life that we rob them of the opportunity to really learn how to manage them and more importantly, how to push themselves to fulfill their potential. That fulfillment requires grit and perseverance and a grounded understanding of what is possible. And of how to push a little past what was thought possible. We are not teaching our kids to recognize and realize Excellence.               

What is Excellence? Let’s back up a bit first: we’ve established that ethos is one of the artistic proofs that Aristotle relied upon to understand and use rhetoric and that ethos is comprised of three ingredients. Because we’re good kids dutifully working our way through this Aristotelian flow chart, we’ve taken a peek at the first ingredient, phronesis and now it’s time to think about the second ingredient: arete.

[Pop quiz: Who can identify the third ingredient of Aristotelian rhetorical ethos in the comments below? The grand prize is being a living embodiment of arete!]

Arete is usually defined as virtue, but my motorcycle-loving friend, Robert Pirsig, isn’t satisfied with virtue. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the narrator wrestles with the character of Phaedrus, who [spoiler alert] is really another version of the narrator himself. As a young student of philosophy, Phaedrus is initially dissatisfied with the Sophists’ translation of virtue, claiming:

“…how are you going to teach virtue if you teach the relativity of all ethical ideas? Virtue, if it implies anything at all, implies an ethical absolute. A person whose idea of what is proper varies from day to day can be admired for his broadmindedness, but not for his virtue.”1 (338)

Because he’s dissatisfied, Phaedrus keeps searching and comes to a definition that is far more agreeable to him, the essence of which encapsulates the elusive, lifelong quest of our narrator:

‘He strives after that which we translate ‘virtue’ but is in Greek arete, ‘excellence.’ … ‘When we meet arete in Plato…we translate it ‘virtue’ and consequently miss all the flavor of it. ‘Virtue,’ at least in modern English, is almost entirely a moral word: arete, on the other hand, is used indifferently in all the categories, and simply means excellence.’ (340-341)

Arete is Excellence, which is what the narrator is after, a synonym of the word he’s been chasing in the novel: Quality. Once he stumbles upon this definition, he uses the words arete and Quality interchangeably, but he keeps struggling to make sense of differing philosophical teachers and how to apply their wisdom to his own life. Phaedrus chafes at detail-oriented Aristotle and informs the reader that people are generally either Aristotelian or Platonist:

People who can’t stand Aristotle’s endless specificity of detail are natural lovers of Plato’s soaring generalities. People who can’t stand the eternal lofty idealism of Plato welcome the down-to-earth facts of Aristotle … Plato is…moving onward and upward toward the ‘one.’ Aristotle is the eternal motorcycle mechanic who prefers the ‘many.’ (331)

Personally, I’d like to raise my hand for the Plato camp, but there I go perpetuating dichotomy. Pirsig as the narrator is cheeky here, claiming that Phaedrus was a Platonist and he, that motorcycle mechanic, is Aristotelian. But of course, the reader learns that they’re two sides of the same coin because both the Platonist student philosopher and the Aristotelian motorcyclist are the same man. But what does this really have to do with us today? Partly, I think, it shows that we must find a way to get comfortable with duality. If we are to cultivate an ethos, we must embrace the one and the many; our founding fathers understood this when they chose our national motto to unify the diverse colonies into a cohesive, federal union: e pluribus unum—out of many, one. This is a concept we’ve struggled with and argued over since the founding of our nation. Our current red state/blue state dichotomies are certainly not new, they’re congenital. And yet, in pursuit of the radical American experiment—that we would be a nation united by the ideal of freedom rather than ethnicity or nationality or any other previous in-group metric—we have continued to struggle to work through conflict. Why? Because we are striving for Excellence. We are hungry for Quality, as Pirsig would have called it. Freedom—inalienable rights to life, liberty, and happiness are worth figuring out; Americans have already decided that these things are our collective definition of Excellence. But just as a school’s ostensible standard of Excellence is rooted in education and academic achievement, we must not forget or abandon our national standard of Excellence. If we are striving to create a national ethos, maintaining and valuing our arete—our definition and standard of Excellence—is a non-negotiable step. If we don’t hold ourselves accountable to our standard of Excellence it is a slippery slope until our standards are defined for us with far less noble ideals:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power ... We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites … We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.2 (Orwell, Animal Farm and 1984)

We must uphold the Excellence woven into the fabric of the United States because it matters. Freedom matters. Language matters. Facts matter. If we turn our collective back on our ideals, it doesn’t take long before we find ourselves chanting:

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.” (Animal Farm and 1984, 183)

Don’t forget to strive for the arete award and share the third ingredient of ethos (phronesis + arete + _____ = ethos). While you’re there, please share your thoughts on arete and whether or not you think America has a national ethos and how you would define it.

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Notes:

Artwork: “Board” by Gerd Altmann is licensed under CC0 Creative Commons.

1)      Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Bantam New Age, 1981.
2)      Orwell, George. Animal Farm and 1984. Harcourt Books, 2003. 338