We are all coming up empty. Striving for success as measured by grades, degrees, and dollars has hollowed out our souls. We have taken to competing against our own limitations to feel accomplished. It is high time we looked down at the basis for our efforts.
As an educator, I am keenly aware of the dangers of a school turning into a hamster-wheel of learning, how to keep going rather than learning how to learn. High stakes testing replaced ideas with information, thinking with data, and wisdom with knowledge.
Those more focused on students than on content latched onto effort and resilience as elements of “mindset” and “grit,” the holy grails of 21st century success. So we praise students for rising to the challenge, we even seek to rise to the challenge ourselves, and the point of the challenge has become to test our grit. Education and work are meant to be so much more than daily trials to see if we can make it to tomorrow.
On Monday last week, Albert Einstein Academy Jewish Day School, where I am the head of school, exhibited what education is meant to be about. Students impressed parents and special friends with their Hebrew skills across disciplines; they took their friends on a learning art walk, bringing their own works together with knowledge of other cultures and symbols; they experimented with engineered contraptions for protecting a raw egg on a one-story drop; and they joyfully sang and danced in celebration of the arts. The day’s events were a stark reminder that learning is about the whole child, not just that part than can sit still and complete a test. Learning is about the turning the soul onto the light of knowledge, kindling the desire to discover more and sharing it in increasingly complex communications.
The very next day, David Brooks’s New York Times column, “Putting Grit in its Place,” addressed the widening distance between what society is making school be about and what I saw the day before. He wrote about the culture of emphasis on GPAs. His critique centered on Angela Duckworth’s new book “Grit,” in which she argues that moral purpose and longing contribute greatly to people’s grittiness. Knowing deeply why we are doing something empowers us to do the hard work it requires; our grit comes not from practicing perseverance but from being grounded.
What awed me about our students’ successes was not their performance. I was in awe of their genuine happiness: their sense that, in sharing with the community what they learned, they had grown as individuals and as a group. We talk often about our Core Value of Individuality, the idea that because we are each created in God’s image we each matter uniquely. Talk is nothing compared to each student having a chance to shine, each having art on display, each taking the hand of a peer and dancing together. They competed to lift themselves to new heights and succeeded. By grounding their learning in an environment of lived values, they not only came up full, their cup overflowed and filled all who bore witness. I pray that as a society, we can begin to build communities of shared values that anchor us deeply and inspire us to make a positive difference in our own lives and the lives of others. It is a competition worth enduring from the ground up.
About Rabbi Jeremy Winaker
Rabbi Jeremy Winaker is the executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Hillel Network, responsible for West Chester University, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and other area colleges. He is the former head of school at the Albert Einstein Academy in Wilmington and was the senior Jewish educator at the Kristol Hillel Center at the University of Delaware for four years. Rabbi Winaker lives in Delaware with his wife and three children.
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