On Mediocrity (3 November 2003)

When I was a high school teacher, the thing that shocked me more than anything wasn't the rudeness of the students, the wildness of their lifestyles, or the paycheck, or anything that people suggested would shock me. What really shocked me was the fact that I taught students — bright, articulate students — whose aim in school was to pass. All they wanted was a 50% for their work, nothing more. They seemed to be quite satisfied with that.

In fact, the most frustrating question I've heard as an educator is: "Why you give me this D?" — as though grades were things I picked out of the sky. My answer — the answer of most lecturers who "give" Ds —was always: "I didn't give it; you earned it all by yourself." My question is: if students don't want Ds, why do so many of them work so hard to attain them?

So hard? you ask. Consider this. Many of the students who achieve Ds and complain about them are bright students who come to class when they feel like it, skip assignments at will, and neglect to do the necessary reading. In short, they are gifted individuals who don't do believe they need to do the work that is necessary to succeed. They expect success to be given to them for some other reason — perhaps how cute they look in their low-slung jeans, or how much money they have behind them, or the simple fact that they are Bahamians living in the Bahamas, and someone owes them something for that fact.

It's quite a shock to them when they begin to earn the poor grades they have worked for. Too many of them have been rewarded in the past for just those things. Too few of them have been trained to aim for excellence; rather, they have already acquired the habit of settling for mediocrity.

I'm afraid that far too often, mediocrity is a Bahamian talent.

Far too often, we adhere to the principle of not doing a full job when half of one will do; and far too often we do not challenge the people who did half of the job. We fork over our money, our votes, our thanks, and go off and mutter (or shout) well out of earshot.

And this concerns me.

It's not just that I don't like mediocrity very much. Nor is it that we're fast hurtling towards a world in which we will be measured by international standards of excellence, not by those easy-to-lower bars we set for ourselves, and we are not preparing ourselves to compete at that level. It concerns me because our easy acceptance — our elevation — of the mediocre tells me that we don't like ourselves very much.

We don't like one another enough to give one another the best that we can. And we don't like ourselves enough to discover what our best is.

Sometimes we settle for mediocrity because we're lazy; we can't be bothered to do the best job possible. Sometimes we settle for it because we've procrastinated so much that it's impossible to do the job well in the time we have left, and so we just aim to get it done. Sometimes we settle for it because we trust in God, and somehow it's always all right on the night (even when it's not). And sometimes we settle for mediocrity because, after all the other times we've settled, we just don't know what excellence is anymore.

But it doesn't really matter. Settling for the mediocre just isn't good enough. Never mind that free trade is coming and we are going to have to compete with people who do know excellence when they pass it in the street. Every time we settle for less than our best we lower not just the standards for ourselves, but for our children. And in doing so, we make it all the more difficult for them to succeed.

Let's go back to the students I mentioned to begin with. In almost every case, it was the students who were bright or very bright who were just getting by. The best of our young people are the ones who are settling for the mediocre, and part of the reason for this is that they have not been taught to aim as high for very much. In a society where all that matters is getting over — collecting the top grade with a minimum of effort, keeping the job no matter how poorly we perform it, getting whatever it is we want without ever having to struggle for it, far too many of the best of us never learn how good we can really be, because we never push ourselves far enough to find out.

No wonder we have a problem in this country with self-esteem!

Our cult of mediocrity has made us a people who don’t expect much of ourselves, who take poor service and worse attitudes for granted, and who reward the mediocre with accolades. There's an up side to all of this: the less we expect, the less we have to achieve to look good. But there's a down side as well. We may be comfortable with what we deliver. But when we compare what we do with what others do we realize how inferior our product is.

In a world where racism is the order of the day, where it is fundamentally engrained into every one of us who can read or watch television that black people can't and white people can, this cult of mediocrity simply serves to reinforce all the stereotypes. And the fact that we accept it, the fact that we let it pass without remarking on it or embarking on a campaign to effect a change, tells me that, deep down, we just don't value ourselves enough to do our best. We don't value ourselves as Bahamians, and we don't value ourselves as humans. All that we are worth is written on our paychecks or our transcripts.

It is time, I believe, for us to return to the fundamental truths that build human beings: that what we do matters far less than the way we do it, and that the way we do our work tells the world who we think we are. It is time we abandoned our false god of mediocrity and worshipped at the altar of excellence. It is time we took risks, time we pushed ourselves far enough to fail. It is only by failing, by getting up and by learning how not to fail the next time that we ever learn truly to respect ourselves.