Where does excellence come from anyway?

We recently traveled to Fredericksburg, Virginia, to visit our oldest son and his growing family, and it occurred to me that the demand for excellence either came out of the air in Virginia at the very beginning of our Colonial stage or there must have been something in the water.

He lives on the Rappahannock River in downtown Fredericksburg, right across from Ferry Farm where George Washington was born and partially raised.

Thomas Jefferson was raised on Tuckahoe Plantation on the James River about one hour south of Fredericksburg. James Madison’s childhood and lifelong home at Montpelier is just 55 miles to the west of Fredericksburg as well.

Granted, these founding leaders of the United States were born into homes whose fathers were leaders in the community. In many cases, they inherited landed wealth that, at the time, included slaves working the land and producing products that made the families wealthy.

However, that doesn’t fully explain how or why they participated in the formation of the longest-running constitutional government the world has ever seen. And surely, the mineral content of the local water supplies didn’t specifically target their families and make them any more brilliant or successful than anyone else who partook of those same waters.

What separated those farsighted leaders from their peers was education. Specifically, education in the classics from ancient Greece and Rome in philosophy, religion, the sciences, mathematics, art, architecture, literature and poetry, most times in the ancient languages, Greek and Latin, direct from their authors.

On top of that, these brilliant men benefited from teachers, mentors and parents who didn’t simply assign coursework and hope their students completed it. They demanded excellence, if not perfection, in the successful completion of their assignments and mastery of the subjects before moving on to the next level of education. That is the definition of pure education at its most basic form. Education without excellence in performance and output could be considered by teachers and family to be a waste of time and energy for each student. Excellence, of course, doesn’t mean that everyone had to become president of the United States to prove they were excellent in their schoolwork while growing up.

However, it does beg the question, where did this demand for excellence come from? Have we lost our collective demand for excellence in 21st-century America? Perhaps we’ve become complacent with just accepting the mundane or vulgar things in life simply because we can easily access it all on social media and feel like society is demanding us to accept it all, no questions asked.

Maybe it had a lot to do with their predecessors, who didn’t have access to such freedom to pursue such excellence through education due to their status in life or religious views and oppressive European rulers. Once freed from such unnatural boundaries, they were able to pursue whatever interests they had in whatever field of study or endeavor they chose.

There were no restrictions on what they could or wanted to be in their lives, so why not choose excellence? What possible reason would anyone have to work and study hard to be mediocre or unsuccessful in life when they had the chance to be excellent?

Fortunately, there are many ways to shift people’s expectations in both education and their lives. But it will take a concerted effort for everyone involved not to accept or look for the lowest common denominator in everyone. Rather, we should look for and expect excellence no matter one’s station in life. Many of the founders, such as Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin, were poor as church mice early in life. However, they took advantage of situations offered to them by benevolent friends or mentors to learn a trade and get an education to not only become founders of America but to make a prosperous life for themselves. Franklin built a fortune in the publishing and insurance business world on top of his scientific and diplomatic achievements, none of which would have happened had he or people around him not demanded excellence and achievement.

It didn’t come from the dirty waters of the Delaware or Schuylkill rivers that flowed through Philadelphia. And he sure didn’t grow up along the relatively pure rivers of Northern Virginia in the 17th and 18th centuries. If the definition of white privilege was retroactively applied to Franklin, Hamilton and many others, none of it could have been properly applied to them in their developmental years.

The main thing that bound them all together was their desire and the desire of their friends and adult mentors to achieve excellence in everything they did and to work hard for it.

Those are aspirations we can apply equally to our lives and every young person we encounter every day.