Exonians Are Not the Best and Brightest

If you can stretch back far enough in the archives of your mind to remember the last time you went to Assembly (I know, it’s hard for me too), then you might remember a common theme among a lot of assembly speakers. The speakers will start out saying, or at some point mention, that they are standing in front of a room full of The Best and the Brightest, and, my personal favorite, the World’s Future Leaders.

"At the end of the day, Exonians are simply not the Best. We are overworked, we are tired and we are fed dessert three times a day."

Now, the World’s Future Leaders line is particularly ridiculous because it’s simply not possible. I for instance don’t want to lead anyone anywhere, and instead like to entertain the idea that someday I could be a writer, living alone in a tiny house in the middle of nowhere. But I also know a lot of Exonians who want to be things like chemical engineers or journalists, which are not typically “leader of the world,” kind of jobs. Now, if we stretch the idea of “leader” out far enough, we could probably say that “every Exonian will be a leader in anything they do,” but that can be said of anyone who stays in a field or a job long enough, does their job well and climbs the career ladder. If we define it that way, then my brother is on track to be a Future Leader at the local Five Guys he works at. It suggests that we are already and automatically set to lead the world when we leave Exeter just by being Exonians, regardless of the fact that many Exonians will not go on to be leaders and that many who never attended Exeter will.

But I would also like to make the case that we are not, in fact, the Best and the Brightest, and that actually, being constantly called such does more damage to us than good.

I don’t deny that Exeter is made up of smart, hardworking kids. But it’s not realistic that we have all of the smartest, most hardworking kids in the nation, and certainly not the world. Some of those kids applied to a lot of private schools, got into most of them, and probably picked Andover. Some of those kids are too poor, or too far away, or have too good of a relationship with their parents to attend Exeter. A lot of those kids didn’t apply. Some of them did apply, but got rejected because all admissions systems are faulty and subjective. Some of those kids don’t speak English. Some of those kids might have a passion for acting or dancing that Exeter wouldn’t have given them time or credit for. The list goes on. 

But more importantly, after being constantly called “the Best and the Brightest,” so often and for so long, being the Best and the Brightest becomes part of our identity as Exonians and it becomes some sort of ultimate standard that we must reach. But it’s impossible to reach, and so two things happen.

The first, which I’ve seen a lot of, is putting other people down. I’ve experienced this while standing in a group of Exonians watching a parade of Exeter High School kids go by and listening to the day student Exonians talk to the boarding Exonians about how dumb the kids who go to that school are. I’ve experienced it at a private school conference for a school club where most of the Exonians present talked for the majority of the conference about how stupid the questions the students from all the other schools had asked were. I hear this kind of stuff all the time at Exeter, even from the students I find least elitist, and even, admittedly, from myself. Putting others down is one of the only ways we can feel secure in this Best and Brightest label. By pointing out others’ flaws, we justify to ourselves why we deserve the “Best High School Education in America,” and why it is that we (as individuals and a student body) are told that we are so high above everyone else.

The second thing that seems to happen is that we are afraid to fail and learn by making mistakes. When suddenly being the smartest is so important, and when you are told that everyone around you is the smartest in the world, taking a risk and falling on your face becomes something even more risky, because it endangers you the exposure of being stupid amongst genius peers. I’ve noticed that often the students who come across the smartest are the students who are very good at figuring out what the teacher wants, rather than the students who think for themselves but sometimes end up looking foolish. And Exonians are obsessed with pleasing their teachers. If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say that you’ll get an A by writing about this thing for that teacher, or that someone got a bad grade because the teacher didn’t like them, then I could probably afford to pay full tuition. But even worse is this obsession with impressing the other students around us, because one wrong step and we may fail the Best and Brightest label and fall into the category of the kids who Exonians look down on. We spend a lot of time thinking about scamming our way through the system, rather than just being interested, engaged and critical students.

At the end of the day, Exonians are simply not the Best. We are overworked, we are tired and we are fed dessert three times a day. If we were the best, we’d probably be better at being humble. We’re just not, and that’s okay. Not being the Best doesn’t make us any less curious, diligent, thoughtful and interested about matters of the world. But I think we are selling ourselves short by buying into the idea of “the Best and the Brightest,” rather than engaging fully and openly with the world around us, accepting it as full of people who want to learn and think just as much as we do.