Principal Points: Perfectionism or “Doing Your Best”

Past Principal Points

Perfectionism or “Doing Your Best”

Most parents are very concerned about how their children are doing in school. Certainly all of our AKCS parents share this concern. They want the best for them. Every parent has hopes and dreams for their children as to what they may one day accomplish in life. Most importantly, parents are concerned for the kind of people their children will grow up to be. This is, after all, the major reason for having a Christian school.

Character development is “Job One” in the Christian school. Training children to make wise choices and apply themselves diligently to the work at hand is, perhaps, the most important enterprise in the Christian school. It is why we give so much attention to effort and work habits on the report cards. More space is devoted to effort, work habits, and conduct on the report card than actual academic achievement. Parents rightly focus on these areas, because when all is said and done, we are more concerned about character than the academics.

This perspective often comes out at home or in the classroom when parents and teachers exhort children to “Do Your Best.” Every classroom and most families have children with varying abilities. It is clearly not fair to expect equal achievement from children with differing gifts and abilities. Thus, we try to encourage our children with statements like, “I’m not so concerned about your marks as long as you are doing your best.” We all, myself included, have used these expressions over the years. Not only do we use it to encourage our children, but also to encourage one another. Recently, however, I have come to question the wisdom of this.

When I think about doing my “best” on some project, I will often feel a sense of frustration or hopelessness. Many of the things that I do are not my “best”. I can do really very good work if I have unlimited time and resources at my disposal. However, there are always limitations. There are always other projects to work on that compete for my attention. For example, I am now back writing this article for the third time today. There are always interruptions; consequently, there are probably very few things I do in life that are truly my very best.

I have found a better perspective in Jesus’ words to the servants in the Parable of the Talents (Mt. 25:14-30). Each servant had been entrusted with varying amounts of riches to care for during their master’s absence. Each of the faithful ones doubled their (insert interruptions #4 & #5 here) wealth and received the same reward from Jesus. He said, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” The servant who had two talents wasn’t berated because he only earned two more instead of five. Nor was he compared to the servant who had five. Rather, they were rewarded based on their faithfulness to do well with what they had. By the same token, the servant who buried the money and simply returned it was criticized for his lack of faithfulness.

Clearly, faithfulness is the character quality Jesus commends here. Noticeably lacking is any mention of the servants doing their best. Could they have earned more with the money that they had? Was a 100% return the absolute best that they could have done? Probably not. However, they did well, and that is the point. Certainly, what it means to do well is going to be different for each person, but it is not the same as doing one’s best.

In fact, the emphasis on doing one’s best can cause some children to work endless hours on a project to ensure that it is perfect. Only once they have done everything that they can possibly think of will they consider it acceptable. The project may have easily earned an ‘A’ before the final two hours worth of work, but those two hours turn it into an ‘A+’. This is their best, and they have been taught to do their best and settle for nothing less. The end result of this thinking is an unhealthy perfectionism. It is wiser to challenge students to do well. For some students that may be earning a ‘B’ on a project. Maybe their best is a ‘B+’ or an ‘A-‘, but surely a ‘B’ is good. (Insert interruptions #6, #7, & #8) For some students their best will be an ‘A+’, so surely an ‘A-‘ would be worthy of a “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

Obviously, working this out in everyday living will still be a challenge. It is hard to know what represents “a job well done” for each student, but it should be our goal, and it is probably a better goal than urging them to do their best.

Brian Hazeltine, B.Ed., M.A.
Principal, Airdrie Koinonia Christian School