The culture that surrounds teenagers today values excellence with a force that borders on obsession. Students live in an atmosphere where mediocrity is frowned upon, and quantity is often prized over quality. Lakeside, for some, has an atmosphere that “you are defined by your GPA,” as one sophomore put it. It doesn’t help that Lakeside also has grade inflation, as detailed in several seminars run by the Parents and Guardians Association. Some Lakesiders talk about resumes, and others about what Ivy League they would — or wouldn’t — want to go to. They hear about how college admissions officers look for students exhibiting “passion” and equate that to a pages-long activity list, impressive test scores, and countless awards. This overwhelming pressure often encourages students to choose one specific skill, master it, and then remain there because being a “beginner” in anything else is a detriment to their “application.” In other words, students decide who they are before they figure out who they want to be — then, they don’t let themselves revise their choice.
Teenagers are the rational actors in an economy of achievement that rewards early specialization and a public record of achievements that grows longer with every passing year. In order to have a future, you must prove you already know who you are. At many schools, this trajectory feels inevitable. The admissions landscape continues to grow more opaque, and parents often respond by treating adolescence as a set of strategic choices instead of a time to explore. Schools thus respond by offering an ever wider menu of courses and activities. Students respond by compressing themselves into the narrow shape they believe will stand out. These three forces interact and form a process that continues to function regardless of the opinions of individuals within it — who often wish for the process to change for the better.
Inside this machine, the student who discovers an early strength is expected to cling to it so they can collect the predictable rewards of hard work: a math “main” receives praise for each efficient solution, while a “humanities kid” receives praise for each gold medal won in writing contests. Over time, this pattern of achievement and reward reinforces itself until the student no longer wonders whether they enjoy the work. They simply fear what would happen if they left the bubble that protects them, terrified that several of the dozens of students who participate in the same exact competitions, events, and exams will surpass them. As a result, students feel like they owe the world a version of themselves that no longer matches their interests. And yet, almost contradictorily, some students stay only with what they excel at because they fear the consequences of beginning again. They establish the terms and words that describe them well before they discover all of their definitions.
There are those that challenge this pattern. At Lakeside, for example, a student might walk from a rigorous science elective to a semester-long seminar on Asian-American literature, and then spend the rest of their morning leading a sectional in orchestra before running a set of experiments in a lab on their own independent study. Lakesiders who arrive expecting to be known as the best in their particular field discover that there are many just like them in their community, each one with additional talents and interests different from the next. A coder who may study computer science at the university level still faces a gargantuan history paper at a similar level of rigor. An actor who can command the musical stage still must confront the horrors of integration in a calculus unit.
Many at Lakeside discover that their original identity never captured the full range of what they can do. Others confront the humbling fact that someone else is better at the thing they once believed defined them. And as painful as that experience may be, it is the start of an honest education. That experience is not universal across American schools, and unless the school and the student can both accept that identity should be provisional and not permanent, it will never occur. Modern adolescence rewards the fourteen-year-old who declares their passion and never strays from it, while punishing those who may start “late” — despite being years away from turning 20. The result is a generation of students who can list their accomplishments down to the specific date they received them, yet struggle to answer the simplest of questions: Do you enjoy any of this?
A Lakesider cannot be reduced to a single discipline or talent because no adolescent should be reduced in that way. The challenge is to resist the reflex to define yourself too early or to categorize yourself into neat boxes before you discover what every box contains. The deeper, albeit more painful truth, is that each student holds many capacities at once that will be realized at different stages of their life. Growth requires space for uncertainty, even mediocrity, and a willingness to start fresh without the fear that the world will interpret that “starting fresh” as a failure of one’s ability.
If there is any reliable mark of a Lakesider, it is their ability to surprise. Whether a coder who writes poetry at the latest hours of night, or the wide receiver that spends their weekend in a clinical lab, none of Lakeside’s students fit into a simple category, and that is the point. Adolescence should be a process of expansion. The culture beyond the newly-erected iron gates that border the school will still try to sort its students. It will ask for narratives that weave together awards and accomplishments to attempt explaining passion, and it will hope for signals of prodigiousness and promise.
Should Lakeside, its faculty, families, and students continue to resist defining themselves early and allow curiosity to unsettle certainty, they all have a better chance of letting their students, children, and themselves become people who act with intention and not out of fear.
