“Extracurriculars include . . .”

Although American high schools may be bastions of mediocrity, that doesn’t prevent them from producing students who are what I like to call “monsters of achievement.”

When I went through high school in the late 60s, monsters of achievement were as rare as pot-smoking virgins. High schools produced lots of high-achieving students in my day, but the typical model for excellence was the student who was superb at one subject, very strong at almost everything else, and maybe even weak in something like sports or art.

At graduation, awards were divvied up rather equally among a smallish group of students who were highly driven, to be sure, but usually by very singular passions. The student who was an ace at math, for example, usually wasn’t all that good at sports or essay writing. The great math kids conceded the honors in 11th-grade Shakespeare to those who were more “humanities-inclined.” Jocks openly lorded it over the athletically challenged, but as long as they earned reasonable grades (mostly Bs) they could get into a solid four-year college. Students who were superb at American history or Latin, but couldn’t grasp the meaning of the second law of thermodynamics in 10th-grade physics, received high accolades even while publicly (in what used to be straightforward college essays) owning up to how hard science was for them.

Today’s monsters of achievement, on the other hand, are tops at every single thing they touch — academics, sports, theater, high-school social life, running the student council, directing student clubs, and volunteering in the community. The sort of student I’m talking about is deeply talented and ambitious, but beyond that he or she possesses enough modesty (whether natural or false) to know that boasting is a bad thing to do. The monster of achievement may be envied, but is usually too nice to be disliked. By most standards, he or she is very, very “well-adjusted.”

For the monster of achievement, the only grade that’s acceptable is an A. The grades of A- or — gasp — B+ don’t exist in their minds, even if the subject is outside the realm of their real interests, or even if it’s an AP or local college course that’s taken for early college credit.

To the monster of achievement, high school is the equivalent of the Olympics, where the only real medal — the only one that the Wheaties box will consider putting under its logo — is the gold. Anything less is the same as losing. Hence the monster of achievement isn’t content to excel merely at academics. He or she also participates in a couple of varsity sports and by the junior year is named captain of one of them. He or she becomes president of at least one school club, holds some kind of office on the student council, has a role in each year’s student musical (starring in one by the junior or senior year), sings in the a cappella choir that travels to Congress, participates in the Model UN starting in the 10th grade, writes sensitive poetry, travels with the local YMCA youth group to help out people in an African village during the summer of the junior year, and volunteers his or her time in a soup kitchen each Thanksgiving Day. To cap things off, the monster of achievement earns stellar scores in both math and verbal SAT’s.

Whether monsters of achievement are young, brilliant, athletic polymaths who just happen to also love to do volunteer work, or simply super-smart, super-intense competitors, is open to question. Grade grubbing often increases as the level of talent and accomplishment rises, and volunteer work is now as much a measure of strategic résumé planning as it is of genuine charitable impulse.

Monsters of achievement are probably permanent features of the high-school landscape, but it would be very bad to permit them to set the standard of high-school excellence. Young people who are not, by nature, as competitive as monsters of achievement often possess precisely the qualities monsters of achievement are missing — qualities of humility and subtleness of understanding that have been formed at least in part by their relatively modest manifestations of excellence and their experiences, while young, of the occasional, but genuine, failure. To overstate the case, perhaps: Flatlining at the top of the screen is eerily similar to flatlining at the bottom of it.

There are thousands of high school students whose achievements are far less spectacular than that of monsters of achievement, but who possess equally — or even more — interesting and exciting minds. There are also a considerable number of late bloomers, for whom serious life only begins with — or even after — college. All of us should be humble in assessing youth. Life is, after all, a rich and ever unfolding experience.

(Image altered from a photo at Flickr.com)