This will be the first installment of a series on what we owe to children.

To begin, I believe we owe children the opportunity to become accomplished.

The Little Rats of Orlando

I am thundering down the concrete stairs of one of the nation’s largest and most technologically advanced performing arts centers. As I round the corner of the basement hallway, a cacophony spills out of two dressing rooms, then echoes and redoubles its force. The rooms pulse with an energy feared by many in our perverse culture: the energy of little girls building their futures. Presiding over the chaos are the mothers who have stepped forward to maintain the tradition—matrons in the best sense of the word. Their bodies are solid, hips having spread over one or more childbirths, knees twinging from stooping, bending, twisting to the height and rapid movements of a toddler, or shoulders rounded with the years of waiting for this precious life to be delivered to them through other means. These hips and knees now creak and ache. More than one matron refuses stair duty, and so I run up and down the concrete steps to capture the workout on my fitness watch, grateful for one more year of mobility. Creases and lines cross the matrons’ faces, testifying to the years of worry about infertility and the best schools and the most affordable neighborhoods, the fear for a child with deadly allergies and the rate of inflation. They may be mothers, but they are severe and all business.

They speak reverentially of “Miss Kim,” the ballet mistress who oversees the children's roles in the annual professional production of The Nutcracker. They invoke the specter of Miss Kim’s disapproval to quiet the rowdy play of nine year-olds whose bodies long for sunshine and monkey bars but who must dwell in a basement for an eight-hour day. Eventually, the real Miss Kim arrives to adjust a hair pin, wipe a smudge of eye liner, change out a pair of gloves. Far from a screaming ogre, Miss Kim commands the attention of the sixty dancers through her care for the tradition of the ballet. She never raises her voice.

Over the course of the afternoon, each matron will at some moment be embraced by spidery arms as a perfectly coiffed and made-up youthful face will look adoringly or pleadingly up to capture her eyes, and then the lines will deepen and I will see that they are not really the lines of fear and worry. Joy first put them there: the joy of beholding this tiny creature—this creature’s gaze, smiles, stumbles, and now, dancing steps.

These are the little rats of the Orlando Ballet. In August, these dancers attended hours of auditions to earn a coveted spot in The Nutcracker. In this new production, the children’s roles have been severely limited. What has traditionally been a showcase production of the ballet school’s children and teens has been converted to a sparkling homage to adult artistry and technical whiz-bangs (smoke, and flying dancers, and a giant carousel horse ridden by Uncle Drosselmeyer). But it would not be The Nutcracker if it didn’t feature a few children, and so the very best have spent weeks mastering the steps of the party children, the small soldiers, small mice, sprites and polichinelles.1 The tradition of the “little rats” is distinctively French, but like most of the best French products it has been appropriated by appreciators the world over. These little rats have a distinctively Floridian style to them (no leg warmers needed here), but they are “petits rats,” nonetheless. The Paris Opera Ballet website, however, still crows that the “rat” is exclusively French:

The “little rat” is a young pupil at the School of Dance of the Paris Opera who takes lessons and performs in ballet productions. Formerly housed at the Palais Garnier, s/he is now trained in the building designed by Christian de Portzamparc in Nanterre. “They are only to be found near the Rue Le Peletier, at the Royal Academy of Music, or near Rue Richer, at the ballet class; they exist but there; you will seek the rat in vain over the entire surface of the globe. Paris possesses three things that all other capitals envy her: the street urchin, the seamstress and the rat.2

I would call the rat an export, however, because you find them in every mid-to-large city that has a ballet company and school, and these backstage areas are one of the few places left where you can find children in pursuit of accomplishment.

Defining accomplishment

Accomplishment is the manifestation of the upwardly-mobile aspirations of middle and upper-middle class families to have children who can move through the ranks of society with ease and grace. I have been particularly attuned to accomplishment this season because I spent a few weeks in Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and she gives a significant amount of space in her tightly-paced script to the conversations concerning—and demonstrations of—accomplishment. Hamill deletes Darcy’s sister, Georgiana, from the script and gives a featured moment to Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s stunted offspring who has no accomplishments because she was sickly as a child. Hamill similarly focuses our attention on Mary Bennet’s terrible piano playing and recitations, Elizabeth’s lack of discipline in everything except reading and walking, and Miss de Bourgh’s restricted development in every area of the arts and academics. She thereby leads the audience to meditate more on the failure to attain accomplishment than to admire its proud exemplars.

In Austen’s novel, which inspired the play, the dialogue about accomplishment begins when Elizabeth Bennet has come to Netherfield Park to check on her sister, Jane, who caught a cold riding over there in the rain. As Jane convalesces in bed, Elizabeth suffers the condescension of Miss Bingley, the cold aloofness of Mr. Darcy, and the well-meaning but unwelcome attempts of Mr. Bingley to draw her into conversation (as she is trying to read a book):

“It is amazing to me,” said Bingley, “how young ladies have patience to be so very accomplished as they all are.”

“All young ladies accomplished! My dear Charles, what do you mean?”

“Yes, all of them, I think. They all paint tables, cover screens, and net purses. I scarcely know any one who cannot do all this, and I am sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time without being informed that she was very accomplished.”

“Your list of the common extent of accomplishments,” said Darcy, “has too much truth. The word is applied to many a woman who deserves it no otherwise than by netting a purse, or covering a screen. But I am very far from agreeing with you in your estimation of ladies in general. I cannot boast of knowing more than half a dozen, in the whole range of my acquaintance, that are really accomplished.”

“Nor I, I am sure,” said Miss Bingley.

“Then,” observed Elizabeth, “you must comprehend a great deal in your idea of an accomplished woman.”

“Yes, I do comprehend a great deal in it.”

“Oh! certainly,” cried his faithful assistant, “no one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, all the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved.”

“All this she must possess,” added Darcy, “and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.”

“I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any.”

When you look at Darcy and Miss Bingley’s collective list: singing, dancing, drawing, music, modern languages, genteel comportment, and a program of continual intellectual improvement as shown by extensive reading: you, too, might echo Elizabeth Bennet in defensive astonishment: how could even half a dozen women become such paragons? But, like Elizabeth, you are likely confusing “accomplishment” with “mastery.” When we confuse accomplishment with mastery and throw the whole project out with a shrug, we deny children something far greater than skills at drawing or dancing. We deny them the chance to feel true self-respect.

A rubric for child-rearing?

In higher education, we assess the success of our students and our own teaching by trying to quantify what percentage of a class move from the level of “Beginning” in any subject matter or skill through “Developing,” to “Accomplished,” and perhaps even so far as “Mastery.” The goal for any course is that a majority of students reach the level of “Accomplished.” A properly planned course of study suited to the student group you have should meet this expectation—if too few can attain accomplishment, you will dispirit them. If all of them attain “Mastery,” then your course objectives are not difficult enough for the stage of development at which they come to you (no matter how much they wish every course gave them that “easy A” and how much faculty wish to pad their course evals by making course expectations so easy an undergraduate can sleepwalk through it). Ultimately, carefully assessing how you teach and the results your students can achieve should lead you to understanding a simple truth that both teachers and parents miss: much of the time, our goal is accomplishment, not mastery. We owe it to our students, and to our children, to give them the opportunities and the tools to become accomplished without the anxiety that they must master everything that we put in front of them.

Mastery by definition is the realm of the few. For a student to be successful in an undergraduate course, they must show accomplishment. For a course to be successful, the majority of students should achieve accomplishment. A few students who master the material (with gusto) are a treat, but in no way the rule. But what I see over and over again in my classroom (and in auditions) are young adults who carry all of the awareness of what mastery looks like but a sloppiness or haphazardness due to an upbringing that never directed them to achieve accomplishment in any single domain. Without experiencing accomplishment at any point in childhood, they do not know their own talents and they struggle to understand the amount of effort required by a meaningful pursuit. Without knowing how to be accomplished, they can never hope to become masters of any art or science.

The Tyranny of Omnipresent Mastery

To return to ballet: when I was young I had no hope of seeing any of the contemporary great ballet dancers myself. I could read about them in magazines or in their memoirs and study the still photographs of them in arabesque en pointe. Once or twice Masterpiece Theatre on PBS featured one of the classic ballets, like Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, which I taped on VHS and watched over and over again.

Compare my access to the true masters of ballet to the reality experienced by young people today, who can access video after video of great dancers. They can compare every fraction of an inch of their body and every angle of their technique with that of the greatest dancers from around the world, and they can do so continuously. Young people can conduct these crippling comparisons for every area of human excellence before they’ve had the chance to feel in their bodies or spirits the first tastes of accomplishment.

So, to begin with, I believe there is a significant danger in overwhelming children with too many examples of the great masters in every domain. While I think our impulse to expose them to the best comes from a laudable desire to inspire them, I fear that when they are only exposed to the great masters that—perversely—we destroy hope.

A student on a developmental path does well when they can see the next step clearly and understands exactly what they need to apprehend or demonstrate to reach that next level. But to only see the final product is overwhelming—like being handed a few bent nails and a 2X4 and shown the architectural plans for a house. Ballet classes taught in the traditional method put the most accomplished dancers front and center. While the petty might think that this is done to shame the less fortunate and to reward the blessed, it’s actually to put the model directly in the sight line of those students who can benefit from an exemplar. You would never put the soloist from the company in the front of the class, but a student from their own level who is just a bit more accomplished.

I see this in every area of excellence. No longer do we take young people to hear folk music played in grubby venues, but we take them to Taylor Swift concerts. And so we have fewer guitarists and no banjo players. How could a ten year old with a thrift store instrument aspire to become the only guitarists they have seen, all of whom are the world’s best? We don’t see examples of Aunt Mildred’s tailoring and dress-making on Uncle Todd and Cousin Ellen, but we do see Ariana Grande in exquisite confections from the world’s best designers, dresses that defy gravity in their miraculous construction. And so the young child doesn’t ask to sew a button or to make a suit for his teddy bear, and we have fewer designers and our clothes are mass-produced to fit no particular body. After all, whose body looks like hers? The art of dressing well (which has very little to do with budget or figure) is lost to all but the most wealthy.

A darker expression of the war on accomplishment appears in the growing number of young people arriving at college with no pretensions to accomplishment at anything. They had been signed up for an art camp, or a few weeks of dance that they complained about and from which were promptly withdrawn, perhaps a math competition team that was “boring” and was quickly dropped. They do not have the slightest intuition what accomplishment requires, and have never felt the absorbing intensity of what Cal Newport calls “flow.”3 I have not found any way to capture the imaginations of these students in class because they aspire to be better at nothing. Their apathy alarms me, and I turn away from it in shame. Thankfully, they are still few.4

Accomplishment is Cheerful

The theatre basement has concrete block walls and so the laughs, screeches, and gossip of the sixty little rats reverberate in the cacophonous tunnel that connects the dressing rooms. Every few minutes a few of them spill through a doorway to dance in the hall, executing the pas de deux of the Sugar Plum Fairy and her prince, which they have studied for weeks from the edges of the stage. In the rooms, they are crocheting and knitting, playing cards, finishing math and English homework. The time is beginning to approach for when the soldiers must get dressed. I tell them to begin to dress, but a twelve-year old dancer with the imperious brow of a Hungarian duchess informs me that I’m too early. Of course she is right—she has been living in this music and movement for twelve weeks. I’ve only just arrived. As I look at her, I do not see a future prima ballerina or even a soloist. I see the future cardiac surgeon who will save a child’s life by expertly closing a hole in the atrial septum. The elegant hands that long to be handed some pointe shoes, to sew the ribbons in place, will be ready to sew sutures through delicate tissues. The one behind her will someday be a lawyer—she has an argument in hand at every second, and she’s charming on top of it. In twenty years’ time, she’ll be pulling up to valet parking at this performing arts center in a well-earned Maserati and smiling to herself about her days as a performer here. With all of her interpersonal skills, honed through years of moving between groups of peers and adults, she’ll know exactly when to reveal to new acquaintances her history as a young dancer—if she reveals it at all. It was a time in her life that made her who she is today, but it is not her identity.

In the novel, Jane Austen’s narrator remarks in Chapter 6 on the “accomplishment” of Elizabeth as compared to that of Mary:

Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached. Elizabeth, easy and unaffected, had been listened to with much more pleasure, though not playing half so well.

Jane Austen shows us accomplishment both through what it is and what it is not. Accomplishment is not Miss Bingley’s oppressive list or Mary’s labored and vain demonstrations of rote skill. Both Miss Bingley and Mary fail to demonstrate accomplishment because they are not cheerful. They play and sing and speak as though every moment is an examination and they must defend their skills to a dour schoolmaster. They never achieve the easy and unaffected manner of Elizabeth Bennet, who—even though she does not play half so well as she might because she will not apply herself to practice— has the self-respect and the cheerfulness to give herself through her performances.

As I say goodbye to the “little rats” of Orlando for this season, I marvel at the intense variety of them. Some are truly excellent, masters in waiting. But most are just so cheerfully present in the dance, executing the steps well, and flinging their light out to an audience of thousands. They have accomplished so much at nine, ten, eleven years old. And now they are ready to accomplish so much more.