In the 2019 documentary The Edge, you watch a lowly ranked England cricket team battle over four years to become the number one team in the world. The players recognise they’re underachieving, they work hard, they practise intentionally, they play for one another and then they beat (almost) everyone in their path. Cue much champagne and dancing.

But then the film asks: what next?

The narrative turns its attention to the dark side of sporting psychology. After the high of reaching their goal, players experience a harrowing emptiness, alongside an increasing sense of pressure to “do it again but better”. The relentless pressure for continual improvement takes its toll; team spirit evaporates, love of the game dissipates, results collapse.

Jonathan Trott, one of the most high-profile players of that period, describes how he worked harder and harder, striving for marginal gains but losing his sense of purpose on the way, eventually succumbing to a stress-related illness and premature retirement from the international scene.

And in a revealing admission, former England coach Andy Flower acknowledges that if he were to do it again, he’d spend more energy getting to know his players as people and understanding their broader motivations and aspirations, rather than seeing them as winning machines to be tuned through increasingly technical tinkering.

The film is a fascinating study in the psychology of achievement and I couldn’t help but make the parallels with the competitive, achievement-focused, rankings-driven nature of contemporary educational culture. How many Jonathan Trotts are out there - pupils, teachers, headteachers, undergraduates - who have wholly lost sight of the purpose and pleasure of learning amid the increased pressure to rise up the achievement rankings?

That question forces you to ask another: what is really worth achieving?

This is perhaps the biggest philosophical question of them all. It’s synonymous with asking what constitutes the good life. Virtue? Equanimity? Honour? Power?

Donald Kagan, Sterling professor of Classics and history at Yale, has traced the way in which Western culture’s attitude to achievement has developed under the influence of two powerful but contrasting ideas. On the one hand, there is the ultra-competitive culture derived from the ancient Greeks, in which individual achievement, honour and accolades are supremely prized: “Always fight bravely and be superior to others,” says Glaucus in Book 6 of The Iliad. Superiority and public acclaim are the goals.

On the other hand, the influence of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, Kagan argues, is much more communitarian, concerned with equality, social justice, the poor, dispossessed and the foreigner in their midst. Individual honours don’t matter - in fact, they’re discouraged, since the purpose of life is understood in relation to the collective fulfilment of a particular moral code leading to social cohesion.

Neo-Darwinist narrative

Today, some would say we lean more to the former than the latter. The late philosopher Mary Midgley argued that a neo-Darwinist narrative has an excessive grip on our collective consciousness: we are fundamentally selfish, neo-Darwinists argue, so it’s inevitable that we will act in selfish ways, primarily seeking our own advancement. We apply this competitive “survival of the fittest” assumption to economics, education, everything.

However, Midgley argues that this is a misrepresentation of Darwin, who strongly emphasised our social natures, too. But many young people have bought the prevailing “myth” that it’s all about them and their personal levels of accomplishment, and that somehow pursuing a path of individual achievement will lead to fulfilment.

For example, William Deresiewiecz’s Excellent Sheep exposes the self-defeating way in which “high-achieving” students strive for ever-longer lists of accomplishments in order to access elite colleges, because that’s what they think they’re supposed to do, and because it leads to “successful” careers. But they do so without any over-arching sense of authentic purpose, which psychology tells us is so important to the experience of fulfilment.

Of course, it’s in the nature of “achievement” that it’s finite. Accomplished. In the past. The French achever means “to finish”. “Let no man say he is happy until his death” says Solon, the founder of Athenian democracy.

However, a healthy psychological approach to measured public achievements would see them not merely as full stops, but within the context of a broader picture; markers on a life plan; part of a sweep of personal development towards full self-actualisation. When too much rides on the achievements themselves, they can take on a decontextualised significance and importance all of their own.

This is a particular danger during teenage years. Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore’s Inventing Ourselves shows how adolescence is a particularly sensitive time for the development of the brain and, by association, their concept of selfhood.

Teenagers’ brains are undergoing an intense period of rewiring, and they rebuild their self-image as they approach adulthood, heavily influenced by their peers but incorporating other types of feedback, too. Teenagers are especially susceptible to internalising labels and markers of achievement and giving them undue weight in their overall self-perception.

So hand them an “objective” measurement of their success, or lack of it, and they may easily absorb it into their own perspective on their broader value. It may take years to shake themselves out of a self-image partly derived from “authoritative” measures of achievement, such as exam results.

Now, this might work out well if those measurements of achievement indicate that you’re clever and capable, and better than others at the game at hand. It might lead to self-confidence and breed future successes. But it can easily go the other way.

High-achievers can succumb to a damaging sense of pressure to maintain expectations. Or if, at a developmentally sensitive moment, you get feedback that you’re in the bottom quartile of your peer group in the only competition that seems to matter, that definition can take a strong hold on a young person’s self-image. Mental health risks abound either way.

Ruthless competition

Sadly, in education, we have designed achievement systems that are obliged to offer exactly this sort of dispiriting, demoralising feedback to large swathes of the adolescent population. It is structurally impossible for all students to achieve measurably “well”, whatever school websites might say - this year’s examinations fiasco was perhaps the first time that many outside of education fully realised that fact. The mass ranking and measurement exercise of external examination means that tens of thousands of young people must be told that they’ve failed every year.

They are likely to believe us. Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, speaks of the “forgotten third” - the 187,000 teenagers who are statistically doomed to fall below a “good” pass at GCSE every year because of the principle of comparable outcomes. This system has “designed in” mass failure.

If we’re applying the ancient Greek model, and education is essentially a competition, then that’s just part of the nature of a contest: winners and losers are inevitable. But if that is our model, perhaps we should be up front about it. It’s social Darwinism applied to children’s lives. The educational environment will select the winners through a ruthless competition for scarce resources: ‘good’ passes. Natural attrition and bell-curve distribution will take care of the rest.

Put like that, are supporters of the system still as keen as they were to defend it?

How else could achievement play out in education? Young people need encouraging, formative, holistic feedback that helps them reflect on the sort of person that they are becoming, and which recognises that the development of character and dispositions is a life-long exercise.

Lip service is often paid to the importance of “character”, but too often the suggestion that this really matters is swamped by the language and activity around measurable achievement. Research from Harvard’s Making Caring Common project, for example, suggests that there is a mismatch between what parents say they value and how young people themselves perceive parental priorities: 96 per cent of parents say moral character and caring for others is “very important, if not essential” and place it as their top priority for their children, whereas 81 per cent of young people think that their individual happiness and level of achievement are their parents’ top concern.

These outcomes are, of course, not mutually exclusive, but the difference in emphasis is striking.

There is similar evidence around teacher-pupil perceptions. Teachers report being primarily concerned with the wellbeing of their students, whereas pupils rate their teachers’ concern around attainment as being much higher.

Clearly, something is being lost in translation, and it strikes at the heart of student motivation and wellbeing.

What if we understood achievement more cooperatively and longitudinally, and in a way that contributed positively to civic life?

There is precious little in school life that prizes collective achievement. Even when schools are sufficiently well resourced to be able to play sport against one another, the prevailing narrative still implies that achievement means beating other people, not working with them to, for example, improve society.

What we need is a broader and more socially inspiring model of achievement for our young people. Catherine Elgin, professor of the philosophy of education at Harvard, argues compellingly that the purpose of education is to help students develop the capabilities they need to live lives that they consider good.

I love the personalisation of the way this aim is framed alongside the emphasis placed on broader values. And there’s all the difference in the world between “good” and “successful”. Student interests matter, as does a broader conception of how they contribute to something “good”.

Education is not - and can never be - simply about accumulating preparation-for-life credits in some future-looking way, or clambering the greasy pole of the great educational competition.

Elgin points out that, for many people, formal education comprises 20-30 per cent of their lifespan, so it is life, and the lived experience of being a purposeful young person in education matters as much as the experience beyond it.

Alistair McConville is director of learning and innovation at Bedales School

This article originally appeared in the 4 September 2020 issue under the headline “What does it mean to achieve?”