Every cocurricular activity, whether debating, robotics club, team sports, music ensembles, or drama, offers a similar promise: it forms character.
For example, push through the discomfort of public speaking often enough, and you won’t just get better at speaking, you will become more confident and articulate. Philosophers call this, ‘virtue as skill’.
‘Struggling to achieve’, what we call Per Aspera at Queenwood, is formed through deliberate practice and leads to reaching your aspirations, Ad Astra (e.g. becoming a better public speaker).
Per Aspera Ad Astra is not just Queenwood’s motto, it underpins everything we do. It also fits the Aristotelian notion of becoming ‘who we are’ through our actions. Participating is vital to developing skill. After all, you don’t learn to swim from reading a text… you need to get wet.
Research on how expertise develops complicates the picture. Skills, it turns out, tend to be more narrowly developed than we assume. Practice tends to build specific, situation-bound competence rather than a generalised capacity that transfers to wherever it’s needed.
This matters for how we think about cocurricular as character-building. If a student develops ‘discipline’ only in the well-structured context of swim practice — showing up at 5 a.m., following a coach’s plan, hitting splits — there’s no guarantee that discipline ‘shows up’ when the context changes. For example, is it brought to an unstructured research project, a messy family obligation, a period with no swim coach at all? The skill was real, but it may have been formed for one specific situation and not transferable to other challenging situations.
None of this means cocurriculars are pointless — quite the opposite. It means the value of participating in cocurriculars isn’t inevitable. The activities most likely to build genuine virtue are the ones that deliberately vary the conditions: a debating program that throws students by giving them unfamiliar topics and formats, a sports program or drama production that rotates roles, a music program that insists on improvisation as well as playing rehearsed pieces.
“Growth comes from meeting situations that we haven’t specifically trained for, not just repeating the ones we have.”
That is why Queenwood offers such a diverse cocurricular and sports program. So our girls learn to step into different settings and try out unfamiliar activities. In doing so, they learn to transfer their behavioural and cognitive skills beyond a single domain, which lays down the solid foundations needed to internalise lasting character virtues and reach for the stars (Ad Astra).
The lesson for students, parents, and coaches alike is to treat the variety and novelty of cocurricular activities as part of the curriculum. A skill practised in familiar settings, stays exactly that — a skill. Character virtues need to be tested somewhere they haven’t been rehearsed so they become internalised.