i have been thinking, with some amount of rage, about the curious, often lauded category of “honors students.” not in the flattering, congratulatory sense (everyone: society, parents, universities, professors, et cetera seem determined enough already to flatten them into some kind of sanctified ideal), i meant in the sense of what it actually means to be “brilliant.” let me be frank: i do not believe that the honors student is brilliant in the sense that matters. sure, he is brilliant as one might be brilliant at arranging cutlery in perfect order for inspection, or memorizing the most pedestrian facts and reproducing them in essays with surgical precision. he obeys the system. he is rewarded. he is disciplined. and for this, we call him brilliant.
meanwhile, somewhere in the shadows of the same lecture hall, there exists the student who fails. more accurately, there is the student who refuses to submit to the tyranny of measured perfection. she arrives late. she misses deadlines. she writes essays that veer into digression, incoherence, obsession, or sheer despair. she is called lazy, irresponsible, unworthy, unteachable. i argue that this is exactly the kind of student who is actually awake. she is awake in the way a weed is alive in concrete: stubborn, uncontainable, sometimes alarming, barely surviving in a world that prefers neat lawns and polished sidewalks. her ideas do not fit neatly into the rubric; they explode, they rupture, they bleed across margins and deadlines and expectations. and in this chaos, there is growth. there is audacity. there is brilliance.
the system, as i have come to understand it through years of neurodivergent negotiation, is not a crucible of creativity. it is a machine designed to reward compliance and punish disobedience. gpa does not equal intelligence. awards do not equal vision. the honors student internalizes this architecture, polishes herself to shine within it, and emerges adorned with accolades that signify what, exactly? that she has learned to obey? that she has survived? that she has mastered a game that no one is brave enough to question? possibly all of the above. and yet, the student who fails, who resists, who rages against this machine, touches something the honors student never can: the raw, unsanctioned, dangerous territory of thought itself.
consider the paradox: the honors student is celebrated for surviving the system, while the failing student is scorned for escaping it. and yet, if we are honest, it is the latter who dares, who disrupts, who writes, who thinks. brilliance is not tidy, nor is it linear. brilliance does not submit essays in double space, arial, formatted to perfection, with footnotes in perfect apa formatting. brilliance is dangerous, uncontainable.
so yes: honors students are brilliant, if you like brilliance measured by numbers and compliance. but the ones who fail, who stumble, who write recklessly, who resist and rage and collapse, they are the ones who are awake. they are the ones who might change the world, or at least our understanding of it. and isn’t that what matters, in the end?