Perseverence

I am serving on a committee devoted to school mision and culture, and part of that is looking at the official school values. Many of those seem to me not to be values at all, but qualities. My school only accepts students with perfect or near perfect scores on the national exam, so isn't it somewhat facile to value excellence, as if it were something we instilled in them? Nowhere is excellence defined.
The issue has me thinking a lot about character education. When I saw this wee daisy blooming amongst the cobbles, I thought about the importance of determinination in the face of adversity. Even our richest, most gifted kids will face loss, failure and rejection one day. Will they have learned enough about resilience to come to bloom where life blows them? I hope so. Are we teaching it explicitly? No. We're excellent.