“There will always be someone greater and lesser”

“There will always be someone greater and lesser” is Mr Wallaker’s concise challenge to a school culture of comparison. In his argument, a child’s worth is not established by winning, class position, or constant praise, but by growing competence and the ability to recover from failure while retaining confidence and optimism. The maxim gives that view memorable form, even as other scenes show how difficult it can be to live up to any neat rule for coping.

Formulation and meaning

Mr Wallaker delivers the maxim during a disagreement with Nicolette Martinez about what children need. She advocates flute lessons, fencing, and social engagements framed as team-building; he answers that children are not corporate products and need confidence, fun, affection, love, and a sense of self-worth. His extended formulation insists that “there will always – always – be someone greater and lesser than themselves,” then shifts attention from where a child stands against others to whether the child can be content with who they are and what they are doing as their competence grows.

The sentence acknowledges comparison rather than promising to abolish it. Its force lies in what follows from that recognition: being surpassed is not proof of personal failure, just as outranking someone else is not a sufficient measure of success. Mr Wallaker makes the point concrete by arguing that the measure of later success is not always winning, but how a person deals with failure. The ability to get up after falling, with optimism and a sense of self intact, matters more than class position in Year 3.

The school argument

The maxim answers Nicolette’s assumption that preparation for a competitive world means learning how to win. When she asks whether there is any point in trying if children are not ranked, Mr Wallaker redirects the discussion toward the adults they will become. Her response—that the world is not harsh if one knows how to win—leaves their disagreement unresolved; she turns instead to a question about Atticus’s form position. Mr Wallaker gets to his feet and reiterates that the school does not give form positions.

The exchange pits two definitions of preparation against one another: securing advantage through ranking, and building the inner resources to withstand setbacks. The narrator’s thought that Mr Wallaker seems to have been reading Buddha’s Little Instruction Book adds a wry note to his sudden, polished pronouncement. Yet the speech is not only a joke about his elevated tone. Its practical test is whether children can fall without losing their sense of themselves, rather than whether they can be kept permanently ahead of their peers.

Resilience beyond the classroom

Elsewhere, Bridget Jones’s experience gives the idea of resilience a more painful, domestic scale. Remembering the first period after Mark Darcy’s death, she recalls Billy running through the house saying he had lost his father, and the effort to hold both children while they asked what was wrong. Her account of grief is not a story of mastering a competition: it is a struggle to manage the next morning, care for the children, and keep functioning. She calls the necessity of continuing KBO, or Keep Buggering On, while acknowledging how far her outward role as mother and widow diverged from feeling whole inside.

The school maxim does not erase that cost. Rather, the difference between its composed language and Bridget’s grief shows that continuing after a fall can mean the uncelebrated work of keeping a household going. The same tension appears in a family celebration when Billy, already upset at missing the hard-hat ceremony, cries that Bridget is to blame and says he will kill her. Under stress, she shouts back that she will kill him first. The outburst is followed by her mother’s shocked reprimand: a comic, strained failure of the calm adults are supposed to provide, not a demonstration of effortless self-command.

Bridget’s response to Roxster’s decision to end their relationship offers another contrast between the ideal of resilience and the performance of being fine. Tired, she immediately adopts a cheerful, accommodating tone, says that he is right to seek someone his own age, and insists that the relationship has been marvellous and that they have learned and grown. Roxster looks haunted and asks whether they can still be friends. Her upbeat reply may sound like composure, but the scene leaves visible the effort involved in turning hurt into a reassuring speech.

In a separate conversation, talk about a phone, tea bags, and Bridget’s dress gives way to tears: she bursts into tears in the other person’s face, hears the repeated instruction to pull herself together and soldier on, and then watches that person begin crying too. The moment unsettles the simple division between the person who must keep going and the person who can no longer manage it. Read beside Mr Wallaker’s maxim, these scenes make resilience less like a ranking or a polished virtue than a fragile practice, sometimes shared, sometimes interrupted, and never guaranteed by appearing composed.