The aim of this paper is to examine the meaning of \'excellence\' in education by showing its conceptual relationship to Polanyi\'s concept of conviviality. It begins with a discussion about the tendency that current discourses on excellence in education, adopting the idea of means-ends separation, are prevalently concentrating on social, political and economical accounts which pursue the goods external to education. However, such tendency is based on a distorted conception of the meaning of educational practice. MacIntyre understands that internal goods of education constitute central meaning of educational practice. Therefore, unlike the case of external goods originated by the principles of social and economical competition, the pursuit of the goods internal to education implies the enhancement of educational excellence. Polanyi envisages conviviality as a specific mode of apprenticeship in which intellectual cooperation is undergoing between novices and the experienced. Conceived of conviviality as such, Polanyi maintains that conviviality results in achievement of the goods internal to a practice and consequently contributes to the development of practice by sharing the goods with all the participants. Though he draws this idea in the context of science teaching, it seems that his idea of conviviality has a significance in its implication for education. This is because the concept of conviviality applied in education invokes the unique feature of the relationship between teachers and students, particularly in the sense of initiation of students into convivial experience. For this reason, the study makes clear that \'educational excellence\' should be reconceptualised both as pursuing the intellectual and moral \'cooperation\' between teachers and students, and as sharing the internal goods with teachers and students. Insofar as that educators and policy-makers use the word \'excellence\' in this way in education, the concept of excellence may contribute significantly to the development of educational practice and keep the autonomy of education.