Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life QUOTES

1 " Practical utility, however, is not the ultimate purpose of a liberal arts education. Its ultimate purpose is to help you learn to reflect in the widest and deepest sense, beyond the requirements of work and career: for the sake of citizenship, for the sake of living well with others, above all, for the sake of building a self that is strong and creative and free. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

2 " Depression means self-loathing, self-disgust, and the kind of emotional numbness that feels like psychic death. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

3 " The purpose of college, to put this all another way, is to turn adolescents into adults. You needn't go to school for that, but if you're going to be there anyway, then that's the most important thing to get accomplished. That is the true education: accept no substitutes. The idea that we should take the first four years of young adulthood and devote them to career preparation alone, neglecting every other part of life, is nothing short of an obscenity. If that's what people had you do, then you were robbed. And if you find yourself to be the same person at the end of college as you were at the beginning - the same beliefs, the same values, the same desires, the same goals for the same reasons - then you did it wrong. Go back and do it again. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

4 " We inherited a strong and flourishing country, and instead of making the investments - that is, the sacrifices - to maintain it, we chose to suck it dry and stick our children with the bill. If you want to see who is to blame for student debt, just look in the mirror. And if parents find themselves supporting kids beyond their college years, that is only, in the aggregate, a form of compensatory justice: the intergenerational transfer of wealth that should have been effected through taxation. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

5 " But the compulsive overachievement of today's elite college students - the sense that they need to keep running as fast as they can - is not the only thing that keeps them from forming the deeper relationships that might relieve their anguish. Something more insidious is operating, too: a resistance to vulnerability, a fear of looking like the only one who isn't capable of handling the pressure. These are young people who have always succeeded at everything, in part by projecting the confidence that they always will. Now, as they get to college, the stakes are higher and the competition fiercer. Everybody thinks that they are the only one who's suffering, so nobody says anything, so everybody suffers. Everyone feels like a fraud; everybody thinks that everybody else is smarter than they are. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

6 " Fortunately, our colleges and universities are fully cognizant of the problems I have been delineating and take concerted action to address them. Curricula are designed to give coherence to the educational experience and to challenge students to develop a strong degree of moral awareness. Professors, deeply involved with the enterprise of undergraduate instruction, are committed to their students' intellectual growth and insist on maintaining the highest standards of academic rigor. Career services keep themselves informed about the broad range of postgraduate options and make a point of steering students away from conventional choices. A policy of noncooperation with U.S. News has taken hold, depriving the magazine of the data requisite to calculate its rankings. Rather than squandering money on luxurious amenities and exorbitant administrative salaries, schools have rededicated themselves to their core missions of teaching and the liberal arts.

I'm kidding, of course. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

7 " I can tell you right now where you're going to end up: somewhere in the middle, with the rest of us. Does it really matter exactly where? People get to places like Yale and think that they've "arrived," only to discover that there are still other places to arrive at, and other places after that, and so on and so forth in an infinite recession, like the vista in a double mirror. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

8 " Life is more than a job; jobs are more than a paycheck; and a country is more than its wealth. Education is more than the acquisition of marketable skills, and you are more than your ability to contribute to your employer’s bottom line or the nation’s GDP, no matter what the rhetoric of politicians or executives would have you think. To ask what college is for is to ask what life is for, what society is for—what people are for. Do students ever hear this? What they hear is a constant drumbeat, in the public discourse, that seeks to march them in the opposite direction. When policy makers talk about higher education, from the president all the way down, they talk exclusively in terms of math and science. Journalists and pundits—some of whom were humanities majors and none of whom are nurses or engineers—never tire of lecturing the young about the necessity of thinking prudently when choosing a course of study, the naïveté of wanting to learn things just because you’re curious about them. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

9 " But there is something that’s a great deal more important than parental approval: learning to do without it. That’s what it means to become an adult. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

10 " You won’t be able to recognize the things you really care about until you have released your grip on all the things that you’ve been taught to care about. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

11 " And speaking of options ,these kids [the ones who attend elite universities] have all been told that theirs are limitless. Once you commit to something, though, that ceases to be true. A former student sent me an essay he wrote, a few years after college, called "The Paradox of Potential." Yale students, he said, are like stem cells. They can be anything in the world, so they try to delay for as long as possible the moment when they have to become just one thing in particular. Possibility, paradoxically, becomes limitation. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

12 " You’re told that you’re supposed to go to college, but you’re also told that you are being self-indulgent if you actually want to get an education. As opposed to what? Going into consulting isn’t self-indulgent? Going into finance isn’t self-indulgent? Going into law, like most of the people who do, in order to make yourself rich, isn’t self-indulgent? It’s not okay to study history, because what good does that really do anyone, but it is okay to work for a hedge fund. It’s selfish to pursue your passion, unless it’s also going to make you a lot of money, in which case it isn’t selfish at all. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

13 " If you grow up with less, you are much better able to deal with having less. That is itself a kind of freedom. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

14 " College, after all, as those who like to denigrate it often say, is "not the real world." But that is precisely its strength. College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

15 " The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it. In "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

16 " You want to make it to the top? There is no top. However high you climb, there is always somebody above you. Mailer wanted to be Hemingway, Hemingway wanted to be Joyce, and Joyce was painfully aware he’d never be another Shakespeare. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

17 " What’s the return on investment of college? What’s the return on investment of having children, spending time with friends, listening to music, reading a book? The things that are most worth doing are worth doing for their own sake. Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state. What’s at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

18 " A real reader creates her own canon, for it consists precisely of those books that she has used to create herself. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

19 " [...] art instills the fundamental moral lesson: That you aren't the center of the universe. That others weren't created for your benefit. That they are just as real as you, with equal claimes to dignity and understanding. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

20 " I have heard from many high-achieving students who have asked me whether it wasn’t possible to be invested both in learning for its own sake and in being at the top. No, I’ve said, it isn’t possible. Learning for its own sake means exactly what it says: learning is the only reason that you’re doing it, because learning is what matters. "

― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life