Home > Work > Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
41 " Online instruction isn’t just conducted on the Web; it embodies an idea of knowledge that’s been shaped by the Web—by Google, by Wikipedia—a confusion of information with understanding. "
― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
42 " colleges and universities do nothing to suggest that some ways of using your education are better than others. They do nothing, in other words, to challenge the values of a society that equates virtue, dignity, and happiness with material success. "
43 " What I saw at Yale I have continued to see at campuses around the country. Everybody looks extremely normal, and everybody looks the same. No hippies, no punks, no art school types or hipsters, no butch lesbians or gender queers, no black kids in dashikis. "
44 " The problem is that students have been taught that that is all that education is: doing your homework, getting the answers, acing the test. Nothing in their training has endowed them with the sense that something larger is at stake. They've learned to "be a student," not to use their minds. "
45 " The purpose of life becomes the accumulation of gold stars. Hence the relentless extracurricular busyness, the neglect of learning as an end in itself, the inability to imagine doing something that you can't put on your resume. Hence the constant sense of competition. "
46 " Whatever the motives out of which they were established, the old WASP admissions criteria actually meant something. Athletics were thought to build character - courage and selflessness and team spirit. The arts embodied an ideal of culture. Service was designed to foster a public-minded ethos in our future leaders. Leadership itself was understood to be a form of duty. Now it's all become a kind of rain dance that is handed down from generation to generation, an empty set of rituals known only to propitiate the gods. Kids do them because they know that they're supposed to, not because they, or anybody else, actually believes in them. "
47 " 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. "
48 " Implicit in the notion of such education as it is practiced in the United States is the concept of breadth. You concentrate in one field, but you get exposure to a range of others. You don’t just learn to think; you learn that there are different ways to think. You study human behavior in psychology, and then you study it in literature. You see what philosophy means by reality, and then you see what math or physics does. Your mind becomes more agile and resourceful, as well as more skeptical and rigorous. And most important of all, you learn to educate yourself. "
49 " I have certainly known students who feel they got a great education in college. But they always say some version of “the opportunities are there if you want to pursue them.” In other words, you have to ask—or really, you have to insist. "
50 " Academic training actively deprives you of the qualities that make for good teaching. A good teacher speaks plainly, in vivid, accessible language, because she is addressing what amounts to a general audience. But the kind of jargon academics learn to use is designed to repel the uninitiated. A good teacher ranges widely, making connections among subjects as well as from learning to life. But academics are constrained to specialize, and increasingly, to hyperspecialize, looking neither left nor right as they plow their little corner of the field. "
51 " When people say that students at elite schools have a sense of entitlement, that is what they are referring to: the belief that you deserve more than other people because your SAT scores are higher. Of course, your SAT scores are higher because you have already gotten more than other people. "
52 " Of course her daughter got into Harvard: that is exactly the kind of parenting the system rewards. That’s exactly what is wrong with it. "
53 " So it is with the drug of praise upon which these children are trained to depend: the praise that is the sign of parental love, for the achievement that is the condition of that love. Every A is a fix that temporarily quells the anxiety of failure, the terror of falling short. "
54 " The American university inherits the missions of two very different institutions: the English college and the German research university. The first pattern prevailed before the Civil War. Curricula centered on the classics, and the purpose of education was understood to be the formation of character. With the emergence of a modern industrial society in the last decades of the nineteenth century, that kind of pedagogy was felt to be increasingly obsolete. Johns Hopkins was founded in 1876 as the first American university on the German model: a factory of knowledge that would focus in particular on the natural and social sciences, the disciplines essential to the new economy and the world to which it was giving rise. "
55 " Growing up elite means learning to value yourself in terms of the measures of success that mark your progress into and through the elite: "
56 " We are not teaching to the test; we’re living to it. "
57 " Kids who have been raised under a regimen of positive reinforcement, and whose self-esteem depends on perfection, are not well equipped to handle criticism. Besides, they have better things to do than hit the books. At a big, public party school—let’s call it the University of Southern Football—that probably means beer and television. At elite colleges, it means those all-consuming extracurricular activities. "
58 " Teaching, said Socrates, is the reeducation of desire. If that sounds paternalistic, it is. Professors should be mentors, not commodities or clerks. "
59 " service,” which is nothing other than a modern echo of noblesse oblige, and generally undertaken in the same spirit of benign condescension. "
60 " With no larger educational ideals to shape the undergraduate experience," Lewis says, "decisions affecting students are calculated to satisfy their immediate demands." Instead of humanities, students are getting amenities. "