62
" Society is a conspiracy to keep itself from the truth. We pass our lives submerged in propaganda: advertising messages; political rhetoric; the journalistic affirmation of the status quo; the platitudes of popular culture; the axioms of party, sect, and class; the bromides we exchange every day on Facebook; the comforting lies our parents tell us and the sociable ones our friends do; the steady stream of falsehoods that we each tell ourselves all the time, to stave off the threat of self-knowledge. Plato called this doxa, opinion, and it is as powerful a force among progressives as among conservatives, in Massachusetts as in Mississippi, for atheists as for fundamentalists. The first purpose of a real education (a "liberal arts" education) is to liberate us from doxa by teaching us to recognize it, to question it, and to think our way around it. "
― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
73
" A former student, in an essay called "The Paradox of Potential," writes, "Instead, we moved cautiously, in groups, plodding down a few well-worn trails so as to ensure that two or four years down the road, we could be stem cells again, still undifferentiated, still brimming with potential. "
― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
79
" Students at places like Cleveland State - and I've confirmed these observations with people who have worked at comparable schools - are being trained to occupy positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or other. They're being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity - lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. For students at prestigious schools, it is exactly the reverse: connections, freebies, privileges, access. And one more thing: impunity. "
― William Deresiewicz , Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life