This blog about the absurd race for high school graduates to gain acceptance at one of the top 50 colleges and universities in America – especially at the Ivy League institutions – is a continuation of the blog entitled “Is Education 2nd or 3rd Place at Elite Institutions?” In that piece, I look at education through a critical lens based on some very interesting stuff in a book entitled Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite. The book is an alarming indictment of the state of U.S. higher education, stretched and bent out of shape by money, the quest to “get ahead” (and avoid sinking), and the desire to separate one’s family from the great, unwashed masses, if you will. In this continuation, I go a bit more into a truer and more authentic purpose of education, and share many education quotes, and I hope I cause those questing ceaselessly for the Ivy League to really ask themselves what the purposes of gaining more money and getting ahead are, anyway.
What is so fantastic about money, anyway? Think about it. Why pay literally $250,000 to go to Harvard for four years if it’s not about making money on the other side? I do get that Harvard has some wonderful things about it, but let’s face it, it is largely about jobs, connections, and bragging rights. As well, we must as a society question the nature of education in this country when one track is “elite” and costs $250,000 (and either is paid in full by wealthy parents or incurs an onerous debt for middle- and lower-class students), and the other is “standard” and does a satisfactory job. I’m not saying that education in America is well-designed and successful, but that is a different blog for a different day.
I am writing about the dark side of the term elite. The vicious, elitist, and unwholesome aspects of the Ivy League. The word elite reminds me of “two societies – one for the rich and connected, and one for the great unwashed masses.” It’s basically the reason thinkers and doers like Jefferson and Franklin created The University of Virginia and The University of Pennsylvania: they were essentially liberal educational enterprises that sought to raise up all comers (with exceptions, unfortunately) in morals, civic virtue, character, and a life of integrity and meaning. This is what education-minded, Harvard University graduate Fareed Zakaria, Ph.D. says on the topic of education from a public perspective: “Unless there are aggressive efforts to compensate for the advantages of wealth, including attendance at private schools and participation in luxury extracurricular pursuits, the American elite educational system runs the risk, in Thomas Jefferson’s terms, of creating an unnatural aristocracy.” He also wrote that “The single most important strength a society can have is a committed, reformist elite,” so what do I know!
As to my question about what money is for, I was on Facebook and saw a neat “meme” that posed the following, and it was very intriguing. Some of you must have heard this by now. I added a few myself. I hope some Ivy League students (or aspirants) read this, because there is power in it.
Things Money Can’t Buy
- A bed – but not sleep
- A clock – but not time
- A book – but not knowledge
- A position – but not respect
- Medicine – but not health
- Amusements – but not happiness
- Acquaintances – but not friendship
- Obedience – but not faithfulness
- A house – but not a home
- Company – but not intimacy
- Church dues – but not a rich spiritual life
- Food – but not satisfaction
- College entrance – but not learning
- The Internet – but not wisdom
Indeed, psychological research shows that money does not buy happiness. We did not evolve with that kind of brain. We want to acquire, to grow, to compete, to experience, and so when we get a bump in happiness (say, getting a raise at work), our minds adjust and our happiness level eventually returns to baseline. Which, incidentally, is 40-50% genetically-based. We also get involved in traps where we make little sacrifices for our careers and one thing leads to another and all of a sudden, we are just trapped. Too many bills to quit working in insurance or sales or as a broker; life just kind of has us by the throat. We are in hock to the government, to Capital One, to Dartmouth, or to Bloomingdale’s.
“There is by now a robust literature on the nature of happiness, and it converges on a pair of observations. Beyond a moderate level of material comfort, happiness consists of two things: feeling connected to others and engaging in meaningful work. These are hardly new ideas.” ~ William Deresiewicz
Writer and Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christiansen’s book How Will You Measure Your Life? is interesting the way he begins it. His fellow graduates slowly, over the years, went from Harvard alums who were going to go out there and grab life by the throat, to something, well, less glorious. “Their lives seemed to be fantastic on every level,” he noted. “But by our tenth reunion,” he continues, “things that we had never expected became increasingly common.” Many were nowhere to be found. He did a little digging and realized that many of them worked in Fortune 500 companies and such, but “[d]espite such professional accomplishments, however, many of them were clearly unhappy. Behind the facade of professional success, there were many who did not enjoy what they were doing for a living. There were, also, numerous stories of divorces or unhappy marriages.”
This (below) is a nice summary:
“My classmates were not only some of the brightest people I’ve known, but some of the most decent people, too. At graduation they had plans and visions for what they would accomplish, not just in their careers, but in their personal lives as well. Yet something had gone wrong for some of them along the way: their personal relationships had begun to deteriorate, even as their professional prospects blossomed. I sensed that they felt embarrassed to explain to their friends the contrast in trajectories of their personal and professional lives. At the time, I assumed it was a blip; a kind of midlife crisis. But at our twenty-five- and thirty-year reunions, the problems were worse. One of our classmates – Jeffrey Skilling – had landed in jail for his role in the Enron scandal.”
The point is simply that if we make a pact with the devil at age 14, he may facilitate our entry into an Ivy League, and a glittering path will open up before us. But, as they say, you’ve got to pay the piper. The devil is going to ask for his due. That is what Faust is all about. Knowledge – or brilliant SAT results – do not a good and fulfilled person make. Happiness is not quite that easy, alas. The guys at Enron were supposed to be “the smartest guys in the room.” No doubt they worked hard, went to all the right schools, and so on. Skilling made $100,000,000 a year as Enron’s CEO. There is something crass about that. And pathetic. And tragic.
I will now share a number of quotations from Excellent Sheep, which is a very compelling read. Nothing in this review or in the provision of these education quotes is meant to detract from the suggestion that you go ahead and purchase and read the book if you are deeply interested in this subject. I also should say that I do not hate the Ivy League; in fact, I am taking classes from Harvard Extension School (the wing of the university that is less snobbish, materialistic, and elitist than the other 11 degree-granting Schools, in my opinion). The Ivy League is fine as far as it goes; most people do not need a $200,000 Porsche Carerra, but there is of course something neat about being able to look that good driving that fast. In fact, I earned 62 graduate units from the California State University, Fullerton in 2000 and have absolutely no regrets. It was a good education, especially for $1800 a year! There are 3,000+ colleges and universities in this country, and as many abroad.
The U.S. is a leader in higher ed, attracting gifted students from around the globe. That does not mean, however, that admissions should reach such absurd proportions. Yes, Yale or Princeton will open some doors, but don’t make your kid (or if you are an applicant, don’t become) some kind of Nietzschean ubermensch. It’s just not that critical. Go to college, study, graduate, and get a job. We all can’t be in the top 1%, and from what I know of that class of person, that social class is more a part of the country’s problem than something to emulate and sacrifice nearly all to enter. When thinking of the Ivy League, think of Xanadu, as characterized by Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan – beware the allure of the Pleasure Dome.
“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.”
“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.”
“If we are to create a decent society, a just society, a wise and prosperous society, a society where children can learn for the love of learning and people can work for the love of work, then that is what we must believe. We don’t have to love our neighbors as ourselves, but we need to love our neighbor’s children as our own. We have tried aristocracy. We have tried meritocracy. Now it’s time to try democracy.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Colleges should remember that selecting students by GPA more often benefits the faithful drudge than the original mind.”
“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.”
“Fortunately, our colleges and universities are fully cognizant of the problems I have been delineating and take concerted action to address them.”
You are reading quotations about proper education and about the Ivy League from the book Excellent Sheep: the Miseducation of the American Elite by former Yale Professor, William Deresiewicz, Ph.D.
“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.”
“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.”
“When a student at Pomona told me that she’d love to have a chance to think about the things she’s studying, only she doesn’t have the time, I asked her if she had ever considered not trying to get an A in every class. She looked at me as if I had made an indecent suggestion.”
“In 1971, 73 percent of incoming freshmen said that it is essential or very important to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life,” 37 percent to be “very well-off financially” (not well-off, note, but very well-off). By 2011, the numbers were almost reversed, 47 percent and 80 percent, respectively. For well over thirty years, we’ve been loudly announcing that happiness is money, with a side order of fame. No wonder students have come to believe that college is all about getting a job.”
“Elite schools like to boast that they teach their students how to think, but all they mean at this point is that they train them in the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions.”
“Implicit in the notion of [liberal] 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.”
“Growing up elite means learning to value yourself in terms of the measures of success that mark your progress into and through the elite….”
“U.S. News [and World Report college rankings data] supplies the percentage of freshmen at each college who finished in the highest 10 percent of their high school class. Among the top twenty universities, the number is usually above 90 percent, a threshold that is also reached at several of the top colleges. I’d be wary of schools like that (though I would make an exception for public universities, which draw from disadvantaged high schools from across their respective states). Not every ten-percenter is an excellent sheep, but a sufficient number are for you to think very carefully before deciding to surround yourself with them.”
You are reading quotes about the Ivy League and proper education by William Deresiewicz, from his book Excellent Sheep: the Miseducation of the American Elite.
“[Tiger Mom creator, Amy] Chua champions filial obedience, but the father she reveres rebelled against his own parents, and she rebelled against him in turn: he by leaving China for the United States, she by leaving California for the East Coast. (Both, it seems, were trying to get as far away as possible).”
“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.”
“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.”
“To say that the humanities can be a path to truth itself is to challenge one of our most closely held beliefs. We live not only in a scientific world, but also in a scientistic one: a world that thinks that science – empirical, objective, quantifiable – is the exclusive form of knowledge, and that other methods of inquiry are valid only insofar as they approximate its methods. But the humanities and science face in opposite directions. They don’t just work in different ways; they work on different things.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We’re still a very wealthy country by any reasonable standard, which means that you’ve been presented with a rare and remarkable chance, one that’s far more precious than the opportunity to be rich: the opportunity not to be. To find your purpose and embrace your vocation, and still to live a decent life.”
The Ivy League doesn’t seem to be all it’s cracked up to be, eh? Education is a deep and wide thing, and I am afraid the Ivy League institutions started out elitist and even racist and classist, and are now ridiculously exclusive. I do think much great research goes on at schools like Johns Hopkins, Harvard University, and MIT. But education is easily found at probably 50 colleges and universities in California alone. Actually, make that 100. It’s not all about bragging rights and partying and outdoing your neighbors; think of the lessons Socrates tried to impart a very long time ago. Here is a podcast you might like, and halfway down on this page is another.
