like i said corral, but the corral doesn't make the herd, it just channels them off
This link has been bookmarked by 165 people . It was first bookmarked on 18 Jun 2008, by Brendan M.
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22 Jun 11
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Jennifer KuehnFascinating article about higher education. Looks at the holes in our current educational system and what universities are truly preparing students for. Heading under the title reads, "Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to
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Todd SuomelaOur best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers. (Fits my experience quite well.)
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09 Nov 08
Gabriela GrosseckOur best universities have forgotten
that the reason they exist is to make
minds, not careers -
11 Oct 08
Roger HuThe American Scholar Magazine. The official website of Phi Beta Kappa's quarterly publication, featuring full articles and other Scholar information.
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02 Oct 08
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30 Sep 08
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Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race.
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The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.
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One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense.
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t schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another.
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if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education
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to make
minds, not careers -
Ivy retardation
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the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy.
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elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them.
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it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you.
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first principle of humanism is Terence’s: “nothing human is alien to me.”
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inculcates a false sense of self-worth.
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o think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense.
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it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you
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With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous
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ecause these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it
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We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright
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I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.
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but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic
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But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite.
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Terence’s: “nothing human is alien to me.”
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n elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth
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SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value.
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The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”
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When people say that students at elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their sat scores are higher.
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One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense.
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As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists. “Work must always be,” Ruskin says, “and captains of work must always be....[But] there is a wide difference between being captains...of work, and taking the profits of it.”
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students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances
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Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down.
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At a school like Yale, students who come to class and work hard expect nothing less than an A-. And most of the time, they get it.
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Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out.
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It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale.
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Entitled mediocrity is indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it’s also the operating principle of corporate America.
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temptation it offers to security
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Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed
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How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.
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if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks
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most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual
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Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework
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The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.
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Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.
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Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions.
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Professors at top research institutions are valued exclusively for the quality of their scholarly work; time spent on teaching is time lost. If students want a conversion experience, they’re better off at a liberal arts college.
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Although the notion of breadth is implicit in the very idea of a liberal arts education, the admissions process increasingly selects for kids who have already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms—the junior journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.
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There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics.
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he purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni.
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At Yale, the long-term drift of students away from majors in the humanities and basic sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics has been abetted by administrative indifference.
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The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.
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“I am not afraid to make a mistake,” Stephen Dedalus says, “even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity, too.”
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Some students end up at second-tier schools because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less gifted or driven. But others end up there because they have a more independent spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class. They concentrated on the ones that meant the most to them or on a single strong extracurricular passion or on projects that had nothing to do with school or even with looking good on a college application.
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I’ve been struck, during my time at Yale, by how similar everyone looks.
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“To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?...There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.” A pretty good description of an elite college campus, including the part about never being allowed to feel alone.
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So there they were: one young person who had lost the capacity for solitude and another who couldn’t see the point of it.
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other students told me they found their peers too busy for intimacy.
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The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude.
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“So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?”
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The world that produced John Kerry and George Bush is indeed giving us our next generation of leaders. The kid who’s loading up on AP courses junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone think, will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.
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26 Jul 08
Varna Sri RamanThe American Scholar Magazine. The official website of Phi Beta Kappa's quarterly publication, featuring full articles and other Scholar information.
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Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers.
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25 Jul 08
David JakesUniversities exist to make minds, not careers...interesting opener to the article
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vingrapladie18 HThe American Scholar Magazine. The official website of Phi Beta Kappa's quarterly publication, featuring full articles and other Scholar information.
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23 Jul 08
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The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.
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Ben ZurawThe American Scholar Magazine. The official website of Phi Beta Kappa's quarterly publication, featuring full articles and other Scholar information.
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15 Jul 08
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12 Jul 08
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The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.
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It’s been said that what those tests really measure is your ability to take tests, but even if they measure something real, it is only a small slice of the real. The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”
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One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense.
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If Al Gore and John Kerry represent one of the characteristic products of an elite education, George W. Bush represents another. It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale.
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11 Jul 08
Simon GIt didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap
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Oliver MayorAs two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them.
education culture academia class essay college school intellectualism
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10 Jul 08
Rich GoldsteinGreat article on university choice, hte purpose of higher education. can i possibly write a link to the type of capitalism I am after...the capitalism of a wholistic life, and how if we can change the way we keep score we can get there?
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They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure.
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Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade. A friend who teaches at the University of Connecticut once complained to me that his students don’t think for themselves. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.
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07 Jul 08
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In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out.
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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.
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Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls.
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A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.
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It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale. Entitled mediocrity is indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it’s also the operating principle of corporate America.
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the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system.
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06 Jul 08
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The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club.
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An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?
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But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. This will seem counterintuitive. Aren’t kids at elite schools the smartest ones around, at least in the narrow academic sense? Don’t they work harder than anyone else—indeed, harder than any previous generation? They are. They do. But being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework.
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Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.
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When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business.
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But, he said—he was a senior at the time—it’s hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.
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It takes more than just intellect; it takes imagination and courage.
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The tyranny of the normal must be very heavy in their lives.
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That same day, as it happened, another student gave a presentation on Emerson’s essay on friendship. Emerson says, he reported, that one of the purposes of friendship is to equip you for solitude. As I was asking my students what they thought that meant, one of them interrupted to say, wait a second, why do you need solitude in the first place? What can you do by yourself that you can’t do with a friend?
So there they were: one young person who had lost the capacity for solitude and another who couldn’t see the point of it. There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude. -
“So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?” Well, I don’t know. But I do know that the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system.
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Add Sticky NoteThe most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy.
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27 Jun 08
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"Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system..."
the_american_scholar william_deresiewicz diversity elite_education thinking_within_the_box delicious_import
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22 Jun 08
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Public Stiky Notes
Page Comments
Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work.
J Anyon - Journal of Education, 1980 - eric.ed.gov
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