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Saved by 36 people (2 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-06-18


Public Comment

on 2008-06-20 by clairefontaine

reminds me of: Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work. J Anyon - Journal of Education, 1980 - eric.ed.gov

Public Sticky notes

to make
minds, not careers

Highlighted by greytank

Ivy retardation

Highlighted by greytank

It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there,

Highlighted by clairefontaine

the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy.

Highlighted by greytank

elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them.

Highlighted by greytank

To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

Highlighted by clairefontaine

it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow.

Highlighted by clairefontaine

it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you

Highlighted by theleftfielder

With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous

Highlighted by theleftfielder

it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you.

Highlighted by greytank

Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race.

Highlighted by clairefontaine

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

Highlighted by theleftfielder

We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.”

Highlighted by clairefontaine

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

Highlighted by theleftfielder

But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages.

Highlighted by clairefontaine

The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense.

Highlighted by clairefontaine

Terence’s: “nothing human is alien to me.”

Highlighted by theleftfielder

The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.

Highlighted by clairefontaine

The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.

Highlighted by caweldude

first principle of humanism is Terence’s: “nothing human is alien to me.”

Highlighted by greytank

n elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.

Highlighted by clairefontaine

inculcates a false sense of self-worth.

Highlighted by greytank

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.”

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

Highlighted by chairdance

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.”

Highlighted by caweldude

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.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

The aptitude with which students absorb this lesson is demonstrated by the avidity with which they erect still more gates within those gates, special realms of ever-greater exclusivity—at Yale, the famous secret societies, or as they should probably be called, the open-secret societies, since true secrecy would defeat their purpose. There’s no point in excluding people unless they know they’ve been excluded.

Highlighted by clairefontaine

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.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.”

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

Highlighted by caweldude

o think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense.

Highlighted by greytank

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.

Highlighted by clairefontaine

students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out.

Highlighted by tlparadis

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.

Highlighted by tlparadis

Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

Highlighted by tlparadis

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.

Highlighted by tlparadis

The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out.

Highlighted by clairefontaine

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.

Highlighted by tlparadis

It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

Highlighted by dawalker

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.

Highlighted by caweldude

temptation it offers to security

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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?

Highlighted by dawalker

Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. 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.

Highlighted by clairefontaine

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.

Highlighted by dawalker

if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks

Highlighted by theleftfielder

most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual

Highlighted by theleftfielder

Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them.

Highlighted by clairefontaine

on 2008-06-20 by clairefontaine

This relates to the argument I am making about TFA and low retention rates; failure is a real possibility, maybe even a likelihood.

Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure.

Highlighted by thomasneal

the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual.

Highlighted by clairefontaine

Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.

Highlighted by dawalker

Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

Highlighted by thomasneal

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.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

Highlighted by dawalker

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.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

he purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

Highlighted by abo46n2

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.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

Highlighted by dawalker

It takes more than just intellect; it takes imagination and courage.

Highlighted by dawalker

“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.”

Highlighted by theleftfielder

Since the idea of the intellectual emerged in the 18th century, it has had, at its core, a commitment to social transformation. Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a vision of the good society and then trying to realize that vision by speaking truth to power. It means going into spiritual exile.

Highlighted by clairefontaine

on 2008-06-20 by clairefontaine

On the genesis of the "intellectual" identity. An 18th century development - who knew?

on 2008-06-21 by jstuart1031

Is that tongue-in-cheek, Claire? I can't tell.

on 2008-06-29 by meikals

not having been to yale or harvard, or even to utas.edu.au where i live, I can tell you that I can't talk to these members of another "class either", mostly because they are not interested in what i am interested in, yale and harvard just corral types like me, it doesn't make them, not at all,

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.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there.

Highlighted by clairefontaine

on 2008-06-20 by clairefontaine

FRAMES - power in invisibility

I’ve been struck, during my time at Yale, by how similar everyone looks.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

The tyranny of the normal must be very heavy in their lives.

Highlighted by dawalker

“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.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy.

Highlighted by meikals

on 2008-06-29 by meikals

like i said corral, but the corral doesn't make the herd, it just channels them off

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.

Highlighted by dawalker

So there they were: one young person who had lost the capacity for solitude and another who couldn’t see the point of it.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

other students told me they found their peers too busy for intimacy.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

“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.

Highlighted by dawalker

“So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?”

Highlighted by theleftfielder

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.

Highlighted by tlparadis

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.

Highlighted by theleftfielder

What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? 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. They took this in for a second, and then one of them said, with a dawning sense of self-awareness, “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.

Highlighted by taryn930

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.

Highlighted by clairefontaine