My soul’s alive today. For two reasons. 1, A friend told me that she’d seen Pete Seeger out on his hill digging gravel. Pete’s 89 or something. He’s limber and alive and multifarious. And he dropped out of Harvard because elitism’s channels were way too narrow for him. 2, On that note, William Deresiewicz–who just finished up teaching at Yale–has a simply beautiful piece in the American Scholar on how elite education teaches the young not to think for themselves. Read it for yourself, it’s Emersonian. (And thanks to Jerry Slater for the head’s up). What follows are some choice excerpts:
The first
disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen [trying to talk to a plumber]… is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t
like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that
diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With
respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed
increasingly—homogeneous.
[T]here are smart people who aren’t “smart.”
The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a
commonplace, 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… social intelligence and
emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other
forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite.
The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense… The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.
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. But they’re not.
Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or
talentless people, or even lazy people… The political implications should be clear. 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. [Weiss: my argument re, The Draft]
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… 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 … 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? …Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. [Holy cow, I never ever thought about this and boy is he right]
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…. 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. [Oh my god, Deresiewicz is rounding the final turn! This piece builds with surprise after surprise]
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,
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.
But a humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than
that… We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.
There’s
a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders
of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all
allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their
budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering
institutional loyalty. [Very transcendentalist; are we entering another spiritual age at last? shaking off the stupid religious doctrines of the tribes, of identity politics?]
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. It means foreswearing your
allegiance, in lonely freedom, to God, to country, and to Yale. [Middle East policy, baby]
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, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside
it, to see that it’s even there. [Middle East; any new idea must be beaten knifed mutilated, ask Stephen Walt]
The
ability to engage in introspection… 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?” [Who's Deresiewicz? Charlie Rose, hook this man up. Leonard Lopate, Patricia Cohen--somebody do it quick.]
Phil,
Do those comments jive with your experience? I went to a small college in Vermont, which prided itself on teaching people to think (meaning meaning).
Not a lot of presidents came out of where I went to school.
Quite a few prominent musicians, actors, writers.
When you're relaxedly asleep, or loving your spouse, or walking in the woods, or listening to John Coltrane, or breathing mindfully, it doesn't matter at all if you went to Harvard, Brown, Amherst, Bard, College of the Atlantic.
If noone ever turned you on to sleeping well, or sexing well, or listening and observing well, or praying well, you'd walk through life in a stupor.
There are MANY ways to get that education.
But, to learn to read clearly and fully, to learn to analyze completely and fairly (math and politics) to learn to ask the question "how do you know", college is a great help.
The community of scholars, of those that think for themselves, that don't seek conformity, is the best benefit of college.
Growing up in the NY suburbs, I was around very elite up and comers. Is there an intellectual environment that is genuinely stimulating and collegial, but not vain.
But if one's end is to provide for a family with at least a couple of kids, can one really get by doing "what they love to do?" Any and all luxury aside, it can be very expensive to send kids to good schools, whether for lower or higher education. So, in the case of somebody wanting not just his/herself to live comfortably, but his/her kids as well, I think Deresiewicz's analysis doesn't hold up.
I agree with the Deresiewicz analysis, yet Michel Fabre has a point. If you have kids, even just one like me, your decision must include its affect on same. It just makes it harder. I've taken the opportunity not to be rich (after working very hard with no help just for that opportunity), but always I've had to consider, and factor in, what was in the best interest of my son in the reality of the society he was born into–this often conflicted with my most authentic individual desires. It is said that while Marx thought and wrote his own children starved at his table. I don't know if that's true, but you get the point. Of course classic artists are notorious for being selfish; it's really hard to balance being a good Dad and being prone to very individualistic choice regarding what is the best way to spend your time on earth. Society and its laws doesn't make it any easier.
wanna make millions? a degree from the indoctrination league not necessary. declare yourself a christian minister. swear allegiance to the state of the jews. wealth is yours to gorge on. note the current porkers following this script.
Interesting article. It's like reading Bill Lind or Chalmers Johnson splintering the shibboleths surrounding the US military, another deeply flawed institution many Americans make unrealistic assumptions about in order to sustain their self-congratulatory narrative of pre-eminence. The Prof's wisdom isn't conventional.
'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.'
Take our friend SOG's obsessive contrasting of Jewish achievement with the rather less spectacular rollcall of Arab intellectual worthies. That seals it for him; they are a lower breed, their lives worth less than his and those of his high achieving confreres, simple as that. You would find the same attitude, though more carefully concealed, upstream in people like Daniel Pipes. And of course, in Old Establishment Americans (quiet or otherwise) toward all other races, for decades now. And in the English before them, and so on.
'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'
Even more, their parents expect success. The kids' sense of self to a large extent relies on parental approval, which is often withheld for perceived failure. It is this pressure David Foster Wallace expertly diagnoses as the root of the Drug Problem in Infinite Jest and elsewhere.
Still, that same Foster Wallace wrote a long essay called Tense Present, in part attempting to justify his belief that minorities and those lower in the socio-economic hierarchy should strive to adopt the usage of the elite, so that they stand a chance of joining it, or at least being able to effectively deal with it. Hard to argue with from a practical point of view, but it seems part of the very pressure of expectation he limns elsewhere.
'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'
And yet those same skills, so essential for building bridges to new knowledge and achievement within existing paradigms, might act as barriers to other forms of experience.
'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'
How many American intellectuals fit this description since 911? People like Lewis at the high toned end and David Brooks at the lower, with Sullivans and Hitchenses and a grey cast of thousands in between. A bloke called Ken O'Keeffe spoke more truth to power in early 03 than the lot of them combined, yet he remains a nobody, cast into even lower depths than your Chomskys and Zinns. While all those Beltway fools who groupthunk conventionally are still musing about the mood flyover country, and being paid handsomely to do so.
'I've taken the opportunity not to be rich'
he he, me too Charles.
'always I've had to consider, and factor in, what was in the best interest of my son in the reality of the society he was born into–this often conflicted with my most authentic individual desires'
Well said. I want the best for both my kids, but define 'best'. They themselves want the things money has bought some of their friends. I try to impress upon my daughter the importance of rote learning all this boring shit they're throwing at her if she wants those things, otherwise she'll be a check-out girl at the local supermarket…
But hey, Prof D might ask, what's wrong with that?
Pretty strong stuff. Close to home. I especially like the idea that leveraging one's brain to acquire wealth is morally no better than one's muscles. It does not match the social reality though: the latter is a crime whereas the former is the dream of most parents/spouse/mother in laws.
We are back somehow to a classic right/left opposition: the society has to organize a rat race to be organized itself. In order to be functionning the society must offer a deal to most individuals in which playing by its rules is far less dangerous/far more profitable than following one's own path.
The more you climb the social ladder, the more ruthless becomes this pressure. As money is supposed to give you freedom, the more you have, the more you are under tremendous pressure to dress, behave, eat, dwell, learn in ways that are socially acceptable by your peers. No wonder that elite schools are suffocating. It is not a defect, it is their raison d'être.
Revolution anyone?
How can you have trouble talking to a plumber? That makes no sense to me. If that is the case with most of the elites, then they have no business being our rulers.
Maybe it is time for a thorough revolution if Obama and McCain are all that our elites can offer. When is the last time that the nation had a real leader, who understood that the people and rulers have responsibilities to one another, in any branch of government? I can't think of one.
Maybe it shows that I didn't go to an elite college, I don't know. I have no problem talking to plumbers and mechanics. I don't know if I'd have trouble relating to an elite, whatever an elite is.
I did have college professors who attended elite schools, and most of them were no better than their non-elite counterparts. Maybe they were just going easy on us. I don't know.
I'll never forget this one professor who taught a course on social history in the United States. She used Barbara Ehrenreich's book "Nickled and Dimed" as a text, and treated Ehrenreich's words as gospel. The funny thing is that when she was asked about her own work history, the prof. could only say that she did an internship at Bergdorffs forty years ago.
I worked my way through school doing everything from painting, warehousing, manufacturing, or any other job that paid enough for rent and tuition, and to have this jackass tell me what it is REALLY like to work a "menial" job would have been funny if she weren't grading me. Yeah, her grandfather was an advisor to Roosevelt, but what difference does that make?
I really believe that the divide between ruler and ruled in this nation is too great to reconcile. The groups have nothing in common at this point, and the hatred that the elites have for the masses is starting to go both ways. At this point, the average citizen is viewed by the elites as being no different than any person anywhere. We're cannon fodder and tax-slaves who can be replaced by any person, from any corner of the globe, at any time–legally or illegally. That's not really a recipe for stability.
Well said, Todd. My experience is similar to yours.
What do you talk about with a plumber? Plumbing, for starters. If you're not up on sports, or hunting, or cars (and who is?), try building and construction. Not pilasters and pediments, the shingle style and the stick style, but old buildings and new, apartments and mcmansions. If you can maintain a neutral attitude towards low-flush toilets, that might help as well.
Deresiewicz's opening gambit is painfully reminiscent of 60s era suburban Whites' confusion about what to say to Black people. And behind it is all the earlier uneasiness about how to deal with peasants or servants. The difficulty isn't all one way, though. You may find some plumbers who have prejudices against elitists and intellectuals.
On first reading, the article is good and insightful. It presents a very clear situation, but how common is it? Elite college students and manual laborers may be polar opposites in some way, but 10 or 20 years on, isn't there some convergence? If you've live in the same place for some time, you obviously would have some common points of reference.
The exceptions are 1) if you never leave academia and all your conversation revolves around your field and your job or 2) if you really do become a part of that top out of sight upper class. But if you do manage that, why would you care about talking to plumbers?
"But if you do manage that, why would you care about talking to plumbers?"
I'm sure that the ultra-elite can have plumbing problems. Isn't it just respectful to talk with the person who is working in your home? To state that you could have nothing in common with a plumber is stating that you believe that one of you isn't as human.
There is no great virtue in talking to a plumber or an elite. But if a person really believes that he could not talk to a plumber, or an elite, maybe he should just concentrate on his career, and not venture to make public policy, or join the media. Wouldn't that make sense?
This is all covered in Curb Your Enthusiam. The last laugh is no plumbers ever heard of the show. But Larry is secure in his gated community, protected and funded unknowingly by the plumber's sons.