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.]
