Thanks to J.D. at What Do I Know? for pointing out this essay at The American Scholar: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education by William Deresiewicz. In it Deresiewicz identifies three major drawbacks to an elite (i.e. Ivy League) education: not being able to relate to anyone outside your social class; a sense of entitlement and security that fosters mediocrity and risk aversion; and worst of all, the stifling of intellectualism. The following illustrates the latter:
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, as universities still dimly feel. So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. 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.
. . .
It’s no wonder that the few students who are passionate about ideas find themselves feeling isolated and confused. I was talking with one of them last year about his interest in the German Romantic idea of bildung, the upbuilding of the soul. 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.
Yet there is a dimension of the intellectual life that lies above the passion for ideas, though so thoroughly has our culture been sanitized of it that it is hardly surprising if it was beyond the reach of even my most alert students. 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. It takes more than just intellect; it takes imagination and courage. “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.”
. . .
I taught a class several years ago on the literature of friendship. One day we were discussing Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, which follows a group of friends from childhood to middle age. In high school, one of them falls in love with another boy. He thinks, “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. What did my students think of this, I wanted to know? What does it mean to go to school at a place where you’re never alone? Well, one of them said, I do feel uncomfortable sitting in my room by myself. Even when I have to write a paper, I do it at a friend’s. 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. It used to be that you couldn’t always get together with your friends even when you wanted to. Now that students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships. “To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?”: my student was in her friend’s room writing a paper, not having a heart-to-heart. She probably didn’t have the time; indeed, other students told me they found their peers too busy for intimacy.
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.
I really appreciated this essay because it wasn't your usual "dead white guys," liberal guilt, elite-bashing. Deresiewicz isn't against education or private schools, he's criticizing a system designed to do nothing more than groom kids to fit into the places their parents expect them to occupy in the upper echelons of society. That may be fine for some, but those who are looking for a real education in the humanities had best look elsewhere. "Second-tier" colleges are not much better; their "take a number" approach grooms students to become little more than desk fodder. Deresiewicz identifies the liberal arts college as the place to go for a truly mind-freeing education.
One thing which struck me personally is how a college education is almost a formality among upper class families, and as a result many of these students end up "sleepwalking off to college with no idea what they’re doing there . . . content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them." Although my family was far from upper class, and I chose my program, I pretty much sleepwalked to and through my four and a half years in academe. I did have a vague notion that I wanted to do something for the environment, and that biology and this new thing called environmental studies might make that possible, but I never got much more specific than that.
I missed a major wake-up call when I took, and absolutely loved, a course in environmental philosophy. It was exactly what my brain had been thirsting for, and I soaked it all up. I didn't even have to take notes. Unfortunately, it never occurred to me that I could change direction and pursue it further, or that philosophy was something people actually did. I just kept trudging along my appointed path until they declared I was a Bachelor of Science.
I also missed out because the classics courses I was hoping to take turned out to be on hiatus for the entire time I was at university, though they were tantalizingly printed in the catalogue every year. I wonder what would have happened if I had been able to take those courses? Would they have woken me up? I really don't know why classics intrigued me then. I did take Latin in high school, as was recommended for biologists, but had never really had any specific interest in the ancient world or the humanities. Perhaps, despite being strongly encouraged to pursue science, there was a part of me that knew that the questions closest to my heart could not be answered by science. I know now that more science will not solve the environmental crisis. I wish I had known that then.
I'm not complaining. Things turned out pretty well, and I have some time now to catch up on what I missed and perhaps even make something of it. But if there are any young people out there just starting out, my advice is to think very carefully about your future and pay attention to the things that light your brain on fire. Don't let your educational program get in the way of your education.
