So, Your Child Got Accepted at a Top Tier University. Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
December 16, 2008
Here, from the other end of the political and theological spectrum, comes Chris Hedges. He lays it on the line. The prestige universities are lock-step intellectually, and at the same time, they are fragmented academically. One worldview, incoherently specialized.
This has all been said before. It was the main theme of the great and much-ridiculed book, The Bell Curve. Before that book, Profscam spelled it out in humorous detail.
Hedges raises no new issues, but he gets most of them into one article.
These schools are agents of the Establishment. They serve as recruiting centers, as The Bell Curve indicated. These places are not for creative inquiry. They are for training an elite in a government-dominated economy.
Most of these students are afraid to take risks. They cower before authority. They have been taught from a young age by zealous parents, schools and institutional authorities what constitutes failure and success. They are socialized to obey. They obsess over grades and seek to please professors, even if what their professors teach is fatuous. The point is to get ahead. Challenging authority is not a career advancer. Freshmen arrive on elite campuses and begin to network their way into the elite eating clubs, test into the elite academic programs and lobby for elite summer internships. By the time they graduate they are superbly conditioned to work 10 or 12 hours a day electronically moving large sums of money around."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," Deresiewicz wrote. "It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers."
"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," he went on. "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. Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions. I don't think there ever was a golden age of intellectualism in the American university, but in the 19th century students might at least have had a chance to hear such questions raised in chapel or in the literary societies and debating clubs that flourished on campus."
If your child is accepted at one of these schools, you are in trouble. Tell him/her, "Not a brass farthing." That was what every pub owner told Eliza Doolittle's father when he asked for credit. Do not subsidize your child's destruction. Do not subsidize these college professors.
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