Ten years ago David Brooks wrote a provocative piece, in his trademark comic sociology genre, about the lives of undergraduates at elite universities. It was called The Organization Kid, and it portrayed the average Princeton/Yale/Harvard/Stanford student as extremely bright and morally earnest but ultimately rather uninspired and herd-like conformists. Meritocratic hoop-jumpers.
It’s a piece that unfailingly stimulates a good discussion among undergraduates in some of the classes I teach here at Stanford.
Brooks’s article is at heart ambivalent about the undergraduates he describes: they’re lovely, talented, and kind, but also overly deferential and obsessed with resume-building. More recently, William Deresiewicz published an article in a similar spirit but with a significantly greater negative judgment. Deresiewicz, now a full-time writer but then an English professor at Yale, wrote in The Disadvantages of an Elite Education that,
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.
Deresiewicz doesn’t blame the students alone for this. He also takes the university to task:
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.
The article ends with one of his students asking him, ““So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?”
When I teach Deresiewicz’s article to Stanford students, they bridle at his description. But I think they also recognize some of what Deresiewicz describes all around them. The hoop-jumping mentality. The instinctive deference to authority. The idea that every activity they undertake be “a growth experience.”
Deresiewicz has since written a few other articles about elite undergraduate life, Solitude and Leadership and What are You Going to Do With That?
In a new initiative, the seniors in the Stanford Program on Ethics in Society select someone they would like to invite to campus to give a talk. The seniors in the program this year selected Deresiewicz, and I was grateful when he accepted the invitation to come to campus for a few events. The public event he’s doing is on April 12, 2011 and is entitled “Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep? Flyer below. RSVP to Andrea Kuduk.
UPDATE: Video of the event available here.
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[...] 12, at 4:30PM in Annenberg. Find out more on the event page and on host Prof. Rob Reich’s page, and RSVP [...]
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18 Comments
Hi Rob,
You could always suggest that homeschooling would allow them to get a sense of themselves, instead of just being sheep, excellent or otherwise. They would actually have a chance to “think”, instead of professors telling them what, and how, to think. Of course, the argument could certainly be made that then it’s just parents telling them what to think. That is, after all, the true basis of our argument. Who has the “right” to teach what is thought?
I must admit, I’d love to be there for this one.
Hope all is well with you,
Kristi Walker
Yes, most of them are. (Baaaa.)
Thank you for the links to the articles.
-A former Stanford student
Educators aren’t there just to teach us what to “think;” they’re (hopefully) instilling information from fields in which they are experts. Homeschooling ought to be made illegal — it’s often used as a tool to brainwash children and keep them from interacting with kids from other backgrounds (Jews and liberals, oh my!). I think students simply have to constantly be asking, “why am I learning this?”
I wish I went to a school where the professors were honest about their students. Great article!
@JC:
The problem with the current system is that that question (why am I learning this?) causes quite a few problems, especially in high school. There are quite a few useless subjects (why am I doing woodcraft or being forced to learn German if I want to be a programmer later?), and so much busy work. I mean, once you’ve figured out how to do a certain mathematical formula for yourself there’s no really point in doing 100 excersizes that are meant to teach you that.
At least with home school (I wasn’t home schooled btw) you do get to actually explore stuff you’re interested in. Also, while you miss the social interaction with others you also miss the bullshit that’s the high school social life.
As education costs are escalating like crazy what we we need are more mature kids (12+) that know what they want and are capable of studying for it by themselves (be it via khan academy or other channels for example).
Ideally we need a system other than grading to determine understanding subject matter. Either you understand how to do something well, you’re just capable enough to do something or you understand it at all. All grades test is ones ability to take tests.
Sorry for the long rant, but we’re in the midst of a serious problem and schools/higher education just seem to be going on as if it’s business as usual. Unless we fix this whole thing in 20 years we’re going to reap what we’ve sown.
@JC:
I wouldn’t be graduating with my M.S./B.S. in computer Science at 21 if it wasn’t for being homeschooled.
As a tech hiring manager I can always tell a Stanford grad. When you ask them about themselves, at any age, they start listing all the famous people they know, worked for or took classes from. I stopped hiring them because their unlimited arrogance kills all forms of group harmony. But even that would be okay if they were also significantly better at doing the job. They aren’t. That said, they are extremely well connected, and if you get a chance to join a start up run by a Stanford grad, and you can put up with the ego, take the job. They can make you very wealthy.
Most people go along with the group. If that were not the case, societies would not have much cohesion. All generals and no privates makes for more civil war.
Great honesty! Wish more school were like that
@JC: That is absurd. The united states has the education system of a third world country.
Any parent who cares about their childrens education and cannot afford to pay for private school should absolutely homeschool their kids. Modern schools are essentially daycare’s where little learning actually happens.
No; they would have their parents as professors. Parents tell their kids how to think at home, professors tell them how to think at school, and it’s hard to imagine combining the roles gives them more intellectual freedom or stimulation.
I am sick and tired of people labeling Stanford students as uninspired “hoop jumpers”. Just look at the Stanford Alumni population and see what they’ve been doing. It’s absurd that despite the diversity of what Stanford students have accomplished post graduation we are still labeled as “uninspired”. One point I can agree with is that generally Stanford students want to make an impact and a difference upon the world. Often times this means mucking with the system and intimately understanding the power structures that exist in modern society and how to exploit them. This absolutely positively does not mean that we are oblivious or incapable of questioning authority, examining life, morality or ethics critically etc. Just because we don’t want to be philosophers the rest of our lives does not mean we are incapable of doing so. I agree a large segment of the Stanford population does seem quite uninspired and I am sad that that is the case but I do think I’ve met a decent percentage of kids that are motivated to achieve greatness (something that is significantly beyond becoming a prestigious doctor or lawyer)
@Armstrong: coming from someone who has clearly never been educated or attempted to educate in a third world country.
I have done both. You have no idea how wrong you are.
@JC: As a progressive jewish homeschooler who engages in regular coop events with a variety of other homeschoolers from pagans to muslims to fundamentalist evangelicals, I must say it sounds like you don’t know anything about the topic.
addendum: Sorry, that post was meant to be a response to the post with the claim that “Homeschooling ought to be made illegal — it’s often used as a tool to brainwash children and keep them from interacting with kids from other backgrounds (Jews and liberals, oh my!).” It did not thread properly though as the Reply link after each message suggested it would. (Poor board design.)
@LC:
@Armstrong: No. ANyone who strongly cares about education should be striving to improve public education, not abandon it.
Suggestion: Why don’t they just admit only the 500 excellent candidates that prof was talking about? Admitting unnecessary people will give them unnecessary power that they don’t qualify, and they will use that power in a wrong way in a company or government where they end up after graduation, which will harm the entire society as we see.
Having been in and out of both home school and public school and finally graduating with a Bachelor’s of Science from a small university, I’ve seen both sides of the fence.
First off, generalizations about humans being sheep are pretty much true about any public institution or group. It is common human behavior to follow authority, as both psychological testing and empirical evidence has shown us. While it is true that those who don’t do and follow what the authority figures command can become fabulously successful and wealthy (e.g. college dropouts Steven Jobs and Bill Gates), that’s more the exception than the rule. By and large college is good for the unquestioning masses and it can even teach us unconventional types the discipline necessary for success.
Having said all of the above, it has also been found that smaller class sizes tend to cause students to learn better because teachers have more opportunity to give students one-on-one experiences (this is one obvious advantage that home schooling has over public schooling). With the advent of colleges like Stanford and MIT opening up many of their lectures to the public via online videos, the need for more lecturing professors is reduced. However, the need for mentors has never been greater. Students need someone who can help them find their passions and learn the self control to pursue them successfully. Without this it doesn’t matter how many video lectures are available for free, the un-disciplined student will find watching burping baby videos on Youtube more alluring than watching an educational lecture about the transcription process of RNA molecules. Only students infected with a love of science can watch videos like these and learn much. The rest will perform a quick context-switch to Facebook or Twitter.