Excellent Sheep Quotes

“What an indictment that is, of the Ivy League and its peers: that colleges four levels down on the academic totem pole, enrolling students whose SAT scores are hundreds of points lower than theirs, deliver a better education, in the highest sense of the word, than do those institutions.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“In 1971, 73 percent of incoming freshmen said that it is essential or very important to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life,” 37 percent to be “very well-off financially” (not well-off, note, but very well-off). By 2011, the numbers were almost reversed, 47 percent and 80 percent, respectively.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“of what I learned at Yale,” writes Lewis Lapham, “I learned in what I now remember as one long, wayward conversation in the only all-night restaurant on Chapel Street. The topics under discussion—God, man, existence, Alfred Prufrock’s peach—were borrowed from the same anthology of large abstraction that supplied the texts for English 10 or Philosophy 116.” The classroom is the grain of sand; it’s up to you to make the pearl.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“Not every ten-percenter is an excellent sheep, but a sufficient number are for you to think very carefully before deciding to surround yourself with them. Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, more appreciative of what they’re getting, and far less entitled and competitive. They tend to act like peers instead of rivals.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“If we are to create a decent society, a just society, a wise and prosperous society, a society where children can learn for the love of learning and people can work for the love of work, then that ids what we must believe. We don't have to love our neighbors as ourselves, but we need to love our neighbor's children as our own. We have tried aristocracy. We have tried meritocracy. Now it's time to try democracy.”

“It comes to this: the elite have purchased self-perpetuation at the price of their children's happiness. Th e more hoops kids have to jump through, the more it costs to get them through them and the fewer families can do it. But the more they have to jump through, the more miserable they are.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“A friend who teaches at a top university once asked her class to memorize thirty lines of the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope. Every single kid got every single line correct, down to the punctuation marks. Seeing them write out the exercise in class, she said, was a thing of wonder, like watching Thoroughbreds circle a track.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“The helicopter parent turns the child into an instrument of her will. The overindulgent parent projects his own need for limitless freedom and security. In either case, the child is made to function as an extension of somebody else.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“I spent about 50% of my time at Yale feeling smug because I was smarter than everyone," a former student wrote me. "I spent the other 50% feeling shitty because everyone was smarter than me.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“In the words of Mark Edmundson, a professor at UVa, "To get an education, you're probably going to have to fight against the institution that you find yourself in - no matter how prestigious it may be.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“You need to get a job, but you also need to get a life. What's the return on investment of college? What's the return on investment of having children, spending time with friends, listening to music, reading a book? The things that are most worth doing are worth doing for their own sake. Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state. What's at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“What you should really want to develop in college is the habit of reflection, which means the capacity for change.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“True self-esteem means not caring whether you get an A in the first place. It means recognizing, despite all you've been trained to believe, that the grades you get do not define your value as a human being.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“Marco Rubio, nobody's idea of a hippie, has had this to say about his mother and father: "Early on my parents drove it into us that a job is what you do to make a living; a career is when you get paid to do something that you love. They had jobs so I could have a career.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“So here are a few suggestions about the way you ought to conduct yourself when you go off to college. Don't talk to your parents more than once a week, or even better, once a month. Don't tell them your grades on papers or tests, or anything else about how you're doing during the term. Don't ask them for help of any kind. If they try to interfere with course selection or other aspects of your life, ask them politely to back off. If they don't, ask them impolitely.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“Science and engineering have suffered as much from the pre-professional mind-set as the arts and humanities have: gifted kids are becoming Wall Street quants instead of physicists or dermatologists instead of geochemists.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“Every job has tedious or unfulfilling parts; every one has trade-offs that you're forced to make. Your work may be autonomous but lonely, like a writer's; or it may involve operating within a dysfunctional system, like a teacher's or a doctor's; or it may mean plugging away for years before you get any traction, like an entrepreneur's. There is sure to be anxiety, frustration, perhaps humiliation, and certainly days when you wish you had done something else.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“Students at places like Cleveland State - and I've confirmed these observations with people who have worked at comparable schools - are being trained to occupy positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or other. They're being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity - lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. For students at prestigious schools, it is exactly the reverse: connections, freebies, privileges, access. And one more thing: impunity.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“We don't have to love our neighbors as ourselves, but we need to love our neighbor's children as our own. We have tried aristocracy. We have tried meritocracy. Now it's time to try democracy.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“she’d love to have a chance to think about the things she’s studying, only she doesn’t have the time”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“College, after all, as those who like to denigrate it often say, is “not the real world.” But that is precisely its
strength.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“But the classroom and the dorm room are two ends of the same stick. The first puts ideas into your head; the
second makes them part of your soul. The first requires stringency; the second offers freedom. The first is
normative; the second is subversive.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“Now we’re dealing with a cohort of meritocratic professionals for whom a different sort of life is inconceivable. What was once an opportunity has become a necessity. There is only one definition of happiness, and only one way to get it.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“As for why you’d feel the need to raise such paragons, or believe that it is possible, or think that trying to do so is desirable, perhaps the answer is that the only lovable children are “perfect” ones. Both kinds of parenting, finally, are forms of overidentification. The helicopter parent turns the child into an instrument of her will. The overindulgent parent projects his own need for limitless freedom and security.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“Top Ten Majors” means the most employable, not the most interesting. “Top Ten Fields” means average income, not job satisfaction. “What are you going to do with that?” the inevitable sneering question goes. “Liberal arts” has become a put-down, and “English major” a punch line.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“You want some people in your life whose job it is to tell you when you’re wrong.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“Eve, the girl who’s running a 3.97 in “Doing School”—she is carrying four APs her junior year, plans to do seven her senior year, and copes with the workload, among other ways, by studying in class (that is, for other classes)—has this to say: “I sometimes have two or three days where I only get two hours of sleep per night. . . . I really really fear failure. . . . I am just a machine with no life at this place. . . . I am a robot just going page by page, doing the work.” She “surviv[es] on cereal” but is usually “too stressed and tired to feel hungry”—though not so stressed that, like some of her friends, she talks about killing herself. And yet she wouldn’t have it any other way: “Some people see health and happiness as more important than grades and college; I don’t.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“As Lara Galinsky, the author of Work on Purpose, expressed it to me, young people are not trained to pay attention to the things they feel connected to. “You cannot say to a Yalie ‘find your passion,’ ” a former student wrote me. “Most of us do not know how and that is precisely how we arrived at Yale, by having a passion only for success.” According to Harry R. Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College, “Too many students, perhaps after a year or two spent using college as a treadmill to nowhere, wake up in crisis, not knowing why they have worked so hard.” One young woman at Cornell summed up her life to me like this: “I hate all my activities, I hate all my classes, I hated everything I did in high school, I expect to hate my job, and this is just how it’s going to be for the rest of my life.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“I’ve been told again and again, at school after school, that career service offices have little or nothing to say to students who are interested in something other than the big four of law, medicine, finance, and consulting. At the recruitment fairs, the last two dominate the field. And some schools go even further. Stanford offers companies special access to its students for a fee of ten thousand dollars—and it is hard to believe that Stanford is the only one.
Selling your students to the highest bidder: it doesn’t get more cynical than that. But though the process isn’t often that direct, that’s basically the way the system works. As a friend of mine, a third-generation Yalie, once remarked, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. David Foster Wallace (Amherst ’85), has a character put it like this:
The college itself turned out to have a lot of moral hypocrisy about it, e.g., congratulating itself on its diversity and the leftist piety of its politics while in reality going about the business of preparing elite kids to enter elite professions and make a great deal of money, thus increasing the pool of prosperous alumni donors.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“The idea that we should take the first four years of young adulthood and devote them to career preparation alone, neglecting every other part of life, is nothing short of an obscenity. If that’s what people had you do, then you were robbed. And if you find yourself to be the same person at the end of college as you were at the beginning—the same beliefs, the same values, the same desires, the same goals for the same reasons—then you did it wrong. Go back and do it again.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life