The Disadvantages Of An Elite Education

good read.

Word.

Very good...And probably very true.

I like the note at the bottom where it says he TAUGHT english 'til 2008. Did he write this and get fired?

this sounds like the ramblings of a very smart social retard. i went to an ok school, and i manage to carry on conversations with the stupidest of people on a daily basis.

I think his title frames the problem too narrowly. Better tagged with 'A College Diploma Does Not Guarantee a Well-Rounded Graduate, No Matter How Much You Pay', or some such. Any educational opportunity is what you make of it. Ironically, it sounds like a solution would include more education, which would include evaluating some form of this article...

Anyone who can't find the words to talk to another human being is just an meep.

Everything he says 'the college' made him think was his own dilusional self-meep.

Good luck with the rest of your life expensively-educated retard.

I think the point was more a critique of the purpose and intentions of the IVY league colleges themselves. Where they considered the best schools by society and themselves, they are really just mediocre education systems that propagate a class system that mostly serves a homogeneous wealthy. The problem isn't what it -made- him or anyone else do so much as what it didn't provide while still wildly claiming to be the best. The 'best' ends up being very limited. It is important that he is confounded by his plumber not because he simply can't talk with him, but because he was given the expectation that he was marvelously worldly and educated.

If the very institutions that purportedly educate the leaders of the country don't actually do so very well (rather, they are the vehicle to that status) while telling them that they do so very excellently, a problem forms. They help to propagate this delusion among the people they help to run the country; that is the dire issue here. They take people like Bush, and instead of helping him be realistic, they help foster the idea that he can do anything he wants and it's all good.

Ivy League schools are just like every other college. They teach the same things. They may have better facilities and more prestigious professors, but they don't have a secret curriculum. What matters is what you make of the education and your time there.

The difference that an Ivy League education gives you is that it opens doors more easily when it is on your resume and it provides an opportunity to network with your classmates. You still have to prove you've got what it takes.

There is no excuse for not making yourself a well-rounded individual, especially if you attended an Ivy League school.

Very good read. Gyst summarizes it well. The critique is that what is being produced is not a generation of real visionaries or leaders, but a new, narrowly self-selected aristocracy. It is system that precludes the creation of leaders the likes of, say, JFK, for example.

yeah JFK was certainly not the product of a narrow, self selected aristocracy.