This all said, I recognize in this piece by the Columbia-educated and formerly Yale-employed scholar and scribe a great deal of wisdom. I especially concur with his lament for a society that’s lost its values, even at what is supposedly the highest level. In some ways, his critique chimes with that of Christopher Hayes’s Twilight of the Elites<\/em>, one of my favorite recent books of social criticism.<\/p>\n Anyway, here is Deresiewicz, who I expect will explore these subjects in more depth in his upcoming book Excellent Sheep<\/em>:<\/p>\n Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they\u2019re doing but with no idea why they\u2019re doing it.<\/p>\n When I speak of elite education, I mean prestigious institutions like Harvard or Stanford or Williams as well as the larger universe of second-tier selective schools, but I also mean everything that leads up to and away from them\u2014<\/span>the private and affluent public high schools; the ever-growing industry of tutors and consultants and test-prep courses; the admissions process itself, squatting like a dragon at the entrance to adulthood; the brand-name graduate schools and employment opportunities that come after the B.A.; and the parents and communities, largely upper-middle class, who push their children into the maw of this machine. In short, our entire system of elite education. Some readers of CultureCrash may wonder what this has to do with the arts and culture. The connections are profound. The Ivy Leagues educate leaders in most sectors of American society, and academia is increasingly a harbor for the fine\/ literary arts as the marketplace withers. And when students become so pragmatic, culture pays the price. The audience for much of the arts and culture comes from schools like these: They matter.<\/p>\n Deresiewicz pains a pretty grim picture of today’s Ivy League students. “So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success,” he writes. “The prospect of not\u00a0<\/em>being successful terrifies them, disorients them.” Many of them, he writes, are “entitled little shit[s].”<\/p>\n As luck would have it, I’m also reading a book about liberal arts education by Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University. (Deresiewicz praises Wesleyan — my alma mater — in his article, though also calls it a “second-tier” school.) I’m hoping to post on Roth’s Beyond The University<\/em> in the near future.<\/p>\n![\"220px-Rhind_sculpture_at_Princeton\"](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/220px-Rhind_sculpture_at_Princeton-192x300.jpg\")
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