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It didn't dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I'd just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn't have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn't succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. "Ivy retardation," a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn't talk to the man who was standing in my own house.
It's not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society's most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday December 29 2016, @06:05PM
Actually, the author IS right about one thing -- which is that many Ivy League kids today are basically taught (through experience) that they will never fail. And that is a problem. My prescription would be to introduce the MIT freshman grading system [mitadmissions.org] to more elite schools. Basically, first semester is "pass/no record." If you get an A/B/C, you pass. If you get a D or F, there's no record on your external transcript that you even took the course.
This sounds weird when you first hear it, but it's essential when you bring together a group of really smart kids who mostly were straight A students and likely have never been challenged to maintain that A average their entire lives. If you just shove them into the first semester at Yale or Harvard or wherever, they'll think they deserve an A. If they get an A-minus, they'll go crying to the professor's office. (Seriously. I know for a fact this happens.) What ultimately happens is that professors (who are largely rewarded for their research, not their teaching) don't want to deal with student complaints, so they just give out huge numbers of As.
MIT long ago realized that they needed to remove some of that pressure as students adjust to new demands. Which means during the freshman year that professors can set a REAL standard that's significantly higher than what high school demanded of most of those kids. And if any student comes crying to a prof, they can just say, "Look -- it's no big deal. Just do better next time. Even if you get a C in the class, it'll just go on your permanent record as a 'pass.' Now you know what the standard is... figure out how to work, and maybe next term you can get better grades." And some kids won't, because they just aren't that good -- but now they've had a while to adjust to the fact that they may just be a C student at MIT, even if they were a valedictorian at their high school.
Frankly, I think this one change could revolutionize the Ivy League standards. Kids might actually be challenged when they go to such schools again. They might learn some of the lessons about how their intellect isn't infallible (as the author apparently didn't realize until later in life).
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday December 30 2016, @04:37PM
Some families have this attitude that education is only a tool. Superior education is another way of putting yourself above others. They are not interested in education for the sake of education, for the pleasure of knowledge and discovery, or for satisfying curiosity, or even keeping the nation strong. They are willing only to learn that which they can see how to apply to their ultimate goals of amassing more wealth, power, social standing, and influence. The goal is to be a winner. They do not want to take a chance on learning stuff that might not be useful. They'll grudgingly learn things they don't see as useful if they must, can sometimes be convinced to take teachers' word that something will prove to be useful. As in, what's the use of higher math, why do they need to learn algebra, trig, and calculus?
With that kind of attitude, they can't see why they shouldn't cheat. Isn't the appearance of an education just as good? Learn just enough to fake the rest? They also can't see why they shouldn't be given an A. If education is mostly bull anyway, what's the point of not giving out an A? They get suspicious that it's something personal. That teacher has it in for them. That's how they can feel so aggrieved about not getting an A. Why don't you like me, professor? Did my parents not donate enough money to the school this year? To them, that maybe they didn't earn an A because they didn't learn the material is just the standard excuse that the teacher and school uses, it can't be the real reason.
They don't say it, but they don't like the idea of educating everyone. It's hard enough to compete as is. One way to be a winner is to hinder others so that they lose. If all these poor kids have bad or no educations, then the elites don't have to work as hard to have a better education than the masses. That such unfairness weakens our democracy and trust in one another is too abstract a notion for them to appreciate. They don't see or care about that. It's all about winners and losers.
Another problem is indeed "head up their arses". These families think they know better than the schools how to educate students, can't see how narrow they are, and that a broad education has value. They may have the power to bully the schools into doing things their way.
If an elite school has a lot of children from families like that, they get a lot of pressure to water down their standards, make exceptions for this special snowflake and that special snowflake. They are also constantly pressured to teach "useful" material. If the school stands its ground, the parents may make good on threats to leave and pull their funding. The teachers who stand their ground risk being fired, risk that the school won't have their backs and will sell them out. Dead Poets Society. It's easier to do the expedient thing, and sometimes the school and/or teachers do. Worse, the elite school may share those narrow attitudes, may be run by people who think the same as these families. It does the quality of their education great harm when people like that are in charge. It can take a few years before the decline gets so bad that it becomes painfully obvious and the school has to make changes.