Excellent Sheep
The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
About the book
A former Yale professor who also sat on its admissions committee, Deresiewicz argues that elite American colleges are turning out conformists with no sense of direction. His students were bright but lost when it came to thinking for themselves, creatively and critically, or finding a purpose. He follows the pressure from parents and counselors who demand perfect grades through to the distorted applications he read at Yale, and criticizes the shift from the humanities toward practical subjects such as economics. College, he contends, should be a period of self-discovery in which students set their own values and measures of success. The book quotes students and graduates he has corresponded with and proposes fixes for the system.
Bryan Callen, who hosted Deresiewicz on his podcast, described it as a look at what has gone wrong in higher education at places like Yale, Harvard and Amherst.
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Bryan Callen (Co-Host/The Fighter and the Kid)
There’s a guy who I just had on my podcast, Mark Deresiewicz, who wrote a book called Excellent Sheep. He was a Yale professor, and took a look at the essentially what was wrong with higher education, at these elite institutions, primarily places like Amherst and Yale and Harvard. And one of the things he said is that we’re breeding excellent sheep. You’ve got 31 flavors of vanilla.
These kids are so obsessed with essentially achievement for its own sake, not fulfillment or meaning, but rather achievement for its own sake, so they can get into a great – become rich doctors or lawyers, or consultants or investment bankers. And even that becomes an extension of what they’ve been doing their whole life, which was hey, I want to please my boss, jump through these loopholes and be in an elite person. And it’s an interesting book. But one of the things he talked about was that these elite institutions are – there’s a feeder system of about 100 high schools in this country, about 100 high schools, and that’s it, that provide students to these universities. So something like QuestBridge is desperately needed, so that we can create an equality of opportunity. That’s always what it is, right?
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