The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The first paragraph gave me douche chills.

The first paragraph made me think the author is full of it. You have an Ivy league degree and you don't have enough smarts to engage a stranger in a small talk?

+1 Uses it to hook the reader but hardly plausible.

[Anonymous]

If you read the whole article, it actually gives some good insight of why IVY is not ideal. He clearly faults himself, and the ivy education system . A product of new england boarding schools- not ivy college (GW) I relate to the since of entitlement. Took me years to get over it- and I come from a lower middle class home.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The first paragraph gave me douche chills.

The first paragraph made me think the author is full of it. You have an Ivy league degree and you don't have enough smarts to engage a stranger in a small talk?

I don't think it's that uncommon for highly educated/intelligent people to be a bit socially awkward. I'm sure we can all think of several examples within our social and professional circles. And please people, I'm not jealous or calling Ivy League graduates socially clueless. But I'm not the only person who has noticed this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree with PP. The author is a Big-3 type. I don't know why OP thinks he is a product of MCPS. Does OP think magnet/GT kids are not exposed to "real world" experiences?

MCPS fosters a mentality of nothing being important except obeying authority and performing academically. They shame and discipline students who do not conform to these standards, they neither inspire nor encourage creativity or out of the box thinking, and have demands and work expectations that are not age-appropriate. It's not just MCPS. I hear the same complaints from families in VA as well as in MCPS. There are plenty of big-3 type parents who put their kids in MCPS and want them on an Ivy League track all the same. The elitist mentality starts at home and at school.

Yikes. You keep on justifying to yourself spending $30,000/year, the rest of us will just ignore you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you read the whole article, it actually gives some good insight of why IVY is not ideal. He clearly faults himself, and the ivy education system . A product of new england boarding schools- not ivy college (GW) I relate to the since of entitlement. Took me years to get over it- and I come from a lower middle class home.

I have an Ivy League education and then went on to teach public elementary school. Guess I had the best of all worlds?

[Anonymous]

OP here. The author states: "But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there. Long before they got to college, they turned themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers, getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher or how pointless the subject, racking up eight or 10 extracurricular activities no matter what else they wanted to do with their time." This reminded me of schools around here. That's all I wanted to say.

[Anonymous]

Hmmm. He bemoans specialization in liberal arts studies, but fails to mention the common core at Columbia, which he attended as a grad student? He uses John Kerry as an example, again and again? I mean, I'm a liberal dem, and I don't care about John Kerry.

But the basic problem is that his thesis doesn't hold together. He builds a case that elite educations train you to think a certain way. Of course they are, because they're entering fields that require you to think a different way.

What I don't get is how would that precludes you from your being able to chat with plumbers. Unless you're a big dork.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree with PP. The author is a Big-3 type. I don't know why OP thinks he is a product of MCPS. Does OP think magnet/GT kids are not exposed to "real world" experiences?

MCPS fosters a mentality of nothing being important except obeying authority and performing academically. They shame and discipline students who do not conform to these standards, they neither inspire nor encourage creativity or out of the box thinking, and have demands and work expectations that are not age-appropriate. It's not just MCPS. I hear the same complaints from families in VA as well as in MCPS. There are plenty of big-3 type parents who put their kids in MCPS and want them on an Ivy League track all the same. The elitist mentality starts at home and at school.

Yikes. You keep on justifying to yourself spending $30,000/year, the rest of us will just ignore you.

+1

This is just a self-serving post for OP.

[Anonymous]

Wait. Gates and Zuckerberg got into Harvard, for Pete's sake, before both dropped out. So his theory, that the kids who get into ivies are the ones who know how to work the system and therefore can't think outside the box, is pretty much destroyed by the examples of Gates and Zuckerberg. Of course, that must be why he chose to talk about Steve Jobs instead.

[Anonymous]

15:44 in what sense?

[Anonymous]

Apparently this meme has been around the block a few times already ...

[Anonymous]

Thanks, 16:48!

[Anonymous]

+1 brilliant!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here. The author states: "But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there. Long before they got to college, they turned themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers, getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher or how pointless the subject, racking up eight or 10 extracurricular activities no matter what else they wanted to do with their time." This reminded me of schools around here. That's all I wanted to say.

BINGO!

Yeah, I think there's some truth to this. It's a shame, too, because I think those kids grow into the kind of person that name-drops and crap like that. I find such people sort of dull.

[Anonymous]

You made my day, 16:48!