William Deresiewicz laments in the current issue of American Scholar how the elite institutions of academia—such as the Ivy League—do not prepare their students to interact with people who are not similarly educated. He writes that elite education produces entitlement, mediocrity, and cowardice—always focused on “playing by the rules” to get ahead. Other academic bloggers have already weighed in on the article, whether it’s about Deresiewicz’s arrogance and assumptions, or whether it’s a reflection on the race towards elite education.
My own response would be this: Thank you for recognising what my peers and I had figured out in high school.
But whether it comes at fifteen or fifty, a revelation is a revelation. Still, what has Deresiewicz discovered? That people are not likely to share the same knowledge or experience with those who have taken other life paths? That sometimes we are in awkward social situations because we lack familiarity with another person? That some people place too high an importance on education?
All of those questions can be answered easily with an emphatic “yes“. But Deresiewicz finds this all revelatory. Why? Because he is entitled. He has bought into the “Ivy League lie” where he believes that the highly educated are special, brilliant people who live in their ivory towers, unable to communicate with the rest of the world because of their ignorance or entitlement.
Whether you take that with a positive spin (the highly educated are special and deserving of admiration) or a negative one (the highly educated are arrogant because they think they are so special), it’s still a lie. Attendance at (and graduation from) a top-tier school does not grant any inherent special quality (other than a more extensive education), nor does it ostracise one from the rest of society. The separation exists because you believe that it exists and in maintaining that belief, you have maintained that separation.
One of the prevalent ideas during high school was that the highly educated, Caucasian-dominated population in this Ivy town is not a reflection of real life, and that once we go off to college, we will find out what that “real life” is. Some of us went to very good schools. Some of us learned about “real life”. Some of us learned that part of life is learning how to communicate with people who are different from you (on all levels), learning that our backgrounds don’t make us “special” or “different”—that they are just part of who we are and that we are smaller parts of the larger human experience.
That some of us grew up.
It’s not about adopting idealist notions of education—that learning should be done for its own sake. It’s about exposure, seeing life for what it is, learning that you are not a “special, special” person.
But if you are willing to do that, you have already begun to cross the divide. By the time you reach the other side, you realise that it never really existed at all.
