I went to an elite college and much as I am grateful for the fine, indeed excellent, educational experience I had, it's taken me decades to strip away the disadvantages William Deresiewicz writes about in The Disadvantages of an Elite Education in The American Scholar. A brilliant essay.
The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you.
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because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it.
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But it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright.
.. elite universities ... select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools,... But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this.
The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth
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If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security.
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if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. This will seem counterintuitive....The system forgot ... that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.
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So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students.
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The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.