William Deresiewicz Quotes

Both kinds of parenting, finally, are forms of overidentification. The helicopter parent turns the child into an instrument of her will. The overindulgent parent projects his own need for limitless freedom and security. In either case, the child is made to function as an extension of somebody else.

College, after all, as those who like to denigrate it often say, is "not the real world." But that is precisely its strength. College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.

They address the questions that are proper to us, not as this or that kind of specialist, this or that kind of professional, but as individuals as such - the very questions we are apt to ask when we look up from our work and think about our lives. Questions of love, death, family, morality, time, truth, God, and everything else within the wide, starred universe of human experience.

Posting information is like pornography, a slick, impersonal exhibition.

Of what I learned at Yale," writes Lewis Lapham, "I learned in what I now remember as one long, wayward conversation in the only all-night restaurant on Chapel Street. The topics under discussion - God, man, existence, Alfred Prufrock's peach - were borrowed from the same anthology of large abstraction that supplied the texts for English 10 or Philosophy 116." The classroom is the grain of sand; it's up to you to make the pearl.

I can tell you right now where you're going to end up: somewhere in the middle, with the rest of us. Does it really matter exactly where? People get to places like Yale and think that they've "arrived," only to discover that there are still other places to arrive at, and other places after that, and so on and so forth in an infinite recession, like the vista in a double mirror.

If you're oblivious to other people, chances are pretty good that you're going to hurt them.

We inherited a strong and flourishing country, and instead of making the investments - that is, the sacrifices - to maintain it, we chose to suck it dry and stick our children with the bill. If you want to see who is to blame for student debt, just look in the mirror. And if parents find themselves supporting kids beyond their college years, that is only, in the aggregate, a form of compensatory justice: the intergenerational transfer of wealth that should have been effected through taxation.

For that is one of the greatest curses of the high-achieving mentality: the envy that it forces on you - the desperation, not simply to be loved, but to be loved, as Auden says, alone.

That's how envy works: the better things are, the worse they are, because they don't belong to you.

Whole fields have disappeared from view: the clergy, the military, electoral politics, teaching, even academia itself, for the most part, including basic science.

What's the return on investment of college? What's the return on investment of having children, spending time with friends, listening to music, reading a book? The things that are most worth doing are worth doing for their own sake. Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state. What's at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human.

The timid practicality that is the major message that our kids absorb today is alibied-and camouflaged, and soothed-with a hollow commercialized rebellion.

To say that the humanities can be a path to truth itself is to challenge one of our most closely held beliefs. We live not only in a scientific world, but also in a scientistic one: a world that thinks that science - empirical, objective, quantifiable - is the exclusive form of knowledge, and that other methods of inquiry are valid only insofar as they approximate its methods. But the humanities and science face in opposite directions. They don't just work in different ways; they work on different things.

Colleges and universities do nothing to suggest that some ways of using your education are better than others. They do nothing, in other words, to challenge the values of a society that equates virtue, dignity, and happiness with material success.

When people say that students at elite schools have a sense of entitlement, that is what they are referring to: the belief that you deserve more than other people because your SAT scores are higher. Of course, your SAT scores are higher because you have already gotten more than other people.

Autodidacts tend to be cranks, obtuse and self-enclosed. A professor's most important role is to make you think with rigor: precisely, patiently, responsibly, remorselessly, and not only about your "deepest ingrained presuppositions," as my own mentor, Karl Kroeber, once wrote, but also about your "most exhilarating new insights, most of which turn out to be fallacious.

Now students all seem to be converging on the same self, the successful upper-middle-class professional, impersonating the adult they've already decided they want to become.

What does it mean to identify with a literary character? I thought I knew, but did I really? Does it simply mean putting yourself in their place? Obviously not. Or approving of their actions? But we're happy to identify with bad characters, given the right encouragement. No, the best I could come up with was that it seemed to be a kind of in-between state - you're somehow them and not them at the same time - that can't exactly be put into words.

If we are to create a decent society, a just society, a wise and prosperous society, a society where children can learn for the love of learning and people can work for the love of work, then that ids what we must believe. We don't have to love our neighbors as ourselves, but we need to love our neighbor's children as our own. We have tried aristocracy. We have tried meritocracy. Now it's time to try democracy."

"It comes to this: the elite have purchased self-perpetuation at the price of their children's happiness. Th e more hoops kids have to jump through, the more it costs to get them through them and the fewer families can do it. But the more they have to jump through, the more miserable they are.

Academic "units" (that is, departments) are seen as "revenue centers"; the ones that can't pull their weight - much of the liberal arts - are slated for downsizing or outright elimination. Science is king, but not just any science; basic research is suffering, too. The holy grail is technology transfer: scientific investigation, often sponsored directly by corporations, that is capable of being parlayed into profit.

We can start all the organic farms we want, but we can't stop congress from declaring pizza sauce a vegetable.

You want to make it to the top? There is no top. However high you climb, there is always somebody above you. Mailer wanted to be Hemingway, Hemingway wanted to be Joyce, and Joyce was painfully aware he'd never be another Shakespeare.

People don't mind being in prison as long as no one else is free. But stage a jailbreak, and everybody else freaks out.

And speaking of options ,these kids [the ones who attend elite universities] have all been told that theirs are limitless. Once you commit to something, though, that ceases to be true. A former student sent me an essay he wrote, a few years after college, called "The Paradox of Potential." Yale students, he said, are like stem cells. They can be anything in the world, so they try to delay for as long as possible the moment when they have to become just one thing in particular. Possibility, paradoxically, becomes limitation.

A real reader creates her own canon, for it consists precisely of those books that she has used to create herself.

Life, if you live it right, keeps surprising you, and the thing that keeps surprising you the most ... is yourself

We are not teaching to the test; we are living to it.

Of course her daughter got into Harvard: that is exactly the kind of parenting the system rewards. That's exactly what is wrong with it.

The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they're doing but with no idea why they're doing it. In

It isn't enough anymore to take a bunch of electives in addition to your primary focus, to roam freely across the academic fields, making serendipitous connections and discoveries, the way that American higher education was designed (uniquely, among the world's systems) to allow you to do. You have to get that extra certification now, or what has it all been for?

People's stories are the most personal thing they have, and paying attention to those stories is just about the most important thing you can do for them.

Jane Austen's life may have seemed uneventful compared to her aunt's or cousin's or brothers', or indeed, compared to just about anyone's. Her genius began with the recognition that such lives as hers were very eventful indeed - that every life is eventful, if only you know how to look at it. She did not think that her existence was quiet or trivial or boring; she thought it was delightful and enthralling, and she wanted us to see that our own are, too.

Practical utility, however, is not the ultimate purpose of a liberal arts education. Its ultimate purpose is to help you learn to reflect in the widest and deepest sense, beyond the requirements of work and career: for the sake of citizenship, for the sake of living well with others, above all, for the sake of building a self that is strong and creative and free.

In 1971, 73 percent of incoming freshmen said that it is essential or very important to "develop a meaningful philosophy of life," 37 percent to be "very well-off financially" (not well-off, note, but very well-off). By 2011, the numbers were almost reversed, 47 percent and 80 percent, respectively.

Don't sell your options short

Here is the rule of thumb: if you aren't giving anything up, it isn't moral and it isn't courage. Stumbles, sacrifices, inner struggle, false starts and wrong turns, conflict with parents and peers-these are some of the signs of the genuine article The way you know it's real is if it hurts.

You're told that you're supposed to go to college, but you're also told that you are being self-indulgent if you actually want to get an education. As opposed to what? Going into consulting isn't self-indulgent? Going into finance isn't self-indulgent? Going into law, like most of the people who do, in order to make yourself rich, isn't self-indulgent? It's not okay to study history, because what good does that really do anyone, but it is okay to work for a hedge fund. It's selfish to pursue your passion, unless it's also going to make you a lot of money, in which case it isn't selfish at all.

Don't try to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life. You are going to be a very different person in two or three years, and that person will have his own ideas. All you can really figure out is what you want to do right now.

What an indictment that is, of the Ivy League and its peers: that colleges four levels down on the academic totem pole, enrolling students whose SAT scores are hundreds of points lower than theirs, deliver a better education, in the highest sense of the word, than do those institutions.

Not every ten-percenter is an excellent sheep, but a sufficient number are for you to think very carefully before deciding to surround yourself with them. Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, more appreciative of what they're getting, and far less entitled and competitive. They tend to act like peers instead of rivals.

[ ... ] art instills the fundamental moral lesson: That you aren't the center of the universe. That others weren't created for your benefit. That they are just as real as you, with equal claimes to dignity and understanding.

The purpose of college, to put this all another way, is to turn adolescents into adults. You needn't go to school for that, but if you're going to be there anyway, then that's the most important thing to get accomplished. That is the true education: accept no substitutes. The idea that we should take the first four years of young adulthood and devote them to career preparation alone, neglecting every other part of life, is nothing short of an obscenity. If that's what people had you do, then you were robbed. And if you find yourself to be the same person at the end of college as you were at the beginning - the same beliefs, the same values, the same desires, the same goals for the same reasons - then you did it wrong. Go back and do it again.

By the time they finish high school - after years of learning how to please their teachers and coaches, not to mention schmoozing with their parents' friends - elite students have become accomplished adult-wranglers.

The American university inherits the missions of two very different institutions: the English college and the German research university. The first pattern prevailed before the Civil War. Curricula centered on the classics, and the purpose of education was understood to be the formation of character. With the emergence of a modern industrial society in the last decades of the nineteenth century, that kind of pedagogy was felt to be increasingly obsolete. Johns Hopkins was founded in 1876 as the first American university on the German model: a factory of knowledge that would focus in particular on the natural and social sciences, the disciplines essential to the new economy and the world to which it was giving rise.

I believe librarians, like English teachers, sit at the right hand of God.

A real education sends you into the world bearing questions, not resumes.

As the sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens has put it, "affluent families fashion an entire way of life organized around the production of measurable virtue in children." Measurable, here, means capable of showing up on a college application. We are not teaching to the test; we're living to it.

Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurshi p comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.

Hence the vogue for double majors. It isn't enough anymore to take a bunch of electives in addition to your primary focus, to roam freely across the academic fields, making serendipitous connections and discoveries, the way that American higher education was designed (uniquely, among the world's systems) to allow you to do.

Tiger Mother felt like reliving a childhood trauma; The Drama of the Gifted Child felt like going through the therapy to cure it.

Status is a funny thing. Money gets you stuff, at least. Status doesn't get you much except the knowledge that you have it. And while money may not make you happy, it is easy to imagine someone who decides they have enough. With status, you can never have enough. It is comparative and competitive, by its very nature. It doesn't just not make you happy: it actively makes you unhappy. You want to make it to the top? There is no top. However high you climb, there is always somebody above you.

We proceed by doubt, by trial and error, by resisting the impulse to lunge after certainty.

Service, which is nothing other than a modern echo of noblesse oblige, and generally undertaken in the same spirit of benign condescension.

Chua champions filial obedience, but the father she reveres rebelled against his own parents, and she rebelled against him in turn: he by leaving China for the United States, she by leaving California for the East Coast. (Both, it seems, were trying to get as far away as possible.)

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don't know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don't know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they're worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don't have are leaders. What we don't have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army - a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.

Everybody wants their child to get an education, but nobody wants them to get an education education.

I have certainly known students who feel they got a great education in college. But they always say some version of "the opportunities are there if you want to pursue them." In other words, you have to ask - or really, you have to insist.

There's no doubt about it: fun people are fun. But I finally learned that there is something more important, in the people you know, than whether they are fun. Thinking about those friends who had given me so much pleasure but who had also caused me so much pain, thinking about that bright, cruel world to which they'd introduced me, I saw that there's a better way to value people. Not as fun or not fun, or stylish or not stylish, but as warm or cold, generous or selfish. People who think about others and people who don't. People who know how to listen, and people who only know how to talk.

Everything is technocratic - the development of expertise - and everything is ultimately justified in technocratic terms. Elite schools like to boast that they teach their students how to think, but all they mean at this point is that they train them in the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions.

Austen, I realized, had not been writing about everyday things because she couldn't think of anything else to talk about. She had been writing about them because she wanted to show how important they really are.

It's hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs