William Deresiewicz’s book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life is a scathing critique of the Ivy League system from which he received his education.
You don't want to miss his book if you're a parent considering an Ivy League college for your child, you're a student who'd like to attend one, or you're someone who's interested in education for its own sake.
While it’s a book worth reading, there were some problems with it, some of which are worth mentioning.
FLIMSY OPINIONS
For starters, Deresiewicz has some flimsy opinions; such as autodidacts are "cranks, obtuse and self-enclosed.” He also doesn’t think that college students should be friends with their parents, and he thinks that the best place to learn to “think” is in college.
For a bit of fun, I’m going to pick some of his opinions apart.
AUTODIDACTS
In defense of autodidacts, attending college didn't become more common until after World War ll. Check out the "Autodidactic Hall of Fame" for some notable names of the self-taught who fail to fit Deresiewicz’s description of an autodidact.
PARENT / CHILD FRIENDSHIPS
As for thinking that children should not be friends with their parents, he has a point but not the one he intended.
Treating your young child as your friend rather than asserting your authority as a parent is the road to bad parenting. However, by the time your child reaches adulthood what else should you be if not friends?
You are family for God's sake. If you did your job well, absolutely you will be friends.
LEARNING HOW TO THINK
As for learning how to think, if Deresiewicz follows the liberal arts curriculum he advocates, then a student would study logic—the art of right thinking—long before college.
If he waits until college to learn how to think, he has waited too long.
Furthermore, the kind of thinking that allows us to "develop a self," as Deresiewicz proposes, is natural from a young age. The institutional school model, whether public or private, is where we learn to distrust our inner guide, and therefore, fail to develop a sense of who we are.
WHAT HE SAYS ABOUT IVY LEAGUE STUDENTS
Deresiewicz begins with a chapter called "Students" where he writes that behind their well-fortressed facades, Ivy League kids are fragile and confused.
He portrays them as highly intelligent twenty-two-year olds who have no idea what they want to do with their lives, no sense of purpose, and no understanding of how to go about finding one.
The “best" and the "brightest” Ivy League kids, to use Deresiewicz's words, are nothing more than "entitled little s**ts" with ambitious parents; parents who had the money to spend on tutors, music lessons, sports equipment, and trips abroad to provide them with the perfect resume and test scores for acceptance into an Ivy League college.
As Deresiewicz says in his most telling line, "It comes to this: the elite have purchased self-perpetuation at the price of their children's happiness."
And, he’s totally right.
Part of the Ivy League initiation process is to cement the childrens' belief that they are better than the rest of humanity simply because they are Ivy Leaguers.
Paraphrasing the words of one Harvard student surveying fellow passengers on a train, Deresiewicz writes, "...feeling that these people, who could never hope to be her intellectual equals, simply didn't exist in the way that a member of the Harvard community did."
HIS MISSION
Deresiewicz has a lot of gripes about his upbringing and his Ivy League education, an education that he says he wasted. So, he devotes some of his time to making sure other kids don’t fall into the same trap as he.
Being the son of Jewish immigrants and a self-professed atheist, in helping kids develop a self, Deresiewicz seems to have replaced his former religion for the temple of education.
He's evangelical about the college experience: “You should arrive at college as at the beginning of a pilgrimage … that you should come to seek conversion, though you know not yet to what belief or way?”
When he talks about the relationship between a teacher and his student, he titles the chapter “Spirit Guides." He refers to the transmission of knowledge by the teacher as “sacred” and, while it may be, the evangelical spirit that floated between the lines of his book was not.
You get the idea that college is the temple, and the professors are the priests, which actually seems pretty accurate given the state of academia today.
But it gets worse.
What really disturbed me had nothing to do with Ivy Leagues and everything to do with William Deresiewicz.
THE ATTACK ON PARENTS
I found his attitude towards parents alarming and dangerous.
The family is the foundational unit of a society. If the families are broken, then society is broken. Adult children who are not friends with their parents is a sign of a broken family.
To quote Deresiewicz, "What isn't normal is the notion that parents and children, first and foremost, should be 'friends' ... better the tyrannical patriarchs of yesteryear toward whom one openly declared one's enmity, than to have such friends as these."
He asks his students, "What do you owe your parents?" He advises them only to talk to their parents "once a week, or even better, once a month."
“Treat your parents with loving care, for you will only know their value when you see their empty chair. ”
Let me tell you what we owe our parents, Professor Deresiewicz. We owe our parents the gift of our lives. We honor them for giving us the gift above all other gifts.
Furthermore, our parents fed us and clothed us and cared for us, and some of them even broke their backs to get us an Ivy League education.
We owe them a lot.
To purchase: Excellent Sheep
FINAL THOUGHTS
However, in spite of the short-sighted aspects of his book, I think Excellent Sheep is an important book to read.
Deresiewicz has much to say about the value of an Ivy League education that will alter your perspective and may even change your destiny.
One last thing, instead of the Ivy Leagues, Deresiewicz recommends small liberal arts colleges. I couldn’t agree with him more on this last point.
If you read his book, and I hope you do, just remember to separate fact from fiction, but above all, be good to your parents.
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