If you are a part of our local community, you’ve heard by now that Bill Deresiewicz, who wrote Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, is coming to San Luis Obispo. If you’d like to know more about Professor William Deresiewicz, we invite you to read on.
Bill D. is “an award-winning essayist and critic, a frequent college speaker, and a best-selling author.” He was also a professor of English at Yale for ten years and a graduate instructor at Columbia for five. His convictions and hearkening cry with the shift in today’s American education is worth our attention.
“As a professor at Yale, William Deresiewicz saw something that troubled him deeply. Some of the nation’s brightest minds were adrift when it came to thinking critically and creatively and finding a sense of purpose. Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and continues into college. This culminates in the skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale’s admissions committee. It is essential, says Deresiewicz, that college be a time for self-discovery, when students can establish their own values and measures of success.”
Bill has written countless essays along with numerous interviews. Below is part of an interview with The Atlantic regarding his most recent book that we felt our readers would appreciate. You can read the full article here.
The Atlantic:
You’ve observed that Ivy League students have an internal struggle with both “grandiosity and depression.” Can you explain this further?
Deresiewicz:
Alice Miller wrote about this 30-plus years ago in the classic The Drama of the Gifted Child, but I had to experience it to see it for myself. The grandiosity is that sense of “you’re the greatest, you’re the best, you’re the brightest.” This kind of praise and reinforcement all the time makes students feel they’re the greatest kid in the world. And I would say that this is even worse than when I was a kid. Now there’s a whole culture of parenting around this positive reinforcement.
These kids were always the best in their class, and their teachers were always praising them, inflating their ego. But it’s a false self-esteem. It’s not real self-possession, where you are measuring yourself against your own internal standards and having a sense that you’re working towards something. It’s totally conditional, and constantly has to be pumped up by the next grade, the next A, or gold star. As Miller says, what you’re really learning is that your parents’ love is conditional on this achievement. So when you fail, even a little bit, even if you just get a B on a test, or an A- on a test, the whole thing collapses. It may only collapse temporarily, but it’s a profound collapse—you feel literally worthless.
These are kids who have no ability to measure their own worth in any realistic way—either you are on top of the world, or you are worthless. And that kind of all-or-nothing mentality really pervades the whole system. It’s also why it’s Harvard or the gutter: If you don’t get into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, it’s a disgrace. If you go to Wesleyan, you can never show your face in public again
This is not really the only way to succeed, but this crazy definition not only of success but of how you achieve success doesn’t even really reflect how actually successful people achieve success. Steve Jobs is an obvious example because he was obviously very gifted and ambitious but he took a circuitous path, and people who are very successful doing interesting things also often take circuitous paths.
This notion that you’ve got to do X, Y, and Z or else your life is over makes you end up as a high-functioning sheep. You end up being the kind of leader that I talk about in the last section of the book. You get to the top, or you get near the top, but you don’t actually do anything interesting there—you just sort of fulfill your function in the organization. You don’t initiate or create.
The Atlantic:
That ties in with your argument that words like “leadership” and “service” have become hollow in the whole college process.
Deresiewicz:
There’s a list of things that everyone knows you’re supposed to do to get into college: scores, extracurriculars, and then these two other things, “leadership” and “service.” They’ve been completely ritualized, and kids have become cynical about them because they know they just need to demonstrate them. In the case of leadership, which is supposed to be about qualities of character, self-sacrifice, initiative, and vision, it just means getting to the top, and that’s all. If you get a position with some authority you are, by definition, a leader. And service, if anything, is even worse. Service is supposed to be about making the world a better place or helping people who are less fortunate, but because it’s done for the resume, it really just becomes about yourself.
The Atlantic:
What kinds of values do you think education should be passing on?
Deresiewicz:
Ultimately, colleges have inherited the spiritual mission of churches. As religious beliefs have declined with the rise of science, especially among educated people, people started to turn elsewhere to ask the big questions: What does life mean? What is the world about? People turned to works of art, to literature, music, theater, philosophy, which were in turn brought into college curricula.
That’s what the idea of a humanities education in college is and should be about, but part of that idea has very much declined. It’s not about learning a specific body of information or skills the way other parts of a college education quite properly should be. Studying the humanities is about giving yourself the opportunity to engage in acts of self-reflection, seeking answers to the kinds of questions you ask yourself not in a specialized capacity—but in the general capacity of being a human being, as a citizen.
The Atlantic:
Some criticize this kind of self-reflection as narcissistic, but you argue that it’s actually “the most practical thing in the world.”
Deresiewicz:
I just hate it when people talk about how self-reflection is somehow self-indulgent—as if the things that students were being invited to do were not, like making themselves rich and powerful. How is that not self-indulgent? But I would say, aside from all the personal, intellectual, spiritual benefits of self-awareness—I can’t believe we even have to argue this—the main point is to know yourself so you know what you want in the world. You can decide, what is the best work for me, what is the best career for me, what are the rewards that I really want. And maybe you’ll end up saying that I do need a certain level of wealth, but you will know it because you will have come to know yourself. And you will be acting on your own initiative instead of having absorbed the messages that have been instilled in you unconsciously.
The Atlantic:
Gaining self-knowledge isn’t a simple or predictable process. Are there certain things that can only be learned outside the classroom?
Deresiewicz:
Aside from the classes themselves, the fact that we’ve created a system where kids are constantly busy and have no time for solitude or reflection is going to take its toll. We need to create a situation where kids feel like they don’t have to be “on” all the time. Given the chance, adolescents tend to engage in very intense conversation, and a lot of life learning happens laterally, happens peer to peer. But if they’re constantly busy, there’s literally no time. It’s crazy. We’ve taken adolescence away from adolescents. School must not take away your opportunities to self-reflect on your own.
Bill D. will be visiting our school next week as he prepares to speak about his best-selling book, Excellent Sheep which is available in The Den. This book is described as “part cultural commentary, part philosophical treatise on the meaning of education itself, the book reads like a self-help manual for ambitious yet internally adrift adolescents struggling to figure out how to navigate the college system, and ultimately their own lives.”
Join us! Bill D will be at the Cultural and Performing Arts at Cuesta College on March 7th at 7pm. It is a must-see event and we encourage you to come!
We’ll see you there!!
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