A Missive from the Chairman
It is more than a little ironic that Philip Yeo, of 3.8 GPA requirement fame, who started the “Chairman’s Honours List” where scholars with perfect grades would have their names proudly published in the local newspapers and engraved on a physical honour roll in Biopolis and get to share a table with the man himself at tea sessions, should send A* scholars this article for their reading pleasure. For here is what it says (amongst other things):
Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value. It’s been said that what those tests really measure is your ability to take tests, but even if they measure something real, it is only a small slice of the real. The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”
Of course, Yeo might not have agreed with this particular paragraph in the essay. Perhaps the article was sent to scholars for the purpose of encouraging them to attend cheaper public universities rather than elite private universities, thus saving A* some money.
“When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity.”
Amazing that an article by an ivy league alumnus trying to critique the ivy league system still sounds so smug.
Comment by LH — June 30, 2008 @ 4:55 pm
The article did get bashed around by a few bloggers when it came out, eg:
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2008/06/the_selfjustification_of_elite.php
Deresiewicz does make some valid points in his article though.
Comment by Lab Rat — July 1, 2008 @ 9:37 am