I revised this review because I watched a video of Deresiewicz outlining the principles behind his book, and I was reminded of how much I agree with his central contentions. Among them, he said that being a leader often means being willing to be unpopular; that colleges breed and demand conformity—which does not a leader make— and that (paraphrasing another), on college campuses, being a leader means being a very good follower. I want to emphasize that I don't believe it is his assertion (as I originally believed it) that the fault lies with millennials for being too compliant (or too sheep-like, that is). It is not (only) a failure of the students. It is the failure of the culture. The point of college, as he says, is to build a self.

Some quotes in his article in the The American Scholar from which this book was born:

"Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow."

"The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. 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."

"There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s intellect or knowledge. There is something wrong with the smugness and self-congratulation that elite schools connive at from the moment the fat envelopes come in the mail."

"Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls 'entitled mediocrity.'"

"Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade…Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.  There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty. As another friend, a third-generation Yalie, says, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a vision of the good society and then trying to realize that vision by speaking truth to power. It means going into spiritual exile. It means foreswearing your allegiance, in lonely freedom, to God, to country, and to Yale. It takes more than just intellect; it takes imagination and courage. 'I am not afraid to make a mistake,” Stephen Dedalus says, 'even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity, too.'"

"Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there."

"There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude."

"The life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system."


Original review:

I am enjoying this thus far, which surprises me, as I read the author's article on the same subject matter and found it banal in terms of its (vulgar) treatment of "millennial entitlement."

If I had a coin for every adult on the internet who incautiously blathers on about the many faults of my generation I would be very wealthy indeed...

We are too lazy and absorbed in electronics, or, we are efficient, but too mechanical and soulless. Too much or too little. Jump through hoops, but not those hoops!

Hence my tendency to absolutely disregard the constructive criticism of adult generations.

So much for being a sheep.