Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation…. One student told me that a friend of hers had left Yale because she found the school “stifling to the parts of yourself that you’d call a soul.
William Deresiewicz, who spent 10 years on the faculty of Yale University, including a day on the Yale admissions committee, has become disillusioned and somewhat cynical about the whole process smart kids must go through to get into one of the prestigious institutions, such as Harvard, Stanford, or Williams. He also includes in the process the elite high schools, private tutors, and test prep courses that upper middle-class parents force their bright kids to go through to get to the top. The professor writes in the New Republic of 8/4/14:
These enviable youngsters appear to be the winners in the race we have made of childhood. But the reality is very different…. Our system of elite education manufactures young people 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 prestige, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they are doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.
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