by William Deresiewicz
A controversial book, coming from a professor from an Ivy League university, which has three distinctive arguments:
This book helped me in big ways to finally come to terms and be in peace by having taken the choice during my teens to study Liberal Arts (International Affairs) instead of some STEM major.
The best quote, in my opinion: "H= MC. Humanities equals more cash." David M. Rubenstein, CEO of The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest private equity firms:
Rating: 9/10
Amazon Page for more details
Click Here to read my notes
A controversial book, coming from a professor from an Ivy League university, which has three distinctive arguments:
- A manifesto that has its origins in Deresiewicz's concern with students lacking critical thinking and a sense of purpose after college, in a world where credentialism dominates.
- An open critic of the current state of public and elite education, particularly the Ivy Leage.
- An argument in defense of the Liberal Arts of its role in society and the economy.
This book helped me in big ways to finally come to terms and be in peace by having taken the choice during my teens to study Liberal Arts (International Affairs) instead of some STEM major.
The best quote, in my opinion: "H= MC. Humanities equals more cash." David M. Rubenstein, CEO of The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest private equity firms:
Rating: 9/10
Amazon Page for more details
Click Here to read my notes
As Lara Galinsky, the author of Work on Purpose, expressed it to me, young people are not trained to pay attention to the things they feel connected to.
Polite, pleasant, mild, and presentable; well-mannered, well-groomed, and well-spoken (not to mention, often enough, well-medicated), they have fashioned that façade of happy, healthy high achievement.
They’ve learned to “be a student,” not to use their minds.
“It’s hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs."
The result is what we might refer to as credentialism. The purpose of life becomes the accumulation of gold stars. Hence the relentless extracurricular busyness, the neglect of learning as an end in itself, the inability to imagine doing something that you can’t put on your resume.
If love of money tends to win out, that is largely because so many kids leave college without a sense of inner purpose—in other words, of what else might be worth their time.
The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error.
When a student at Pomona told me that she’d love to have a chance to think about the things she’s studying, only she doesn’t have the time, I asked her if she had ever considered not trying to get an A in every class. She looked at me as if I had made an indecent suggestion.
What is not reasonable is that we have constructed an educational system that produces highly intelligent, accomplished twenty-two-year-olds who have no idea what they want to do with their lives: no sense of purpose and, what is worse, no understanding of how to go about finding one. Who can follow an existing path but don’t have the imagination—or the courage, or the inner freedom—to invent their own.
Education is more than the acquisition of marketable skills, and you are more than your ability to contribute to your employer’s bottom line or the nation’s GDP, no matter what the rhetoric of politicians or executives would have you think.
You need to get a job, but you also need to get a life.
Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state.
The first thing that college is for is to teach you to think.
It means developing the habit of skepticism and the capacity to put it into practice.
It means learning not to take things for granted, so you can reach your own conclusions.
Society is a conspiracy to keep itself from the truth.
Why college? College, after all, as those who like to denigrate it often say, is “not the real world.” But that is precisely its strength. College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.
The classroom is the grain of sand; it’s up to you to make the pearl.
A real education sends you into the world bearing questions, not resumes.
The job of college is to assist you, or force you, to start on your way through the vale of soul-making. Books, ideas, works of art and thought, the pressure of the minds around you that are looking for their own answers in their own ways: all these are incitements, disruptions, violations.
“An education,” Lapham quotes an old professor, “is a self-inflicted wound."
What you should really want to develop in college is the habit of reflection, which means the capacity for change.
Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus remark that the purpose of college is to make you a more interesting person.
But being interesting is very different from credentialed self-actualization, as David Brooks would call it.
Interesting is not accomplished.
What makes you interesting is reading, thinking, slowing down, having long conversations, and creating a rich inner life for yourself.
The purpose of college, to put all this another way, is to turn adolescents into adults.
And if you find yourself to be the same person at the end of college as you were at the beginning—the same beliefs, the same values, the same desires, the same goals for the same reasons—then you did it wrong. Go back and do it again.
“Education’s what’s left over."
Most of what you come across in college will inevitably fade from memory. What’s left over, precisely, is you.
True self-esteem means not caring whether you get an A in the first place. It means recognizing, despite all you’ve been trained to believe, that the grades you get do not define your value as a human being. It means deciding for yourself what constitutes success.
You can invent a device or a drug or an app, but you can also invent your life.
Moral imagination means the capacity to envision new alternatives for how to live.
The morally courageous person tends to make the individuals around him very uncomfortable.
It’s not okay to study history, because what good does that really do anyone, but it is okay to work for a hedge fund.
Do what you love to do the most: no, not that—not what you think you love, or think you ought to love, but what you really do love.
“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six,” George Orwell wrote, “I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature.
You can endlessly delay gratification, doing work you hate because of the promise of future reward, or you can find your way to work that is its own reward.
When Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard, was asked to name a book that she wished that all her incoming freshmen would read, she cited Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong, which “advocates doubt as a skill and praises error as the foundation of wisdom."
Of course you’ll make mistakes, and some will be hard to endure. But life is finally a long process of learning how you ought to have lived in the first place. Or it is if you do it right.
Getting a piercing, growing a mustache, moving to Austin—these do not make you an individual. You can’t accessorize your way to moral courage.
Here’s a rule of thumb: if you aren’t giving anything up, it isn’t moral and it isn’t courage.
The best advice I ever got, the thing that saved me, at the age of twenty-two, from becoming a lawyer, was this: Don’t try to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life. You’re going to be a very different person in two or three years, and that person will have his own ideas. All you can really figure out is what you want to do right now.
That is the great question about bureaucracies. Why are the best people so often mired in the middle, while nonentities become the leaders? Because what gets you up the ladder isn’t excellence; it is a talent for maneuvering.
“What people usually mean by a leader now,” Mark Edmundson remarks in reference to the way the word is thrown around on campuses today, “is someone who, in a very energetic, upbeat way, shares all the values of the people who are in charge. Leaders tend to be little adults, little grown-ups who don’t challenge the big grown-ups who run the place.
Instead of training “leaders,” how about training citizens? How about training thinkers—these are colleges, after all—individuals who question those in power rather than competing to become them?
Better yet, how about recognizing that the best leaders are thinkers?
People who possess what might be called resistant minds: who can ask questions instead of just answering them; who can figure out not only how to get things done, but whether they’re worth doing in the first place; who can formulate new directions, for a business or an industry or a country—new ways of doing things, new ways of looking at things—instead of simply putting themselves at the front of the herd that’s heading toward the cliff.
It takes a willingness to be unpopular, however: independent thinking does, and leadership certainly does.
Emerson insisted that we each must win our independence by mounting a private revolution to free ourselves from the tyranny of existing mental structures.
Independence, impoliteness, disagreement, dissent: these values are encoded in our national genetics.
Instead of worrying so much about building your resume, you need to start working on building your mind.
A survey of 318 companies found that 93 percent cite “critical thinking, communication and problem-solving skills as more important than a candidate’s undergraduate major,” in part because they are filling positions with “broader responsibilities” and “more complex challenges” than in the past.
Part of what you learn from majoring in something that actually interests you is that there are more fulfilling ways to spend your time than trying to be rich.
“Companies are looking for soft skills over hard skills now,” said the head of the firm that conducted the study, “because hard skills can be learned, while soft skills need to be developed.” And the latter seem to be in short supply.
“Increasingly, anything you learn is going to become obsolete within a decade,” says Larry Summers, the former secretary of the Treasury and president of Harvard. “The most important kind of learning is about how to learn.
Humanities majors, he says, are well equipped to handle complexity and ambiguity, think creatively, communicate persuasively, and understand the needs of customers and employees.
Engineering programs have also started to recognize the importance of giving their students a base in the liberal arts, precisely because technical information has a limited shelf life, while skills of thinking and communication last a lifetime.
If anything, the liberal arts are more important now than ever, as a rapidly evolving global economy relies increasingly on creativity and innovation.
If Thomas Friedman is right, if the future belongs to those who can invent new jobs and industries rather than staffing existing ones, then it belongs to people with a broad liberal arts education.
the necessary aptitudes, writes Richard A. Greenwald, author of The Micropreneurial Age, include “breadth, cultural knowledge and sensitivity, flexibility,” and “the ability to continually learn, grow and reinvent.
David M. Rubenstein, the billionaire cofounder and co-CEO of The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, put it this way earlier this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: “H = MC. Humanities equals more cash."
Practical utility, however, is not the ultimate purpose of a liberal arts education. Its ultimate purpose is to help you to learn to reflect in the widest and deepest sense, beyond the requirements of work and career: for the sake of citizenship, for the sake of living well with others, above all, for the sake of building a self that is strong and creative and free.
The humanities are what we have, in a secular society, instead of religion.
Art doesn’t make you a better person; it only makes you a freer one.
If you think the humanities have any value, whether as a doorway to enlightenment or just as cultural capital, then they are valuable for everyone and should belong to everyone.
The best thing that could happen to our culture now is if the Asian and Latino kids did likewise.
A teacher awakens; a teacher inspires.
Remember that the central intellectual ability that you’re supposed to develop in college is that of analyzing other people’s arguments and formulating your own.
What they really want is that their teachers challenge them and that they care about them. They don’t want fun and games; they want the real thing.
What they want, in other words, is mentorship.
In South Korea, so I’m told, parents warn their children that if they don’t stop misbehaving, they’ll tell their teachers.
For all the skill that teaching involves, you ultimately only have a single tool: your entire life as you have lived it up until the moment you walk into class.
Students want you to be honest, not least about yourself. They want you to be yourself. You need to step outside the role a bit, regard it with a little irony, if only to acknowledge the dissonance between the institution and the spirit.
There is only one problem with telling students to seek out good teaching in college. They’re going to have some trouble finding it, because academic institutions usually don’t care about it. Oh, they’ll tell you otherwise, in their promotional material. But I advise you to be skeptical.
The only genuine solution to the crisis in the classroom is for colleges to bring back teaching to the center of their mission.
The students, the teachers, the mentality, the madness: at those and other top-tier universities, they’re all essentially the same. The rest is marketing and ego, the sorts of things psychologists have in mind when they talk about “the narcissism of small differences”
The flattery in question is essentially reflexive: you’re great because we’re great. (One of my students has written of “Yale’s boundless appetite for self-celebration.
When people say that students at elite schools have a sense of entitlement, that is what they are referring to: the belief that you deserve more than other people because your SAT scores are higher. Of course, your SAT scores are higher because you have already gotten more than other people.
The whole idea of “service,” as embodied in organizations like Teach For America and among the elite in general, is inherently condescending.
Surveying five New Jersey elementary schools, she concluded that the ways in which students are taught, even more than what they are taught, prepare them to occupy their respective class positions. Working-class kids are heavily disciplined and instructed by rote; the sons and daughters of professionals get creativity and self-expression; the children of the business class are taught authority, mastery, and self-control.
Kids at prestigious schools, in other words, receive an endless string of second chances.
Instead of service, how about service work? That’ll really give you insight into other people. How about waiting tables yourself, so you can see how hard it is, not only physically but mentally?
The meritocracy is also a technocracy. It can solve the problems that you put in front of it, but it cannot tell you whether they’re the right ones to be working on.
We want kids with resilience, self-reliance, independence of spirit, genuine curiosity and creativity, and a willingness to take risks and make mistakes.
Helen Vendler, the Harvard professor and dean of American poetry critics, has tried to remind her institution that great artists are not likely to be “leaders” or the kinds of people who are good at everything (or want to be), and I would say the same about great scientists, great thinkers, and great just about everything else.
Polite, pleasant, mild, and presentable; well-mannered, well-groomed, and well-spoken (not to mention, often enough, well-medicated), they have fashioned that façade of happy, healthy high achievement.
They’ve learned to “be a student,” not to use their minds.
“It’s hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs."
The result is what we might refer to as credentialism. The purpose of life becomes the accumulation of gold stars. Hence the relentless extracurricular busyness, the neglect of learning as an end in itself, the inability to imagine doing something that you can’t put on your resume.
If love of money tends to win out, that is largely because so many kids leave college without a sense of inner purpose—in other words, of what else might be worth their time.
The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error.
When a student at Pomona told me that she’d love to have a chance to think about the things she’s studying, only she doesn’t have the time, I asked her if she had ever considered not trying to get an A in every class. She looked at me as if I had made an indecent suggestion.
What is not reasonable is that we have constructed an educational system that produces highly intelligent, accomplished twenty-two-year-olds who have no idea what they want to do with their lives: no sense of purpose and, what is worse, no understanding of how to go about finding one. Who can follow an existing path but don’t have the imagination—or the courage, or the inner freedom—to invent their own.
Education is more than the acquisition of marketable skills, and you are more than your ability to contribute to your employer’s bottom line or the nation’s GDP, no matter what the rhetoric of politicians or executives would have you think.
You need to get a job, but you also need to get a life.
Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state.
The first thing that college is for is to teach you to think.
It means developing the habit of skepticism and the capacity to put it into practice.
It means learning not to take things for granted, so you can reach your own conclusions.
Society is a conspiracy to keep itself from the truth.
Why college? College, after all, as those who like to denigrate it often say, is “not the real world.” But that is precisely its strength. College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.
The classroom is the grain of sand; it’s up to you to make the pearl.
A real education sends you into the world bearing questions, not resumes.
The job of college is to assist you, or force you, to start on your way through the vale of soul-making. Books, ideas, works of art and thought, the pressure of the minds around you that are looking for their own answers in their own ways: all these are incitements, disruptions, violations.
“An education,” Lapham quotes an old professor, “is a self-inflicted wound."
What you should really want to develop in college is the habit of reflection, which means the capacity for change.
Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus remark that the purpose of college is to make you a more interesting person.
But being interesting is very different from credentialed self-actualization, as David Brooks would call it.
Interesting is not accomplished.
What makes you interesting is reading, thinking, slowing down, having long conversations, and creating a rich inner life for yourself.
The purpose of college, to put all this another way, is to turn adolescents into adults.
And if you find yourself to be the same person at the end of college as you were at the beginning—the same beliefs, the same values, the same desires, the same goals for the same reasons—then you did it wrong. Go back and do it again.
“Education’s what’s left over."
Most of what you come across in college will inevitably fade from memory. What’s left over, precisely, is you.
True self-esteem means not caring whether you get an A in the first place. It means recognizing, despite all you’ve been trained to believe, that the grades you get do not define your value as a human being. It means deciding for yourself what constitutes success.
You can invent a device or a drug or an app, but you can also invent your life.
Moral imagination means the capacity to envision new alternatives for how to live.
The morally courageous person tends to make the individuals around him very uncomfortable.
It’s not okay to study history, because what good does that really do anyone, but it is okay to work for a hedge fund.
Do what you love to do the most: no, not that—not what you think you love, or think you ought to love, but what you really do love.
“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six,” George Orwell wrote, “I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature.
You can endlessly delay gratification, doing work you hate because of the promise of future reward, or you can find your way to work that is its own reward.
When Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard, was asked to name a book that she wished that all her incoming freshmen would read, she cited Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong, which “advocates doubt as a skill and praises error as the foundation of wisdom."
Of course you’ll make mistakes, and some will be hard to endure. But life is finally a long process of learning how you ought to have lived in the first place. Or it is if you do it right.
Getting a piercing, growing a mustache, moving to Austin—these do not make you an individual. You can’t accessorize your way to moral courage.
Here’s a rule of thumb: if you aren’t giving anything up, it isn’t moral and it isn’t courage.
The best advice I ever got, the thing that saved me, at the age of twenty-two, from becoming a lawyer, was this: Don’t try to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life. You’re going to be a very different person in two or three years, and that person will have his own ideas. All you can really figure out is what you want to do right now.
That is the great question about bureaucracies. Why are the best people so often mired in the middle, while nonentities become the leaders? Because what gets you up the ladder isn’t excellence; it is a talent for maneuvering.
“What people usually mean by a leader now,” Mark Edmundson remarks in reference to the way the word is thrown around on campuses today, “is someone who, in a very energetic, upbeat way, shares all the values of the people who are in charge. Leaders tend to be little adults, little grown-ups who don’t challenge the big grown-ups who run the place.
Instead of training “leaders,” how about training citizens? How about training thinkers—these are colleges, after all—individuals who question those in power rather than competing to become them?
Better yet, how about recognizing that the best leaders are thinkers?
People who possess what might be called resistant minds: who can ask questions instead of just answering them; who can figure out not only how to get things done, but whether they’re worth doing in the first place; who can formulate new directions, for a business or an industry or a country—new ways of doing things, new ways of looking at things—instead of simply putting themselves at the front of the herd that’s heading toward the cliff.
It takes a willingness to be unpopular, however: independent thinking does, and leadership certainly does.
Emerson insisted that we each must win our independence by mounting a private revolution to free ourselves from the tyranny of existing mental structures.
Independence, impoliteness, disagreement, dissent: these values are encoded in our national genetics.
Instead of worrying so much about building your resume, you need to start working on building your mind.
A survey of 318 companies found that 93 percent cite “critical thinking, communication and problem-solving skills as more important than a candidate’s undergraduate major,” in part because they are filling positions with “broader responsibilities” and “more complex challenges” than in the past.
Part of what you learn from majoring in something that actually interests you is that there are more fulfilling ways to spend your time than trying to be rich.
“Companies are looking for soft skills over hard skills now,” said the head of the firm that conducted the study, “because hard skills can be learned, while soft skills need to be developed.” And the latter seem to be in short supply.
“Increasingly, anything you learn is going to become obsolete within a decade,” says Larry Summers, the former secretary of the Treasury and president of Harvard. “The most important kind of learning is about how to learn.
Humanities majors, he says, are well equipped to handle complexity and ambiguity, think creatively, communicate persuasively, and understand the needs of customers and employees.
Engineering programs have also started to recognize the importance of giving their students a base in the liberal arts, precisely because technical information has a limited shelf life, while skills of thinking and communication last a lifetime.
If anything, the liberal arts are more important now than ever, as a rapidly evolving global economy relies increasingly on creativity and innovation.
If Thomas Friedman is right, if the future belongs to those who can invent new jobs and industries rather than staffing existing ones, then it belongs to people with a broad liberal arts education.
the necessary aptitudes, writes Richard A. Greenwald, author of The Micropreneurial Age, include “breadth, cultural knowledge and sensitivity, flexibility,” and “the ability to continually learn, grow and reinvent.
David M. Rubenstein, the billionaire cofounder and co-CEO of The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, put it this way earlier this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: “H = MC. Humanities equals more cash."
Practical utility, however, is not the ultimate purpose of a liberal arts education. Its ultimate purpose is to help you to learn to reflect in the widest and deepest sense, beyond the requirements of work and career: for the sake of citizenship, for the sake of living well with others, above all, for the sake of building a self that is strong and creative and free.
The humanities are what we have, in a secular society, instead of religion.
Art doesn’t make you a better person; it only makes you a freer one.
If you think the humanities have any value, whether as a doorway to enlightenment or just as cultural capital, then they are valuable for everyone and should belong to everyone.
The best thing that could happen to our culture now is if the Asian and Latino kids did likewise.
A teacher awakens; a teacher inspires.
Remember that the central intellectual ability that you’re supposed to develop in college is that of analyzing other people’s arguments and formulating your own.
What they really want is that their teachers challenge them and that they care about them. They don’t want fun and games; they want the real thing.
What they want, in other words, is mentorship.
In South Korea, so I’m told, parents warn their children that if they don’t stop misbehaving, they’ll tell their teachers.
For all the skill that teaching involves, you ultimately only have a single tool: your entire life as you have lived it up until the moment you walk into class.
Students want you to be honest, not least about yourself. They want you to be yourself. You need to step outside the role a bit, regard it with a little irony, if only to acknowledge the dissonance between the institution and the spirit.
There is only one problem with telling students to seek out good teaching in college. They’re going to have some trouble finding it, because academic institutions usually don’t care about it. Oh, they’ll tell you otherwise, in their promotional material. But I advise you to be skeptical.
The only genuine solution to the crisis in the classroom is for colleges to bring back teaching to the center of their mission.
The students, the teachers, the mentality, the madness: at those and other top-tier universities, they’re all essentially the same. The rest is marketing and ego, the sorts of things psychologists have in mind when they talk about “the narcissism of small differences”
The flattery in question is essentially reflexive: you’re great because we’re great. (One of my students has written of “Yale’s boundless appetite for self-celebration.
When people say that students at elite schools have a sense of entitlement, that is what they are referring to: the belief that you deserve more than other people because your SAT scores are higher. Of course, your SAT scores are higher because you have already gotten more than other people.
The whole idea of “service,” as embodied in organizations like Teach For America and among the elite in general, is inherently condescending.
Surveying five New Jersey elementary schools, she concluded that the ways in which students are taught, even more than what they are taught, prepare them to occupy their respective class positions. Working-class kids are heavily disciplined and instructed by rote; the sons and daughters of professionals get creativity and self-expression; the children of the business class are taught authority, mastery, and self-control.
Kids at prestigious schools, in other words, receive an endless string of second chances.
Instead of service, how about service work? That’ll really give you insight into other people. How about waiting tables yourself, so you can see how hard it is, not only physically but mentally?
The meritocracy is also a technocracy. It can solve the problems that you put in front of it, but it cannot tell you whether they’re the right ones to be working on.
We want kids with resilience, self-reliance, independence of spirit, genuine curiosity and creativity, and a willingness to take risks and make mistakes.
Helen Vendler, the Harvard professor and dean of American poetry critics, has tried to remind her institution that great artists are not likely to be “leaders” or the kinds of people who are good at everything (or want to be), and I would say the same about great scientists, great thinkers, and great just about everything else.