Excellent sheep pdf download

I fell into the same trap, despite how hard I tried to escape it. I filled my time with so many extracurriculars because I was scared of boredom and being stuck in my own mind. I took as many classes and tests as I could because I was genuinely curious about learning, but no one ever taught me how to learn. High school, then college, was about the accumulation of information. Math, physics, history in high school, then "cultural capital" in college as I shopped around for classes to take that would allow me to converse with my prep school peers.

Classes in philosophy because I hadn't completed in debate in high school, art history so I could become part of the "upper middle-brow," and read book summaries for my sociology classes like the Yale student the author describes because "there's a bigger social reward for being able to talk about books than for actually reading them. And if not those, then delaying one of those options for a year to pursue a fully-funded fellowship or travel opportunity. Deresiewicz sums it up well: Elite students are told that they can be whatever they want, but most of them end up choosing to be one of a few very similar things In chapter two, as Deresiewicz delves into the history of the elite education system in America, I was suddenly struck by how thoughtfully the Harvard computer science system is designed.

The value of attending a school like Harvard is that it encourages students to get a liberal arts education. While many students still major in economics to signal their interest in finance or consulting, computer science as a gateway to software engineering, or one of seven biology concentrations to fulfill premed requirements, the Harvard faculty has been careful not to overwhelm these concentration requirements.

It's a shame that in computer science, many of my peers who fulfilled their 10 class requirements turned to mathematics or statistics to "gain more knowledge" and make use of their undergraduate years, but what I hope Harry Lewis and other computer science faculty were trying to encourage is for us to explore the breadth of other fields out there.

When students from other schools, companies, or even pre-frosh interested in computer science criticize the dearth of practical computer science classes and lack of offerings, I've never thought that it might have been designed this way on purpose to push us towards getting the most of our liberal arts degrees.

I've always understood getting an education to be the accumulation of knowledge. Which is why I scoffed at government classes that assigned more reading than was possible within a school-week, thinking that professors are overestimating their students as well as philosophy classes that made us recount Descarte's and Hume's arguments that seemed completely outdated and irrelevant.

Only in this book did I realize that it was precisely these classes that were supposed to be teaching me the value of a college education, to develop "the habit of skepticism and the capacity to put it into practice.

Go back and do it again. We ask of a scientific proposition, "Is it true? Art gives names and concreteness to experiences. Finally, Deresiewicz tears into the American political elite, and though he wrote this before the Trump administration came into office, it may shed some light on the era of populism in the United States. In fact, consider our current president Jan 28, Athan Tolis rated it it was amazing Shelves: education.

My brother additionally spent 6 years at a lesser institution in New Haven, but has meantime somewhat redeemed himself: he teaches at Harvard these days. You have been warned, I am writing with considerable bias. On the other hand, I believe I am at least as excellent a sheep as the author and thus reasonably qualified to comment.

Second, I must declare that I disagree with a whole lot of what William Deresiewicz has to say, but quite perversely I totally loved the book nonetheless. This book was truly cathartic for me to read. The book has three very distinct parts that are spread over four chapters. Part I is about the psychological travails of the excellent sheep.

The author describes the horrible ordeal students go through in order to secure for themselves a place at the elite institutions of the Ivy League, MIT and Stanford, the hoops they must jump through, the youth they never have, the true learning that never takes place, the whole pantomime we all had to endure. If the author is right it no longer starts during your Sophomore year in high school, these days you need to have it all planned out straight out of nursery.

Four fake activities no longer suffice, you need ten. Studies and statistics quoted in the book leave no doubt the author must be right. To me it sounds more like 1. No, really. I only applied to Harvard because Stanford did not offer early admission, that is the sole reason I bothered to apply to two schools.

Well, yes, if a kid does not think nay, know! Summary of my point: Deresiewicz has the causality wrong. The kids who suffer would suffer the exact same breakdowns if they went to Disneyland with their mom and dad. Acing tests and pretending to be interested in model UN is, if anything, an escape for people who can do the work. Math and science, in particular, come naturally to those who do well in those subjects.

My sister aced GCA A-Level Math the UK equivalent of AP Math when she was 14 and her primary motivation was to prove the point that she was as good as her older brothers; it had nothing to do with her college application 4 years later and it did not cause her any grief whatsoever.

They need to be doing whatever is the hardest. My Freshman week in college we were presented with a choice of three flavors of Sophomore year naturally calculus. In order of difficulty it was Math 21, Math 22 and Math There was a test to be taken. Ah, and I lied: I did not turn down Stanford. I asked them to wait a year for me to attend. And then another year. I was a total ass and I did not even know it, basically.

Thank you William Deresiewicz for imparting this bit of self-knowledge on me. I spent that crucial part of my life doing my utmost to keep options open, rather than delving into something I loved, or at least looking for something I loved. Part III of the book discusses the place of meritocracy in our society, our civilization and our democracy.

To find your purpose and embrace your vocation, and still to live a decent life. That hit me so hard. The author fears that we are in the midst of a massive move in the opposite direction, heading quickly toward a dystopia where we will be governed by an aristocracy formed at Harvard, Yale and Princeton. A lot of the damage is already done. In these short 5 pages the author tears into every single recent US President and most presidential candidates.

With his racial identity and relatively humble background, his election has been called the triumph of meritocracy. But there can be no doubt that one of the reasons America is great is it twice in its history got ahead of all other nations in terms of imposing good, free education and it would be a fantastic idea if we had a third go now.

Amazingly, Obama just announced a plan to offer free community college to all Americans, possibly heralding the third such revolution. Not on the evidence of Part II of the book, at any rate. Get a liberal arts education instead. This is your chance to discover who you are. College is your time to be selfish, ask yourself the big questions, figure out for yourself what all the big thinkers have said that is relevant to you today.

Go ahead, ditch the pre-med curriculum, get your hands on the good books, become an English major. The author, of course says this much better than I ever could 2.

The argument is very weak. And here comes the best bit. And they will be taught by the same Helen Vendlers the author adulates. He got a C in orgo, OK? Because he could. He had a ball. One night his Columbia girlfriend sent us her math-for-poets homework and we sat around and worked it all out from first principles and sent it back to her.

We most certainly did not do our work that night, we did hers. With a C in orgo. Case closed. Four years of liberal arts await you, if that is your wish. Second, suppose you are a genuine genius. Not a bloody-minded hard worker with the right set of parents like I was, but a proper genius.

You can go become the star student somewhere else, or you can measure yourself against your true peers at Harvard. Wikipedia will show you Harvard won it all 4 years I was there. From tens of colleges that compete and thousands that are eligible. We won it with the second, third or fourth team we fielded. Bottom line, if you are a genius, you would do yourself a disservice to forego the opportunity to hang out with your true peers for the sake of going to pursue some liberal arts discovery wild goose hunt.

Go to the proper school and take a year off to study the good books. Or three. Nobody will care. Third, suppose you want to go to college as a preamble to entering American business or politics. You genuinely cannot pass on the opportunity to make the connections you will make at an Ivy League college. View all 6 comments. Apr 26, Trevor I sometimes get notified of comments rated it liked it Shelves: social-theory , work , education.

And, in terms of the last one, what it believed good teaching meant was quite simply being a leader. Not the sort of colleges that the people teaching got into - but some form of college all the same.

One of the things that was made clear was that the Teach For movement essentially think that everything that happened in education up until the start of their movement itself was basically a mistake. For Teach for, teaching is leadership. And this is the beauty of the whole game - a leader is a leader is a leader - if you can be a leader in one situation, you can be a leader in any.

A leader sets big goals. A leader gets their subordinates to be inspired by those big goals. A leader breaks those goals down into bit sized chunks. And a leader measures how fast and how well chewed those chunks end up being by their subordinates.

Some of the literature I read from within the Teach for movement referred to books that discussed leadership - so, I figured I should read those too. It was a bit of a harrowing experience for me.

Too often I felt a bit like I had joined a cult. Then, recently, someone spotted some of the reviews I had written at this time and suggested two leadership books I might find more interesting - this is one of those.

A lot of this will tell you things that are fundamentally wrong with the elite colleges in the US and why, even it you are from the ruling class, sending your kids to such schools might not be the best idea for them. You see, I basically did what he is proposing these young people ought to do. I should have been nodding knowingly and saying, yep, your dreams, they are there to be followed, off you go, as I read this.

Except, he also talks a lot about vocations - callings - what Aristotle referred to as Arete - something like the perfect thing that makes you what is the real you, your very own personal excellence.

Years ago, when I was studying philosophy, one of my lecturers said of Marx that he had this very strange idea of what his utopia would look like. Marx had said you could be a fisherman in the morning, a butcher later in the day, and a poet in the afternoon, and a philosopher after dinner.

I remember smiling at how stupid Marx was at the time. Let me be lots of things, without ever being any one of those things entirely. That does sound like a kind of utopian paradise to me. All the same, the problems discussed here in relation to research universities, the quality of teaching you receive in them, the fact everyone you are studying with will want to become an economist or gain an MBA - oh god, kill me now. All of that does fill me with despair and certainly does need to be said.

This is a book directed at the elite by someone from the elite. The individualisation of all problems tends to be my major problem with such books - but even so, this book does pose some problems that we ought to be thinking about as we move further and further into a post-work world. Jul 23, Sunny rated it it was amazing Shelves: education , american-literature. A diablo ex machina that runs the entire play and not just the ending. I have to admit that there were tonnes and tonnes of points that I wholeheartedly agreed with.

They want to come across as well rounded but in the midst of that they lose themselves completely. That mixture of different topics, done even by chance, had the potential to create so many possibilities for the world and for the students that were a part of it. A shame now that most students just go to uni on the whole for the big 4 of law, medicine, finance and consulting so that once they leave they can walk into one of those 4 jobs as they pay the most yawn.

The English university model that prevailed before the civil war and the German model on which john Hopkins University was founded which was more scientific in its approach whereas the English model had more of a focus on the humanities and the search for more holistic forms of truth and higher questions of the mind and the soul.

American universities and universities from around the world have veered towards the scientific models with more of a focus not on sciences per se but on those degrees which gives you a specific calling and lead you down a very specific career pathway. Your minds are meant to open to all realms of the possibile there and not be sequestered into tiny ready made off the shelf boxes. Everyone is afraid of failing and therefore hardly tries anything.

Getting an A grade is everything to some students a lot of students and not getting that can be catastrophic for them. Have those students ever considered that it may be an A compared to their peers or some generic benchmark but how has what they have done really stand against a higher benchmark which they can set themselves?

In that often leadership is nothing more than a group of gung ho hyped up suped up followers. Far from leaders in fact. They are often the ones that reconfirm the messages and exactly the same mantra that senior leadership above them give to them to relay. Children are constantly raised in a prosocial environment in which the status quo is maintained further still.

Of course — why would the system urge you to be different and think outside the system and box on the outside? Everyone is always urged to be a team player and yet look at some of the best footballers in the world — the Messis the Marradonas the Christiano Ronaldos and the original Ronaldo himself — yes they were team players but more than anything else they could change a game on their own.

We may think that the introduction of Facebook, iPhones, farmers markets sustainable agriculture, WhatsApp twitter etc has meant that we are more armed than ever to stand on the shoulders of giants and crush the evil in the world or that we have like Archimedes have been given our place now to move the world, but really? Jun 09, Veronica rated it it was amazing Shelves: politics. 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 o 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. 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. 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 something wrong with the smugness and self-congratulation that elite schools connive at from the moment the fat envelopes come in the mail. 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. 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. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system. 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. View all 3 comments. Sep 03, Lynn rated it it was amazing. The first part of the book was thoroughly depressing. Part 2 leads you to believe there is hope - particularly if your child is someone that actually likes and desires and education. Part 3 is unrealistic - but probably the only possible solution. I see much of what is going on in college also happening in high school - particularly the grade inflation, excessive extra curricular activities with no real purpose other than to build a resume and lack of coherence in the curriculum.

No one seems The first part of the book was thoroughly depressing. No one seems to have thought at all about how an education should hold together. How are the different parts connected to make a whole that is more than just the sum of the parts. The problems extend down well past the Ivies.

Jun 03, Craig Werner rated it it was ok Shelves: education. The rating reflects my distaste for the subjects of the book, not its execution. Deresiewicz defends liberal arts education in a cogent manner. The final section of the book could be ready profitably on its own. The content's not surprising to anyone who's been following the discussion of the value of a liberal arts education in a STEM obsessed world: critical thinking is more important than specialization, the great books are great books for a reason and Deresiewicz doesn't confuse that with t The rating reflects my distaste for the subjects of the book, not its execution.

The content's not surprising to anyone who's been following the discussion of the value of a liberal arts education in a STEM obsessed world: critical thinking is more important than specialization, the great books are great books for a reason and Deresiewicz doesn't confuse that with the neo-conservative defense of a white male canon.

So why the two stars? As the book's title indicates so I can't say I wasn't warned , its primary concern is with the very very privileged students who attend the very top tier according to US News anyway of educational institutions.

By which he means Harvard, Yale and Princeton, with a nod or two towards Stanford. At times, he extends the focus to include the other Ivies and a few of the east coast liberal arts schools like Williams and Amherst. It's a hermetic world in many ways.

Deresiewicz understands that very well. He knows that the students who get into those places have been trained for it from the cradle; he's clear on how little real "merit" has to do with anything--his discussion of legacy admissions and athletics renders the notion of merit as empty as it actually is.

Poor whites, never mind poor blacks and Latins and Natives and Southeast Asians, need not apply. Not surprisingly, the students who have run the railroad track feel empty, spiritually and intellectually.

They're not the only ones in their generation of course, but they feel like they've been lied to whereas for a whole bunch of students at Wisconsin where I teach--itself becoming increasingly monochromatic in class terms--it's not big surprise.

Well, I guess I feel some sympathy for them, but by the time I finished this book, I didn't want to read another word about their plight, probably ever. And while Deresiewicz analysis of the problem is cogent, his suggestion on what to do amounts to "the elite schools have to change and the society as a whole has to invest in education. Oct 02, Douglas Wilson rated it really liked it. As diagnosis, this book is outstanding. Elite education for America's elite has become a vast exercise in getting our high-achieving students all dressed up for the ball, and then never actually hiring a band for the event.

Superbly equipped for just about anything, except knowledge of what an education is for, these incarnate high SAT scores on stilts wander aimlessly around the Ivy League campuses, not quite sure what they are there for. This book really is a stunning indictment of the status As diagnosis, this book is outstanding.

This book really is a stunning indictment of the status quo. At the same time, there is more to an education than getting to ask and discuss the big questions. If we are going to conceive of the liberal arts as a time for asking answerless questions, which is okay provided the non-answers are to the big questions, then bright sophomores are going to figure that out in ten minutes, and go to law school.

If nobody knows what we are here for, including the English majors, then we might as well go to law school.

We don't know a lot, but it seems that life in a fog might be a little better if I had some money. Oct 04, Emily rated it liked it Shelves: , magazine-article-as-book , nonfiction. This is a classic magazine-article-as-book; you could read just the first and fourth sections, or his original essay and get better than the gist of it, but I still didn't mind reading the longer version since it's short and he's a lively writer.

The main idea is that admission to the Ivy League and a handful of other schools e. Stanford, Williams has become so competitive that their students have become overachieving, risk-averse, purposeless automatons who go from elite high schools throug This is a classic magazine-article-as-book; you could read just the first and fourth sections, or his original essay and get better than the gist of it, but I still didn't mind reading the longer version since it's short and he's a lively writer.

Stanford, Williams has become so competitive that their students have become overachieving, risk-averse, purposeless automatons who go from elite high schools through the Ivies to consulting or banking jobs without pausing to smell the roses or consider how they might serve society.

As I've mentioned before , I went to Yale, but I hardly recognized the world of this book. That must be partly because I graduated a good long time ago, but I also think the author's not putting nearly enough blame on the parents rather than the schools.

Yale students may be more preprofessional than they used to be but they still don't have preprofessional majors, at least, not official ones. If you're going to be narrowly ambitious for certain types of careers, you have to bring that yourself. I had friends whose parents had Big Plans for them but I don't recall any adult, family member or professor, suggesting that I was at university for any purpose other than to, you know, read and be clever and look at paintings and stuff and I'm pretty sure you could still do that today if you were committed enough to being weird and dreamy.

I don't think the author spells out what I see as the main problem clearly enough. Now you get into an Ivy and you have to keep struggling through school to get into the right profession and be part of the top 0. There is so much status anxiety and insecurity in today's society that the merely rich are using the schools as venues to battle over who gets to be the new ultrarich. Deresiewicz mocks the young sheep for thinking there's nothing between Harvard and the gutter, but the trend is toward that being more true, so I can see why today's parents are worried about their kids' future.

The book also has a very cogent explanation of how the different traditions of the English college and the German research university chafe against each other in American higher education today. Still, I would recommend it only if you are a prospective Ivy League student or parent. It's ultimately pretty inside-baseball. Aug 15, Donna rated it it was ok Shelves: non-fiction. First, I will preface this review by saying, I'm not the target audience for this book. Here's my problem with this book.

The author has some strong opinions, and that is what this book is Which is fine, as long as you're not passing it off as factual or as long as you are not slamming other people. This book did both of those things It was hard to get into this, with all the ax grinding going on. The author is so anti ivy league, it was becoming quite comica First, I will preface this review by saying, I'm not the target audience for this book.

The author is so anti ivy league, it was becoming quite comical. The target audience is probably college kids who have ivy league schools in their grasp, which is such a small target audience. If these kids are seeking to get in, and are really as misguided and tightly wound as the author says, I will just say that this book will not help them. The author is an inspired teacher, and his lesson is of a truth sorely needing to be told.

One, Mr. Deresiewicz spent twenty-four years in the Ivy League, graduating from Columbia and teaching for a decade at Yale…. He brings the gory details. Two, the author is a striker, to put it in soccer terms.

Three, his indictment arrives on wheels: He takes aim at just about the entirety of upper-middle-class life in America…. Craven conformity, not free-spirited independence, is what Deresiewicz sees students learning in a campus world populated by hyperspecialized professors who pursue arcane research agendas and leave the teaching of undergraduates to adjuncts and TAs.

The time has come, Deresiewicz asserts, for college professors and administrators to make students their first priority by giving them a challenging liberal-arts education. Grounded in the humanities, such an education would give students real intellectual and imaginative breadth, not just a professional credential.

Besides pressing for this curricular and pedagogical realignment, Deresiewicz calls for radical reform of admissions policies, so reversing the trends that make the university an enforcer of caste hierarchies. November 12, Now in a new deluxe edition with a foreword by Chuck Palahniuk and cover by Joe Sacco, here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her.

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You are not alone. In this captivating fusion of science, history, and personal memoir, David Adam explores the weird thoughts that exist within every mind, and how they drive millions of us toward obsession and compulsion. Adam, an editor at Nature and an accomplished science writer, has suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder for twenty years, and The Man Who Couldn't Stop is his unflinchingly honest attempt to understand the condition and his experiences.