Content area
Full Text
Soc (2016) 53:103106DOI 10.1007/s12115-015-9978-z
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s12115-015-9978-z&domain=pdf
Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s12115-015-9978-z&domain=pdf
Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s12115-015-9978-z&domain=pdf
Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s12115-015-9978-z&domain=pdf
Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s12115-015-9978-z&domain=pdf
Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s12115-015-9978-z&domain=pdf
Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s12115-015-9978-z&domain=pdf
Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s12115-015-9978-z&domain=pdf
Web End = BOOK REVIEW
William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
New York: Free Press, 2014. 245 pp. $26.00. ISBN-978-1476702711
M. Platt1
Published online: 29 December 2015# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
When I ask fellow teachers, can you think of a college that is better now than twenty years ago, most are stumped. When I ask fellow teachers if the college they graduated from has held its own, few say it has. And with the fall of the faculty, I seldom dare ask fellow teachers: what did you do to perpetuate the College where you are. Old students, now teachers, I do write to, so that someday the College, and its core, a shared curriculum of worthy studies, will be restored.
Nietzsche says the quality of a people or epoch is to be judged by their letters. (Frolicsome Science, No.329) Who today would affirm that graduating from one of our colleges means you can write a letter about an important experience in your own life, as Americans with only some grade school could during our Civil War, and as our fathers fighting a two-ocean World War for over a thousand days could, and our mothers in return wrote, in hopes they would return. And do the teachers in our elite colleges today write such letters about their own lives? We teachers address a lot of words to our students, in lectures, while conducting discussions, and in conversations outside class. We compose course descriptions for them, brief ones in the catalogue and longer ones in the semi-contracts that have replaced the invitations to study that sometimes prevailed in the past, and only now appear when a teacher is seeking the right set of best students for this particular class, for example where students are choosing among freshmen seminars. In these we speak of matters a serious student might rise in joyous expectation to, because we have already.
In his Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite & the Way...