Leng's email - Elite education

Dear friends,

A friend forwarded this that I just read, and was really struck by it.  It is a critique of the elite universities, and their tacit support of privilege, and complacency, and the creation of a class of people who substitute form for substance—and are not aware of it. 

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/ 

I send it to you because you are 1) like me, a product of some of these elite universities, or  2) you are hoping to get into these places, or  3) you help people get into them! Not that climbing the ladder of achievement or privilege is wrong, nor that we are not free to choose the normative values of our own life.  However, the creation of an unthinking and unreflective elite—by universities, corporations, special scholarship schemes and selection process, civil service selections, etc.—is a concern, at least to anyone who is educated (in the broadest definition of education), because education ought to  help the many, not the few.

If you’ll excuse my normative slight of hand in the above, the educated mind tries to at least not be too self-delusional.  But if Marshall Goldsmith’s What got you here won’t get you there,  and Malcolm Gladwell’s  Outlier , both of which are about “successful” people, are right, the successful (including those well educated) are self-delusional. The successful drivers that successful people attribute to themselves are post-hoc narratives.  Gladwell suggests that Gates and Jobs et al are successful because they rode a generational wave—people born in the 1950’s who came of age in their 20’s during the birth of a new technology.  Goldsmith, arguably the most influential executive coach, would say that successful people were given more breaks than they would care to admit, or could even recognize.   Ability was never a sufficient reason, and sometimes, not even a necessary one. 

Your thoughts are welcome.

Leng

Leng Lim

"Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love--Reinhold Niebuhr"