I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or
opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation,
or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these
skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions,
but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the
private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing
parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs,
the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away
from it. The message, as always, is the medium. 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.
The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my
kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people
who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity,
but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race.
With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed
increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation
and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of
white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside
the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and
professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to
cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the
paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working
class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in
it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and
John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent,
intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the
larger electorate.
But it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to
believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school
weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the
unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the
best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else
was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give
that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when
people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to
Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where
I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never
learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges,
often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are
smart people who don’t go to college at all.
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