Excellent Sheep
This book is a groundbreaking manifesto about what our nation's top schools should be -- but aren't -- providing: "The ex-Yale professor effectively skewers elite colleges, their brainy but soulless students (those sheep'), pushy parents, and admissions mayhem" (People). As a professor at Yale, William Deresiewicz saw something that troubled him deeply. His students, some of the nation's brightest minds, were adrift when it came to the big questions: how to think critically and creatively and how to find a sense of purpose. Now he argues that elite colleges are turning out conformists without a compass. Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and culminates in the skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale's admissions committee. As schools shift focus from the humanities to "practical" subjects like economics, students are losing the ability to think independently. It is essential, says Deresiewicz, that college be a time for self-discovery, when students can establish their own values and measures of success in order to forge their own paths. He features quotes from real students and graduates he has corresponded with over the years, candidly exposing where the system is broken and offering clear solutions on how to fix it. "Excellent Sheep is likely to make... a lasting mark. He takes aim at just about the entirety of upper-middle-class life in America.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
20mentions
14people
2013–2025years
30% recommend65% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Don't Think of an Elephant will completely change how you view politics and what anyone in politics says and how to interpret it.
Aristotle's Ethics helped me reconcile my desire to constantly strive to do more and what to make of it when it seems never-ending.
Plato's Republic goes deep into virtue in a way that somehow doesn't (and might need to) get explored more often today.
Excellent Sheep is the book that got me to read the above books in the first place.
- He also wrote Excellent Sheep, a good book about the state of higher education.
- safe spaces, gender studies, wokeness certificates, virtue signaling workshops, degrees in conformity & groupthink.
read William Dereshevitz' "Excellent Sheep", it's the best book on the subject.
- 1. 4 years on non-stop propaganda by left wing owned mainstream media, amplified by online echo-chambers, will do that to you. Especially if the other side is labeled all shades of evil, like ‘racists’ and ‘fascists’ indiscriminately and without evidence. Slander is a powerful political weapon.
2. "Moronic sheep" is a poetic way to describe people who tend to trust lies they've been force-fed, without questioning. I blame the lack of critical thinking, groupthink, and deep internalized 'herd following' attitude nurtured from schools to colleges. Which, btw, a possible reason for larger Trump support among people who haven't passed through the brainwashing machine of the US college/academia.
I guess anti-individualism is the best way to call it. I always refer to excellent "Excellent Sheep" book by William Deresiewicz who succinctly described just what I experienced first hand during years of Ivy League un-education.
3. see 1.
if we can't get free speech on BigTech platforms then we shall part our ways, each stuck in its own 'safe space'. As for me personally I prefer swimming against the current.
- "Excellent Sheep"[1] by William Deresiewicz is a great read on this topic.
Also, his "Solitude and Leadership"[2] talk at West Point in 2009, which probably inspired to write the book.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Excellent-Sheep-Miseducation-American...
- I've taught at two colleges and based on my (purely) anecdotal experiences and attention to the climate, I'd say that the number of students and faculty interested in stifling or censoring ideas is small but also very, very noisy. They also have no sense of humor and college administrators as a group have no sense of humor or perspective, and they're chronically worried about accusations of indifference or insensitivity (which are themselves as good as convictions). There is a strong economic and career incentive for administrators to take everything seriously and to keep their heads down as much as possible.
Brew this up and one gets a majority of students who are reasonable but a small minority who drive all the discourse.
I don't teach at Yale and have never taught at Yale or schools with similar cultures, so I can't speak to the environment there, but William Deresiewicz did, and his book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life came out of that and I recommend it. His book A Jane Austen Education (http://jakeseliger.com/tag/a-jane-austen-education-how-six-n...) is also very good, even for someone like me who does not love Jane Austen.
Edit: Also, almost all of the censorship calls and nasty behavior / comments came from students on the left. Vox's "I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me" (http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid) is congruent with my experiences.
