Quote: (08-27-2014 03:32 AM)Lucky Wrote:
This is more or less common knowledge; you can be upper-middle class and get very great grades/test scores along with an insane amount of extracurriculars to receive admission or you can have wealthy parents. There are a some that enter without those qualifications but they're few and far between.
Has anyone read this scathing article by a former Yale professor? His goal is to dismantle the idea of the Ivy League being a place of intellectual growth and refers to the students as a race of bionic hamsters.
"It almost feels ridiculous to have to insist that colleges like Harvard are bastions of privilege, where the rich send their children to learn to walk, talk, and think like the rich. Don’t we already know this? They aren’t called elite colleges for nothing. But apparently we like pretending otherwise. We live in a meritocracy, after all.
The sign of the system’s alleged fairness is the set of policies that travel under the banner of “diversity.” And that diversity does indeed represent nothing less than a social revolution. Princeton, which didn’t even admit its first woman graduatestudent until 1961—a year in which a grand total of one (no doubt very lonely) African American matriculated at its college—is now half female and only about half white. But diversity of sex and race has become a cover for increasing economic resegregation. Elite colleges are still living off the moral capital they earned in the 1960s, when they took the genuinely courageous step of dismantling the mechanisms of the WASP aristocracy."
What does this even mean though? It's just postmodern progressive gobbledy gook. It never ceases to amaze me how people who supposedly earn a living by being thinkers, particularly in the humanities, are so downright ignorant of the human condition. I wonder how much that former professor would like it if his neighbourhood or family suddenly became a lot more "diverse".
Of course people self-segregate. Elite universities are not just places of learning in the same way that an overpriced bar is not just about the consumption of alcohol. It's about making sure the right and wrong people are in the correct places. If such places didn't exist, they would soon form, abroad if necessary, because people are social animals concerned with hierarchies and social circles.
A lot of this is about
Veblen goods. Maybe a lot of kids at top universities shouldn't be there. Maybe they're there because it's expected of them, either for getting a job or to satisfy their parents or some other social circle. So let's imagine for a moment that all of those guys didn't go to elite universities. What's the alternative? One is that there would still be a whole lot of smart people who deserved to go to such universities. Yet who would pay for them? Currently, the dumbies on legacy admissions subsidise the smart, but poor, people. The other possibility is that they'd just start admitting a whole lot of poor people who weren't up to scratch. How would that help those poor people to do a couple of years, or maybe even a full degree (but be unable to get into anything great afterwards), and accumulate a whole lot of debt and false expectations? Of course, they could just lower the standards, but then those universities would no longer be desirable places to attend.
I teach groups of kids. There are kids who are not up to scratch. You try to tell the parents in a diplomatic way that their kids need to work harder and so on at the start. After that, it's on them. They're adults. They can figure this stuff out. Yet maybe they're aware that their kids aren't that smart and they're still okay with it for any number of reasons. The point is though that if I only took kids who were really smart, the classes would be so small that no one would be able to afford them, and so everyone from the smart kids to the parents of the not so smart kids to me would lose.
Deluge: I went to a private school that back then was middle of the road, but is now pretty elite. We did have some very wealthy kids at our school, including some overseas students. Mostly though, the kids at my school came from families where they poured all of their resources into their kids' educations. One of my friends' parents ran a bicycle shop for crying out loud, and he used to commute more than an hour each way from the outer suburbs/borderline countryside. My family didn't take vacations, for a long time my parents had one car (a second hand piece of crap at that), and so on. They made sacrifices. I don't have much sympathy for people (and there are a lot out there like this) who complain about private school kids.
Also, having been on both sides of the desk, and having taught at both private and public schools, I would say the biggest issue is not even to do with the quality of the teaching per se. It's to do with the culture at the school. At private schools, there are a whole set of expectations that get fulfilled. Classes start on time and kids are on task the entire lesson. They do their homework, and lots of it. They are expected to engage in extracurricular activities or attend school events as a matter of course. They wear their uniform correctly. All of these attitudes set the kids up for success, even in a non-academic sense, later in life because the kids internalise a value system. The parents are paying too much to let their kids slack off, and they expect the teachers to be equally as committed. On the other hand, I think the majority of government schools can best be described as having an air of slackness about them. Kids look sloppy. They roll in anywhere up to fifteen minutes late, spend half the lesson off task (and many don't have the required materials, i.e. a pen and some paper, yet have plenty of money for new shoes or phones), and getting homework from them is like pulling teeth. Hardly any engage in any sort of extracurricular activities. I've even taught in some of the highly desirable government schools (non-selective though) and seen this to an extent. Is it any wonder then that good universities in Australia are dominated by private school kids, as are top companies?
I also agree with you about the genetic component of all of this. There's evidence to this effect anyway, but it also stands to reason as again, people self-select their associations.
I once taught at one of the good public schools (one where the local real estate prices are inflated because people are so desperate to move within the catchment zone). Without my prompting, one of the students started telling me how private schools are a waste of money. I asked her what sorts of jobs the parents of the kids at the elite schools have, and she agreed with me that those parents are in elite positions where you have to be pretty smart to get such jobs and hold onto them. Also, that such people often have to make decisions regarding tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on a daily basis. So then I asked her why, if such people could competently handle tens of millions of dollars, would they not be able to competently handle tens of thousands of dollars regarding their kids' education? Because obviously, Joe, who works down at the local fish and chip shop and doesn't know what CPI stands for, knows something that William, who is a top executive at KPMG, doesn't. She shut up.
I really think a lot of it's sour grapes and the politics of envy.
