Excellent Sheep

You won't be able to recognize the things you really care about until you have released your grip on all the things that you have been taught to care about.

Most elite college graduates end up in financing or consulting, because they don’t know what they really want and feel lost.

College was a time of self-discovery and learning to think critically, and we need to go back to that.

The most prestigious college institutions are run like businesses, not schools, so they miss the point of education.

The purpose of college is to enable you to live more alertly, more responsibly, more freely: more fully.

College is not about getting a job, it’s about getting an education.

You need to be happy when you go home.

The best reason to fail is to learn that failure isn’t the end of the world.

Aim high, to be sure, but do it for the love of the work.

Leadership had content, for those fortunate sons of the upper class; the concept made demands. It meant devotion to the benefit of others, not yourself.

The job of a leader, the job of a thinker, is to identify and ask them [questions]. This is where courage comes in.

In the liberal arts, you pursue the trail of inquiry wherever it leads. Truth, not use or reward, is the only criterion.

The highest function of art, and of literature in particular, is to bring us to that knowledge of ourselves that college ought to start to give us.

The past, in other words, allows us to create the future. If you want to be a leader, if you want to find a new direction, then that is where you need to start.

The perspectives that you get from studying the general—the wisdom, to come right out and say the word—are meant to interpenetrate the practice of your specialty.

A teacher’s job is to lead forth the powers that lie asleep within her students. A teacher awakens; a teacher inspires.

The SAT is supposed to measure aptitude; what it actually measures is parental income.

An elite education doesn’t simply fail to teach you how to talk to people who are genuinely different than you; it tells you that you shouldn’t even bother.

The meritocracy purports, like every ruling class, to act for the good of all. Its ethos is in fact, by definition, one of self-advancement.

Our leadership class, in short, has turned its back upon the rest of us.

The new dispensation must ensure—this is the essential thing—that privilege cannot be handed down.

The purpose of college, to put all this another way, is to turn adolescents into adults.

The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose.

Self-knowledge is the most practical thing in the world, because it helps you find your way to a career that’s right for you.

Moral imagination means the capacity to envision new alternatives for how to live.

The opportunity not to be rich: to find your purpose and embrace your vocation, and still to live a decent life.

What do you owe your parents? Love, and when they need it later, care, but not submission. Not your life.

Take time off to slow down, to give yourself perspective, to break the cycle of incessant achievement.

If you grow up with less, you are much better able to deal with having less. That is itself a kind of freedom.

Inventing your life is not about becoming an artist or activist or entrepreneur or any other particular thing. It is simply about finding your way to work that’s right for you, whatever that may be.

The only point of having more is having more than everybody else.

The college admissions game... is not about whether you go to an elite school. It’s about which one you go to.

Parents of high achievers are often oblivious, even willfully so, to what their kids are going through.

Preteens and teens from affluent, well-educated families... experience among the highest rates of depression, substance abuse, anxiety disorders, somatic complaints, and unhappiness of any group of children in this country.

I am a robot just going page by page, doing the work.

Perfectionism... fosters self-hatred by telling the child that he isn’t worthy of his parents’ love.

We are robbing children of their childhood and teenagers of their adolescence. We have engineered a vast regimentation of youth.

Higher education increasingly resembles any other business now. What pays is in; what doesn’t is under the gun.

Colleges now sell themselves to kids in terms of what they can give them, not what they plan to expect of them.

The first thing that college is for is to teach you to think... It means developing the habit of skepticism and the capacity to put it into practice.

A real education sends you into the world bearing questions, not resumes.

The ability to engage in introspection, I suggested, is the essential precondition for living the life of the mind, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude.

Look beneath the façade of affable confidence and seamless well-adjustment that today’s elite students have learned to project, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation.

The purpose of life becomes the accumulation of gold stars. Hence the relentless extracurricular busyness, the neglect of learning as an end in itself, the inability to imagine doing something that you can’t put on your resume.

It’s hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.