- Simon and Schuster
Reading Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, William Deresiewicz‘s polemic against Americans’ obsession with getting into and educated by prestigious universities was a disconcerting experience. Deresiewicz is an engaging writer. I enjoyed his previous book, A Jane Austen Education, and I would probably have enjoyed being in his class at Yale, where he taught for a decade (provided I could get in, which I could not, even in the prime of my overachieving youth). I agreed wholeheartedly with “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” the 2008 American Scholar essay that was the seed of this book. Yes, yes, we, as a culture, confuse prestige—which, as Cheryl Strayed pointed out in an excellent “Dear Sugar” column, is derived from the Latin praestigiae, which means “conjuror’s tricks”—with true intelligence and capability.
Deresiewicz came to this epiphany after obtaining a couple of degrees at Columbia, including a PhD in English, which got him his job at Yale. And, after all that education, he still could not have a conversation with his plumber. This filled him with despair. (But was it a gap in education that prevented him and the plumber from having a satisfying and meaningful conversation? Could it have been a mutual ineptitude with small talk? Don’t consider any specific cases. It’s not germane to the argument here.)
Excellent Sheep, by contrast, hammers the same point home over and over. If my liberal arts education—and my Facebook feed—taught me anything at all, it’s that the world is filled with all kinds of people, most of whom are not like me, don’t even agree with me about what makes up a good life, and yet have somehow stumbled into lives that don’t make them want to kill themselves and that they even find meaningful. (Yes, I am aware, that is part of middle-class and upper-middle-class privilege and many people don’t even have choices at all. But are there people who were assigned their lives and are still happy or at least content?) It’s also taught me that writers and philosophers have been railing against conformity for at least 2,500 years. But history and literature favor the malcontents, because their struggles are easier to identify and dramatize than the stories of people who conform perfectly to the societies where they grew up. What kind of book could Deresiewicz write about a top student who was also a terrific athlete with musical talent who excelled at Yale and then went on to a happy life as a management consultant?
