42 pages • 1 hour read
William DeresiewiczExcellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Purpose of Education
The main theme of the book is the true purpose of higher education. Deresiewicz focuses on elite education but he makes it clear he is referring to education for all students. After noting that so many people are concerned with the return on their “investment” in college, he poses some rhetorical questions about value:
You need to get a job, but you also need to get a life. What’s the return on investment of college? What’s the return on investment of having children, spending time with friends, listening to music, reading a book? (79).
His concern is that higher education does not turn into just another transactional entity, devoid of any but financial value. He answers his own questions when he writes, “What’s at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human” (79).
The three chapters in Part 2 most extensively deal with this. The situation is made worse, Deresiewicz says, because colleges themselves no longer know what constitutes a good education. Throughout the book, he makes it clear that he believes the purpose of education is not to learn a skill, trade, or set of information. It comes as no surprise when he states that the main purpose is to learn how to think. Those other things can also be part of education but should not be the focus since they are too limiting. Thinking involves viewing things from a different perspective—being skeptical rather than taking things for granted—and asking questions. These are the mark of true leadership, which is something else colleges today get wrong. Too often, leadership becomes following others rather than forging one’s own path. However much elite schools focus on it, Deresiewicz questions the need for educated people to be leaders at all; perhaps, he says, important work, like art, involves solitude.
Strong forces, however, are working against this view of education. From parents to colleges to society in general, values are not always in alignment with teaching students to improve thinking skills and to find true selves. Deresiewicz tells the story of a student at a prep school who tearfully admitted during a class discussion he did not want the career of a stockbroker his parents chose for him. That night, the student’s mother called the teacher with a warning: “Don’t put any ideas into his head” (48). For their part, elite universities often focus on grooming the next generation of heavyweight alumni donors. To that end, they’d prefer financiers and hedge fund managers to artists. Finally, American society has become a stratified winner-take-all rat race. None of these is conducive to colleges “merely” teaching students to think.
Citizenship in a Democracy
A kind of corollary theme to the true purpose of education—learning to think—is what kind of citizens a democracy needs. Deresiewicz makes it clear both explicitly and implicitly that a liberal arts education is necessary for a strong, well-functioning democracy:
Its ultimate purpose is to help you to learn to reflect in the widest and deepest sense, beyond the requirements of work and career: for the sake of citizenship, for the sake of living well with others, above all, for the sake of building a self that is strong and creative and free (155).
He writes elsewhere about the notion of doxa, or a received opinion that society espouses in “a conspiracy to keep itself from the truth” (80). Governments and corporations are full of propaganda to tell the narratives they want people to believe. The purpose of critical thinking is simply to be able to think for oneself, to question the assumptions one has accepted and examine the world and its phenomena from various angles. Not doing so is tantamount to going through life blind. Deresiewicz notes that the argument for a liberal arts education usually refers to its benefits to society. He argues, though, that this skips a step. Learning to think is a requirement to first forming a strong, independent self and, by extension, a strong, independent democracy.
Inequality in Society
Underlying the entire text is the notion of rampant inequality that is having a harmful effect on society. It is the reason why students are working so hard to become armed with credentials for getting into elite colleges and why colleges are structured as they are and provide the kind of education they do. There’s a “winner-take-all” mentality everywhere, and no one wants to be left behind. This is amped up to such a degree that what constitutes being left behind has become extreme. Deresiewicz writes that the kind of life once seen as respectable is now looked down upon by some. He notes that it’s still possible to study medicine at a state university and become a doctor in a comfortable middle-class suburb in a place like the Midwest; however, “[s]uch an outcome is simply too horrible to contemplate” (42). What drives this, he argues, is people in the upper-middle class fiercely competing for ever higher status in the hierarchy.
Deresiewicz argues elite institutions are only making such inequality worse, as they have become clubs for the wealthy. He claims they like to tout their diversity, resting on their laurels of opening their doors to minorities and women in the 1960s, but that limited expansion extends to gender and ethnicity alone. A study from 2004 noted that “American higher education is more socioeconomically stratified today than at any time during the past three decades” (206). Deresiewicz surmises this has only worsened in the decade that followed. As with trying to change the direction of the curriculum to the liberal arts, this trend is difficult to change because it is not in the universities’ interests as they seek to increase their endowments through alumni donations.
All this works to the detriment of society and many Americans. Deresiewicz examines this in the last chapter, sketching out a direct connection from the sharp decline in government support of public universities in the 1980s, to the deepening inequality of 2020. People are not investing in children through education, and the ever-increasing dependence on paying for college through student loans means that fewer students from poor families go to college. Referring to the upper middle class, Deresiewicz writes:
Starving public education, higher and otherwise, doesn’t benefit them only in the form of lower taxes. It also rigs the economic system for their children. Take most of the kids out of line, and yours are going to get a whole lot more (240-41).
Mental Health of Young People
The theme of mental health is omnipresent but not highlighted as much as others in the book. Deresiewicz contrasts students’ high levels of competence with their levels of happiness. Studies and reports consistently show that students are not just stressed, but often feel hopeless and depressed. As a college president who wrote to Deresiewicz put it, “[W]e appear to have an epidemic of depression among younger people” (8).
The theme picks up in Chapter 3, when Deresiewicz examines the regimen that students go through to prepare for college. Amy Chua’s family is an extreme example. Chua, a colleague of Deresiewicz’s at Yale, became famous for her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in which she detailed her methods of parenting and training her two daughters for success at the highest levels. The way she treats her children is off-putting to Deresiewicz, who finds her tactics to be bullying. He quotes from two books to explain what this does to children: The Price of Privilege by Madeline Levine and The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller. Tellingly, the latter is a book about childhood trauma and abuse, indicating that such behavior is not just about having high standards.
This all ties back to the main theme: the purpose of education. In Deresiewicz’s view, the purpose he outlines leads to healthier outcomes. As students work to find their true calling and unique path, the pressure of trying to please others (parents, society) is removed, and depression and midlife crises are far less likely.
