Top 65 William Deresiewicz Quotes
#1. As the sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens has put it, "affluent families fashion an entire way of life organized around the production of measurable virtue in children." Measurable, here, means capable of showing up on a college application. We are not teaching to the test; we're living to it.
William Deresiewicz
#2. That's how envy works: the better things are, the worse they are, because they don't belong to you.
William Deresiewicz
#3. Service, which is nothing other than a modern echo of noblesse oblige, and generally undertaken in the same spirit of benign condescension.
William Deresiewicz
#4. In 1971, 73 percent of incoming freshmen said that it is essential or very important to "develop a meaningful philosophy of life," 37 percent to be "very well-off financially" (not well-off, note, but very well-off). By 2011, the numbers were almost reversed, 47 percent and 80 percent, respectively.
William Deresiewicz
#6. But it is not the job of truth to make us feel good. It is the job of truth to be true, and it is our job to deal with it.
William Deresiewicz
#7. By the time they finish high school - after years of learning how to please their teachers and coaches, not to mention schmoozing with their parents' friends - elite students have become accomplished adult-wranglers.
William Deresiewicz
#8. In The Pale King, David Foster Wallace has his narrator remark that "it was a little bit like a for-profit company, my family, in that you were pretty much only as good as your last sales quarter.
William Deresiewicz
#9. The timid practicality that is the major message that our kids absorb today is alibied-and camouflaged, and soothed-with a hollow commercialized rebellion.
William Deresiewicz
#10. I am suggesting that you take as many opportunities as possible in college to step away from whatever specialized program of study you have decided to pursue and have the kind of experience that the humanities can give you.
William Deresiewicz
#11. Here is the rule of thumb: if you aren't giving anything up, it isn't moral and it isn't courage. Stumbles, sacrifices, inner struggle, false starts and wrong turns, conflict with parents and peers-these are some of the signs of the genuine article The way you know it's real is if it hurts.
William Deresiewicz
#12. Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurshi p comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.
William Deresiewicz
#13. Now students all seem to be converging on the same self, the successful upper-middle-class professional, impersonating the adult they've already decided they want to become.
William Deresiewicz
#14. A man never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going. The desire to eliminate uncertainty eliminates life.
William Deresiewicz
#15. What an indictment that is, of the Ivy League and its peers: that colleges four levels down on the academic totem pole, enrolling students whose SAT scores are hundreds of points lower than theirs, deliver a better education, in the highest sense of the word, than do those institutions.
William Deresiewicz
#16. A real education sends you into the world bearing questions, not resumes.
William Deresiewicz
#17. Both kinds of parenting, finally, are forms of overidentification. The helicopter parent turns the child into an instrument of her will. The overindulgent parent projects his own need for limitless freedom and security. In either case, the child is made to function as an extension of somebody else.
William Deresiewicz
#18. When people say that students at elite schools have a sense of entitlement, that is what they are referring to: the belief that you deserve more than other people because your SAT scores are higher. Of course, your SAT scores are higher because you have already gotten more than other people.
William Deresiewicz
#19. [ ... ] art instills the fundamental moral lesson: That you aren't the center of the universe. That others weren't created for your benefit. That they are just as real as you, with equal claimes to dignity and understanding.
William Deresiewicz
#20. People don't mind being in prison as long as no one else is free. But stage a jailbreak, and everybody else freaks out.
William Deresiewicz
#21. Everybody wants their child to get an education, but nobody wants them to get an education education.
William Deresiewicz
#22. 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've been taught to care about.
William Deresiewicz
#23. Tiger Mother felt like reliving a childhood trauma; The Drama of the Gifted Child felt like going through the therapy to cure it.
William Deresiewicz
#24. Moral courage can be lonely indeed. People don't mind being trapped, as long as no one else is free. But stage a break, and everybody else begins to panic.
William Deresiewicz
#26. Information is freely available everywhere now. The question is whether you know what to do with it.
William Deresiewicz
#27. Posting information is like pornography, a slick, impersonal exhibition.
William Deresiewicz
#28. The Bible doesn't say that money is the root of all evil; it says that love of money is.
William Deresiewicz
#29. Don't try to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life. You are going to be a very different person in two or three years, and that person will have his own ideas. All you can really figure out is what you want to do right now.
William Deresiewicz
#30. Chua champions filial obedience, but the father she reveres rebelled against his own parents, and she rebelled against him in turn: he by leaving China for the United States, she by leaving California for the East Coast. (Both, it seems, were trying to get as far away as possible.)
William Deresiewicz
#31. If you grow up with less, you are much better able to deal with having less. That is itself a kind of freedom.
William Deresiewicz
#32. Austen, I realized, had not been writing about everyday things because she couldn't think of anything else to talk about. She had been writing about them because she wanted to show how important they really are.
William Deresiewicz
#35. People's stories are the most personal thing they have, and paying attention to those stories is just about the most important thing you can do for them.
William Deresiewicz
#36. Growing up elite means learning to value yourself in terms of the measures of success that mark your progress into and through the elite:
William Deresiewicz
#37. [Jane] Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else's stories
entering into their feelings, validating their experiences
is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness.
William Deresiewicz
#38. Educators in China are increasingly concerned that their system isn't cultivating critical and independent minds.
William Deresiewicz
#39. Whole fields have disappeared from view: the clergy, the military, electoral politics, teaching, even academia itself, for the most part, including basic science.
William Deresiewicz
#40. You want to make it to the top? There is no top. However high you climb, there is always somebody above you. Mailer wanted to be Hemingway, Hemingway wanted to be Joyce, and Joyce was painfully aware he'd never be another Shakespeare.
William Deresiewicz
#41. When a student at Pomona told me that she'd love to have a chance to think about the things she's studying, only she doesn't have the time, I asked her if she had ever considered not trying to get an A in every class. She looked at me as if I had made an indecent suggestion.
William Deresiewicz
#42. Students are expected to demonstrate creativity and perform service in order to get into college, but no one thinks they should be dumb enough to take them seriously as vocational goals.
William Deresiewicz
#43. I believe librarians, like English teachers, sit at the right hand of God.
William Deresiewicz
#44. Now our kids must have the qualities of both an old aristocrat and a modern technocrat. No wonder they're so busy, and so frantic.
William Deresiewicz
#45. As some people say, we're already in a Singularity relative to ancient Grecians, inasmuch as they couldn't understand our world at all ... and I think it's true in the opposite direction, too.
William Deresiewicz
#46. We proceed by doubt, by trial and error, by resisting the impulse to lunge after certainty.
William Deresiewicz
#47. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people's ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself.
William Deresiewicz
#49. Online instruction isn't just conducted on the Web; it embodies an idea of knowledge that's been shaped by the Web - by Google, by Wikipedia - a confusion of information with understanding.
William Deresiewicz
#50. Life, if you live it right, keeps surprising you, and the thing that keeps surprising you the most ... is yourself
William Deresiewicz
#51. The very fact that we still have majors at all in this country represents a compromise between the ideals of depth and breadth -
William Deresiewicz
#52. We can start all the organic farms we want, but we can't stop congress from declaring pizza sauce a vegetable.
William Deresiewicz
#53. But there is something that's a great deal more important than parental approval: learning to do without it. That's what it means to become an adult.
William Deresiewicz
#54. A real reader creates her own canon, for it consists precisely of those books that she has used to create herself.
William Deresiewicz
#55. I have certainly known students who feel they got a great education in college. But they always say some version of "the opportunities are there if you want to pursue them." In other words, you have to ask - or really, you have to insist.
William Deresiewicz
#56. When Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York and one of the last of the WASP aristocrats, undertook a vast expansion of his state's university system, he did so, he said, because he thought that every citizen deserved an education that was just as good as the one that he'd received at Dartmouth.
William Deresiewicz
#57. Colleges and universities do nothing to suggest that some ways of using your education are better than others. They do nothing, in other words, to challenge the values of a society that equates virtue, dignity, and happiness with material success.
William Deresiewicz
#58. Novels
which, after all, are training grounds for responding to the world, imaginative sanctuaries in which to hone and test our ethical judgments and choices.
William Deresiewicz
#59. Depression means self-loathing, self-disgust, and the kind of emotional numbness that feels like psychic death.
William Deresiewicz
#60. Colleges should remember that selecting students by GPA more often benefits the faithful drudge than the original mind.
William Deresiewicz
#62. For that is one of the greatest curses of the high-achieving mentality: the envy that it forces on you - the desperation, not simply to be loved, but to be loved, as Auden says, alone.
William Deresiewicz
#63. If you're oblivious to other people, chances are pretty good that you're going to hurt them.
William Deresiewicz
#64. So it is with the drug of praise upon which these children are trained to depend: the praise that is the sign of parental love, for the achievement that is the condition of that love. Every A is a fix that temporarily quells the anxiety of failure, the terror of falling short.
William Deresiewicz
#65. Of course her daughter got into Harvard: that is exactly the kind of parenting the system rewards. That's exactly what is wrong with it.
William Deresiewicz
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