Most admissions officers at elite universities genuinely want to see each candidate as a whole person. They genuinely want to build a campus with a diverse community and a strong learning environment. But they, like the rest of us, are enmeshed in the mechanism that segregates not by what we personally admire, but by what the system, typified by the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, demands.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.
~ Erwin Schrödinger
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By 11th grade, the high-IQ students and their parents have spent so many years immersed in the college-admissions game that they, like 18th-century aristocrats evaluating which family has the most noble line, are able to make all sorts of fine distinctions about which universities have the most prestige: Princeton is better than Cornell; Williams is better than Colby.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
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Today, even middle-school students have been so thoroughly assessed that they know whether the adults have deemed them smart or not. The good test-takers get funneled into the meritocratic pressure cooker; the bad test-takers learn, by about age 9 or 10, that society does not value them the same way.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
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Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world.
~ Erwin Schrödinger
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By reimagining college-admissions criteria, James Conant hoped to spark a social and cultural revolution. The age of the Well-Bred Man was vanishing. The age of the Cognitive Elite was here.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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Best wishes all our readers who celebrate Christmas.
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I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of an ancestral promptings and urgings, a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, of all of which I am the sum total.
~ Charlie Chaplin
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