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: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.
~ William Deresiewicz
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College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.
~ William Deresiewicz
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We inherited a strong and flourishing country, and instead of making the investments – that is, the sacrifices – to maintain it, we chose to suck it dry and stick our children with the bill. If you want to see who is to blame for student debt, just look in the mirror. And if parents find themselves supporting kids beyond their college years, that is only, in the aggregate, a form of compensatory justice: the intergenerational transfer of wealth that should have been effected through taxation.
~ William Deresiewicz
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Education is more than the acquisition of marketable skills, and you are more than your ability to contribute to your employer’s bottom line or the nation’s GDP, no matter what the rhetoric of politicians or executives would have you think.
~ William Deresiewicz
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That’s how envy works: the better things are, the worse they are, because they don’t belong to you.
~ William Deresiewicz
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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
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The idea that we should take the first four years of young adulthood and devote them to career preparation alone, neglecting every other part of life, is nothing short of an obscenity. If that’s what people had you do, then you were robbed. And if you find yourself to be the same person at the end of college as you were at the beginning – the same beliefs, the same values, the same desires, the same goals for the same reasons – then you did it wrong.
~ William Deresiewicz
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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
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Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state.
~ William Deresiewicz
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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
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