<p>It’s just that so many students who go to “elite” schools seem to end up in ‘the machine,’ even if it’s a very lucrative position in the machine, if you know what I mean. That’s not to say that “lower-tier” schools (these terms I always use with heavy quote-marks) don’t have students also entering the machine, but a realisation that I developed this year is that no, getting into that school isn’t that magic ticket, and that there seems to be many elements of “slavery to the system,” conformity and determinism despite the students’ high intelligence.</p>
<p>I guess it’s the gnawing idea that I come across many students who seem to be ‘manufactured’ for their lives – private prep schools and Ivy Leagues being points along the assembly line chain, with parents sometimes being the factory workers. My valedictorian, who’s going into biochemical engineering, sees no value in fields like linguistics (which I plan to connect plentily to calculus, biological evolution and physics) or women’s studies, with all the entailing discussions of morality and right, almost like the misinformed relative at the dinner table who disapproves of your field of study. This I would tolerate as a personality trait if not for the fact that she doesn’t appear to have any fascination for the implications of the field she’s going into and she is not the type to wonder about concepts not covered by the course that happen to covered in the next page across from the assigned reading. This is just my gripe – she was after all, admitted to a rather good school. I do hope I’m wrong and that one day she might discover this post and correct me, but it’s just that there’s a certain dullness to the whole thing. We do have quite a cordial relationship face-to-face, but if you want a heart-to-heart talk about calculus and science – she isn’t the type to talk to.</p>
<p>I guess my impression of “top students” who attend elite schools are that of the type who transcend their conditions and “break out” of the moulds set for them.</p>
<p>It is a sort of philosophical problem – a while ago you may have noticed my thread in the admissions forum about “privilege”. I was trying to quantify my uneasiness I guess, and now I realise my real target wasn’t so much more privilege as the idea of “educational determinism” (you went there because your environment all your life has told you to go there). Most of us after all, find a certain uneasiness with Exeter and Andover sending 40-50 grads to Harvard each year in a systemic “mass production” kind of way. It’s not that they should be faulted for a nurtuing environment and for being brilliant, but shouldn’t the cream of the crop transcend their conditions – transcend ‘the machine’ (a very vaguely-defined idea at the moment)?</p>