<p>Funny to hear about conformity. I think that’s more for religious schools or highly conservative. When you get 25k+ apps, and are holistic, you can demand the class be uniformly highly capable. But, none that I know want social or personality-type conformity. Do the students all, nontheless, seem to fit a pattern? From the outside, it may seem so. Not on closer look.</p>
<p>In my HS class (74) one of the brainiest kids went to St. Johns. I don’t think he was in a single EC, except maybe the student “alternative” literary mag. But you could tell he was an intellectusal. In those days at least you really had to be a nonconfiormist to go there. It was a difficult school (Great Books) and nobody had ever heard of it.</p>
<p>annasdad has a hatred for ivys for an unknown reason</p>
<p>“I’m thinking that annasdad is yanking our collective legs/chains just to stir the pot.”</p>
<p>I like this statement! Yanking the collective chains is an eminently usable quote for the future.</p>
<p>FWIW, I did hear from a few MIT students’ parents when I went to a admitted students open house that when their kids could not pass a specific GIR course they retook it at Harvard. I assume there is some truth to it since it is prefaced by flunking a class at MIT to admit a problem as opposed to a blanket statement saying thats what MIT kids do to prove Harvard is easier.</p>
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<p>The successful non-conformist begins questioning “the system” early on and often learns to outwardly play the conformist game by high school. The student with a “good reputation” is given a lot more slack than the known “troublemakers.” My younger son is quiet and respectful but has long had this dangerous tendency to regularly correct his teachers’ mistakes or (in math) to suggest quicker and simpler alternate solutions to the conventional method just taught.</p>
<p>He had occasional trouble with teachers in lower level classes where teaching discipline was the primary goal and Fearless Leader dare not be questioned. On the other hand, he was tolerated (and even encouraged) by his amused teachers in his higher level classes, where the focus was on critical thinking.</p>
<p>My feeling is that non-conformists who get into the elite colleges somehow learn to work the system from the inside while still being a part of it, while the ones that don’t decry the system from the outside.</p>
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<p>I think trash-talking rival schools at that level is pretentious and overwrought. No one seriously believes there is any meaningful difference in caliber in the students at, say, the top 20 or so places, or that there are dropoffs like cliffs the moment you go down to the 30’s. People need to get over themselves, and fast. These are all great places filled with smart kids that offer great opportunities to those who choose to take advantage of them. Parsing Harvard vs MIT or anything else at this level is just stupid, and doesn’t make the parser look very bright at all.</p>
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<p>I don’t know about that. My kid went to Brown and there sure are a lot of nonconformists there!</p>
<p>Getting great or perfect grades in high school is not a measure of being a person who is a conformist.</p>
<p>MIT trying to talk smack to Harvard would be like Dwight Howard talking smack to LeBron on a basketball court. Dwight Howard is an all-star, maybe one of the top ten forces in the NBA… but LeBron is the best player in the game right now.</p>
<p>MIT is a great school – few would honestly dispute that. It is one of the top ten undergrad schools (among national universities at least) in the US and is great at the post-grad levels as well. But it isn’t Harvard.</p>
<p>MIT is known for its Math/Science/Engineering programs. Harvard, like Princeton and Yale, is good at pretty much everything.</p>
<p>(not that anyone asked, but that’s how I see it)</p>
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Thats being quite polite. There are several threads started on CC about the Harvard cheating scandal, but only one smacks at/insults the school with inflammatory, offensive cracks like calling it a diploma mill and mocking it and the competition for the Ivys and their rigor.</p>
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Am guessing there is some idiosyncratic enjoyment gotten by logging in, watching the comments posted in the thread, but failing to respond/post.</p>
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<p>Of course. That’s what motivates ■■■■■■. Which just goes to show that one can be a long-established poster and still be a ■■■■■.</p>
<p>^^I don’t think it’s safe to say everyone who is not commenting right now is a ■■■■■. There are 170 comments on this thread but 6,777 views, last I checked. (Having said that, is there a way to see whether someone is logged in? What if they have the app on their smartphone?)</p>
<p>But back to the issue of conformity–I would agree that Brown is probably the least traditionally conformist Ivy, in part due to its reputation for being more “free form” in its approach to learning and grading (do they still not give letter grades there?). Yale definitely has a fair number of non-conformists, especially in the drama program, but again–fully 1/4 of its graduates are going into investment banking or consulting. So is “conformity” being beaten into them while they are there? That is the speculation of the Yale student who wrote the article I cited above.</p>
<p>And LoremIpsum, I understand what you are saying about your son (and have one who is similar myself) but I don’t buy that a genuinely non-conformist kid would necessarily gravitate toward most of the Ivies in the first place. Certainly not Harvard, Princeton, or Dartmouth, anyway. This is just my opinion based on my familiarity with these schools.</p>
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I can’t speak for Slithy, but thats not how I took what she said. A poster who purposely starts a controversial, inflammatory, insulting thread, cherry picks who/what to respond to and then logs in without responding… well, if it walks and talks like a duck…</p>
<p>[MIT</a> Course Catalog: Undergraduate General Institute Requirements](<a href=“Welcome! < MIT”>Welcome! < MIT)</p>
<p>An MIT parent saying that their kid could not get through a required class at MIT in a science subject and so had to go across to Harvard to pass it is considered trash talk?</p>
<p>Btw, it does not point to level of student but rigor of the class and/or what is considered passing.</p>
<p>Jym-- from a professional standpoint, I’m sure it will interest you to know that studies of cohesiveness in internet chat groups have proven the necessity of regular flamers to create any kind of group “norms.”</p>
<p>I’m trying to find the study online, but, and this is hillarious, I’ve only seen it in print. </p>
<p>Anyway, it is comforting to know that when I get overly busy, I can count on CC to have some givens. One form or another of this particular conversation seems to be a given.</p>
<p>Happy labor day everyone.</p>
<p>I spent this weekend going through 200+ boxes of what we put in storage 2 years ago. It was like having our whole life flash in front of me. I found out I was a really bad parent because I used to French braid D1’s hair, based on her 8 year old diary. I was on the floor because I only did it because i thought she liked it. 20 years from now, I am probably going to find out she hated going to a private school or even going to college. </p>
<p>I came back to CC after a hard day of unpacking found this is where all the action was. Hope AD’s daughter is enjoying her classes at Truman. Wonder if she keeps a diary also. </p>
<p>Before all CC parents jump down my throat, I had no idea it was a diary until I opened it to see if we should keep the notebook. That’s how paranoid I am on CC.</p>
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<p>Just take a cursory look at history of socio-economic class and how the use of snobbery has been used to keep out/down those considered “lesser” on the basis of socio-economic class, cultural capital, etc throughout history. </p>
<p>From a mere glance, it has played critical parts in excluding less powerful/disenfranchised groups from having a political voice/role in their respective societies, access to social networks critical to success in high powered public/private sector career fields with widespread socio-political influence, being free of legal and social harassment derived from said snobbery, and far more than what I can think off the top of my head.</p>
<p>I don’t know about you…but that list has a far greater impact historically than anything a “victim” of reverse snobbery is ever likely to face considering he/she’s usually part of the elite “in” group in the first place. </p>
<p>Kinda like a certain presidential candidate saying he knows the pain of the average American because he had to sell some investments from an overflowing trust account to pay for his elite private university education while the world’s tiniest violin is playing in sympathy of his “plight”…</p>
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<p>Don’t know about now, but back in the '90s and before, there were CTCL colleges like the one I attended that were willing to take on the non-conformists who weren’t willing to outwardly conform to their HS’s norms. </p>
<p>Many of them…including myself populated Oberlin’s student body in the '90s and earlier. Granted, most were far more “out there” in that department. </p>
<p>You’d need to be to have the stones to go onto the US Military’s School of the Americas base to protest its role in training some of the most brutal tyrannical Latin American dictators and risk arrest by base MPs for trespass and “disorderly conduct”. Most parents would be horrified by the risks/actions of Oberlin and other students who participated in that protest. On the other hand, it is commemorated with much fondness and admiration by the Oberlin College community/alumni association.</p>
<p>As for non-conformists and Ivies…they’re most likely to go off to Brown from what I’ve seen among non-conformists who had interests of attending an Ivy.</p>
<p>I can offer one specific data point, on the rigor of classes at an Ivy, based on a comment that mathmom made about Harvard’s German courses, quite a while ago. At Harvard, the book Der Richter und Sein Henker by Durrenmatt is read in the first-year, second-semester course. At my large, public research university, the same book was read in the second-year course, about half way through.</p>
<p>Since I started German from scratch, having taken Latin in high school, the slower pace was actually advantageous for me.</p>
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<p>You might be right. My son chose free-thinking Brown and absolutely loves that school’s tendency to mock itself. He did at one time have reservations that the top colleges might be too pompous for him (our elite high schools here are like that).</p>
<p>Still, one would think that the tippy-top schools would attract a fair number of non-conformist chameleons who will refuse to drink the administration’s Kool-Aid, yet still long for the opportunity to be surrounded by the nation’s best students: a lot of learning takes place outside the classroom among one’s peers.</p>
<p>ooh poetgrl, would love to see that article! Unless, of course, it happens to be a stale 2005 review article of 3 decades of research. In that case, I’ll pass :)</p>
<p>Good thing there is no way there is research that old about internet interaction, since the www and all it has had to offer hasn’t been around all that long.</p>
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Ah yes, the predictable course of many conversations here! </p>
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<p>First edition of Hiltz and Turoff’s Network Nation, which analyzes computer mediated communication was…1978. Sorry, jym! Want any help getting those young whippersnappers off your lawn? :)</p>