Troubled Sheep
/
This book, in many ways, is a letter to my twenty-year old self. It talks about the kinds of things I wish that someone had encouraged me to think about when I was going to college—such as what the point of college might be in the first place.I was like so many kids today (and so many kids back then). I went off to college like a sleepwalker, like a zombie. College was a blank. College was the “next thing.” You went to college, you studied something, and afterward you went on to the next next thing, most probably some kind of graduate school. Up ahead were vaguely understood objectives: status, wealth, getting to the top—in a word, “success.” As for where you went to school, that was all about bragging rights, so of course you chose the most prestigious place that let you in. What it meant to actually get an education, and why you might want one—how it could help you acquire a self, or develop an independent mind, or find your way in the world—all this was off the table. Like kids today, I was processed through a system everyone around me simply took for granted.
It goes on like that for some time. The book gives us all a patient talking-to, the sort one might have with a sunny, secretly-indifferent teenager who has never failed (never been allowed to fail) at a single thing. And maybe for that teenager, this book is well-tuned.
Chua’s ‘Asian’ parenting is simply an extreme version of upper-middle-class practice—the unrelenting pressure as she hounds her daughters to excel, the willful disregard of everything except ‘achievement’—and it shows us all that’s wrong with it and all that lies behind it. Perusing her book is like reading a novel with an unreliable narrator: she is constantly revealing things she doesn’t realize about herself, is blind to the meaning of her own story.
I’m a little worried that this book, the ink hardly dry, doesn’t seem aware that this helicopter parenting argument, at least in some circles, is already all but over. As evidence, ask yourself if the words “helicopter parent” sound more like a compliment, or an insult. The change to the next thing is already happening. Toward what is difficult to say. But the broad models of the millennial (pragmatic and career-focused) and the hipster, their counter-cultural (also pragmatic and career-focused, but with any number of infuriating personality simulations running on a projector in the foreground), are already phasing out.We’re about to find out what comes after “millennial.” I can’t begin to speak for every parent, but it looks like the cycle of punishment and reward that sprouted a generation of millennial gold-sticker-seekers can be avoided without a descent into anarchy. The approach I see many parents adopting (granted, my daughter is 5, so her peers aren't applying to colleges anytime soon) is to steer one's children from obvious danger, but otherwise follow and support their curiosities (they will have some), introduce them to new experiences they wouldn’t have known about, and let them make their own choices. Most of my parenting contemporaries seem to be trying to limit the praise and condemnation, and talk and question their kids about how their choices led to those outcomes. We'll see how that works out.There are occasions (such as taking the two-millionth run at poor Tiger Mom) where the author ceases professing for a minute and puts his views plainly. Deresiewicz is capable of delivering a much sharper, more animated, and more quickly-paced case. I commend to you his essay in The American Scholar from 2008 (“The Disadvantages of an Elite Education”), which was all of those things. It was a nearly perfect article. It was, in his words, the precursor to this book, and it was the brick-through-the-window disquisition that Excellent Sheep dearly needs.Most of it would be suitable to quote, but I’ll confine myself to that essay’s introduction:
It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.
In both texts, our writer includes himself in the narrative. In the book, he and his students are the passive recipients of terrible parenting and a broken educational system. But in the essay— and this is essential—you hear a man who is equally as angry at his own blindness as he is at the vast apparatus through which, yes, “a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated.”As Judge Judy has so gleefully spit-shouted on numerous occasions, “You ate the steak, now you have to pay for it.” You don’t get to complain after you purchase something and finish the whole thing. And it seems nonsensical to me for the former students in his book to have worked so tirelessly to get into a very good school, then enter into a dull, lucrative career (all against their will), then have access to every trapping of wealth (all of this taking twenty or thirty years), and then look back and lament that they had never been sufficiently encouraged by someone else to write a romantic comedy, or become a playground designer, or open a pet therapy practice, or translate Belarusian poetry, all in penury, with all those years to have changed their minds. We all review our choices, quite often with a note (or a howl) of lament, but each of us needs to acknowledge that these were our goals, and if we don’t like the way we’ve spent our past, then that is too bad.
Deresiewicz describes some valuable aspects of the college experience that he wishes his subjects weren't too busy to engage in. He mentions the “late-night bull session” several times: three or five people stay up and debate whatever. This is critical to a young person's individuation, and to their capacity for argument and reason later on. (I'm actually a little surprised to hear that everyone didn't do that.) But at times, he seems to want to catalog the full substance of these exchanges in his book, in their entirety, in case the reader never in his life gets around to having long conversations with friends. Here, the author tears down anodyne commencement speeches (no one in particular). Listen as he explains not just his thesis, but every possible query to it:
I cannot emphasize enough that inventing your life does not come without potential costs. People say “find your passion,” but they don't say “be prepared to suffer” (if only by surrendering the status that you might have had). They say “follow your dreams,” but they don't say “the hell with credentials.” I don't mean credentials per se, which are obviously often necessary, but credentialism, that lust for prestige that more or less defines the elite mentality and makes it impossible to find your passion or follow your dreams. How absurd it is—how disgusting, really—for commencement speakers to get up and mouth those exhortations at the very schools that do so much to preclude their fulfillment.Status is a funny thing. Money gets you stuff, at least. Status doesn't get you much except the knowledge that you have it. And while money may not make you happy, it is easy to imagine someone who decides she has enough. With status, you can never have enough. It is comparative, and competitive, by its very nature. It doesn't just not make you happy: it actively makes you unhappy. You want to make it to the top? There is no top. However high you climb, there is always someone above you.
As I've said, Deresiewicz has clearly proven elsewhere that he's an excellent essayist, who has here written a book of instructions for a particular audience, in a tone that would not be appealing for middle-aged people to discuss. So I shouldn't lampoon too enthusiastically. (Him: “Money gets you stuff, at least.” Me: “Oh my goodness, it does!”) But to take the substance of the book seriously, I can summarize:Perhaps Ivy League schools should seek a different kind of student; department heads should set curricula with more flexibility; administrators should counsel students toward more fulfilling life choices. Maybe the kids themselves should show more initiative toward self-actualization, and Ivy League adults need to do more to value accomplishments in others beyond the accumulation of wealth. Maybe that would make more of these kids consider their options and think for themselves (or at least become better at talking to their plumbers).I’d like it if his aims were achieved, or achievable, but his recommendations for getting there seem incomplete. We shouldn’t be surprised (or, really, alarmed) if an incredibly insular Ivy League culture begets a population of people who are affluent, and are then isolated by their own perceived superiority to consort only with one another. When they grow up to raise the next generation of incredibly similar Ivy League students, we also shouldn’t be surprised if a greater pursuit of order and control over these people's ability to feel and take risks in such an environment fails to produce more free, feeling individuals. And if it did, wouldn’t that just be “helicopter parenting,” part two?____
Michael O’Donnell is a reviewer for Open Letters Monthly.
