Historicality

technicoloring:

“In short, at the top of the meritocratic ladder we have in America a generation of students who are extraordinarily bright, morally earnest, and incredibly industrious. They like to study and socialize in groups. They create and join organizations with great enthusiasm. They are responsible, safety-conscious, and mature. They feel no compelling need to rebel—not even a hint of one. They not only defer to authority; they admire it. ‘Alienation’ is a word one almost never hears from them. They regard the universe as beneficent, orderly, and meaningful. 

They have woven their way through the temptations of adolescence and have benefited from all the nurturing and instruction and opportunities with which the country has provided them. They are responsible. They are generous. They are bright. They are good-natured. But they live in a country that has lost, in its frenetic seeking after happiness and success, the language of sin and character-building through combat with sin. Evil is seen as something that can be cured with better education, or therapy, or Prozac. Instead of virtue we talk about accomplishment.

Maybe the lives of the meritocrats are so crammed because the stakes are so small. All this ambition and aspiration is looking for new tests to ace, new clubs to be president of, new services to perform, but finding that none of these challenges is the ultimate challenge, and none of the rewards is the ultimate reward.”

I want to print this article out and mail it to every. Single. Person. That I know.

Reblogging for truth (at least in the first half) but also for a more critical take on the latter half.

There is a bit of a self-righteous air to the article—a certain “everything was better and freer when I was a youngster.” And while I think that it’s a little silly to assume that all modern “contrivances” and “the end of chivalry” are automatically restrictive and wrong because Brooks seems to disagree, he brings up a number of really thought-provoking points about the sheer…achievement-based ethos of today’s children and students.

(I am, nonetheless, somewhat alarmed by the neocon-ish slant of his take on morality—perhaps it’s an instinctive “generational” recoil from the concept of pure Evil (with a capital E) and a general distaste for mixing religious doctrine—because, let’s be honest, there’s a lot of that when he discusses character and “virtue”—into an otherwise enlightening article about hyperachievementism.)

tetw:

by Wesley Yang

What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?

I’m still not sure how much of this article I agree with—I need some more time to mull it over. But this passage, in particular, really resonated with me:

And so there is an additional concern accompanying the rise of the Tiger Children, one focused more on the narrowness of the educational experience a non-Asian child might receive in the company of fanatically preprofessional Asian students. Jenny Tsai, a student who was elected president of her class at the equally competitive New York public school Hunter College High School, remembers frequently hearing that “the school was becoming too Asian, that they would be the downfall of our school.” A couple of years ago, she revisited this issue in her senior thesis at Harvard, where she interviewed graduates of elite public schools and found that the white students regarded the Asians students with wariness. (She quotes a music teacher at Stuyvesant describing the dominance of Asians: “They were mediocre kids, but they got in because they were coached.”) In 2005, The Wall Street Journal reported on “white flight” from a high school in Cupertino, California, that began soon after the children of Asian software engineers had made the place so brutally competitive that a B average could place you in the bottom third of the class.

…

Things that somehow come naturally to people who go to school in the suburbs and have parents who are culturally assimilated.” I pressed him for specifics, and he mentioned that he had visited his white girlfriend’s parents’ house the past Christmas, where the family had “sat around cooking together and playing Scrabble.” This ordinary vision of suburban-American domesticity lingered with Mao: Here, at last, was the setting in which all that implicit knowledge “about social norms and propriety” had been transmitted. There was no cram school that taught these lessons.

tsg2010:

I got a full tuition scholarship to college. Not my first choice college. Honestly, I refused to even apply to my dream school (Columbia) because I knew I couldn’t afford it and it would break my heart to turn down an offer. Just like it did when I had to turn down U. Chicago, and U….

Preach. Go forth and be awesome—I’ll be rooting for you all the way.