Center,
It didn’t ring a bell, so I googled a 2014 review in the NY Times, Reading the review, it seemed really familiar. Then I realized I had read the same quotes not so long ago from an article in the New Republic. You may want to look at that piece, since it was quite long, and the NYT reviewer felt that the actual book was padded anyway. I saw no points raised in the book review that I’d not read in the article, fwiw.
I think it is worth being mindful of the points made. But the issue is whether education should be primarily vocational or if it serves some higher purpose. In the US, for the last few generations, education has been a means of upward mobility. Prior to that it was more akin to a past time for the moneyed class. If education is a means of upward mobility (or a means to stave of downward mobility), who can blame kids for studying finance instead of poetry? Degrees in non-vocational fields are luxury goods few can afford.
Moreover, rising income inequality has made the implied cost of NOT following the bucks far more expensive. Maybe for my grandparents, being a school teacher would have meant making only 1/3rd of what a banker made. Today, it might mean earning <1/50th. And then they won’t earn enough to pay for THEIR kids’ BS and college.
One line from the article that I did not see in the review, that has bothered me. In the NR article the author says something about parents “feeding their kids into the maw of the admissions machine”. Ouch, that hurt. And he is right. But I don’t know the answer. One thing I always tell my kids is that, the less they value material goods, the more freedom they will have in their lives. I say that. I do not model it. You know then how that works!
Funny, we spend all our energy and time on M10. So we get great results on M10, revel in in for about 30 days, and then start to question just what we are pursuing and why! Human nature!