Harvard Gone Wild

Parent Cafe
1

<p>Very interesting interview with a recent grad, and probably not at all what you’re expecting, given the title and source.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/douthat200505260818.asp[/url]”>http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/douthat200505260818.asp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

2

<p>Driver, nice article. I think he is pretty balanced in his view of Harvard. This quote expresses my experience there pretty exactly:</p>

<p>There’s plenty of actual learning going on — but all too often, it feels optional, both because the environment of the place is career-focused rather than learning-focused, and because the curriculum makes it easy to skate through without being challenged. So it’s possible to get a great education at Harvard (the professors and students are, as you might expect, brilliant), but you have to go out looking for it, and you have to seal yourself off from all the other pressures that the place presents. And the number of people who make resist these pressures, and make academics the center of their Harvard experience, is far smaller than it should be. </p>

<p>Some of this is the students’ own fault, admittedly, but a greater portion of the blame belongs to the people running the university, who have let undergraduate education founder for decades, with terrible-to-nonexistent advising, a disastrous Core Curriculum, and a general sense of academic drift. The prevailing attitude seems to be that “if you’re smart enough to get into Harvard, you’re smart enough to get what you want out of it” — which sounds swell, until you consider that however smart Harvard students may be, they’re also just teenagers away from home for the first time, with all the confusion that entails. </p>

<p>And depriving them of any kind of guidance — because guidance might require actually asserting that some forms of knowledge are more important than others, and nobody’s willing to do that anymore — turns out to be good way to ensure that they aren’t as well educated as they should be, given everything that a school like Harvard has to offer. </p>

<p>My experience dates back 30+ years–so it is interesting that a more recent graduate sees the same issue there still.</p>

3

<p>driver, I started the same thread under parents forum but no one posted yet. Did anyone read his book yet?</p>

4

<p>Very interesting article, not so much a bashing of Harvard as a critique of career America in general and education in particular; most of it would apply to any “elite” school.</p>

<p>Thanks Driver.</p>

5

<p>SusieQ, I’ve not yet read his book, perhaps over the summer. In the meantime, here’s an interesting review of the book by a Dartmouth student, writing for The Dartmouth Review.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.dartreview.com/archives/2005/04/08/ross_douthat_explores_harvard_the_iviest_of_the_ivy_league.php[/url]”>http://www.dartreview.com/archives/2005/04/08/ross_douthat_explores_harvard_the_iviest_of_the_ivy_league.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;