The title of William Deresiewicz's new book on the state of Ivy League education in America invokes the observation made by poet and public intellectual Ezra Pound about 80 years ago.
In The ABC of Reading, Pound had argued that higher education needn't be mandatory, foisted on everybody, but should be reserved for those who have a genuine desire to know. The rest, he said is "merely sheepherding."
Deresiewicz, a Yale English Professor who was denied tenure at this hallowed Institution of higher learning, damns the current generation of HYPSters, an acronym for Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford graduates, for being mere sheep, but of excellent pedigree, not because they have good genes or do any larger good to society, but because they obediently follow the tried and tested path of a meaningless life of "blinkered overachievers."
A majority of HYPSters go into bland careers in finance and/or consulting; according to Deresiewicz they tend to lack curiosity, moral courage, passionate weirdness.
The legion of "excellent sheep" is one of a generation of polite, striving, praise-addicted, grade-grubbing nonentities.
What caught my attention (via this most excellent review of the book) was Deresiewicz's critique of the institutions that have sprung up to be the grazing pastures, as it were, of the "excellent sheep."
One such institution is an Yale-brainchild, Teach For America. Deresiewicz is suspicious of the motives of those among the sheep who sign up for two years with Teach to do the recommended stint of teaching the "socioeconomically underserved" kids of America:
[They] swoop down and rescue [the unfortunate] with [their] awesome wisdom and virtue [...] [They] do acknowledge their existence, but in a fashion that maintains [their] sense of superiority — indeed, that reinforces it.
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