Thursday, July 31, 2008

Am I becoming an Asshole?

So my summer is dwindling to its last 3 weeks, and i am sitting happily in the plush library with a view of rolling hills and the Golden Gate bridge and endless shelves of leather bound scientific journals.

An assortment of conversations (and a self audit of my summer shopping binges) lately have made me wonder what it is that matters to me. Little things, but somehow huge things. Like my ability to tolerate things. My desire for shining new (expensive) things. The yawning chasms between the highs and crashes of my self esteem. A decreased tolerance for inconvenience. My sudden new found ease at calling people dumb.

Is it age? Cynicism? is it a medical education? A dangerous sense of entitlement that i always swore would never...be...me?

Article: Elitism


"...As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow."

Once I had a fierce pride in my populism, of working my way up by those infamous American bootstraps, which admittedly stemmed from a devastating insecurity of being able to hold my own, against the children of perceived superiors. Its a lot of motivation to work really hard when you think everyone else is intrinsically better than you; or when you envision yourself the scrappy outsider; or when you have something to prove; or have some weird complex of carrying the family honor on your shoulders (the Atlas myth, lets call all of this). Now on the other side of the divide--"wow... you're here, at our amazing school, in our amazing profession, we--and therefore you--are really pretty fucking awesome."

It's hard to resist! Ugh, stroke me some more.

The rise of analysis: "The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense."

I wonder to what extent medical education is not alienating because of the epistemology of science, or by abusive hierarchy, or the sleep deprivation of its interns, or by the banality of memorizing organic chemistry mechanisms in the face of the deepest questions of morality and suffering. I wonder if its fundamentally maybe just about the education process of our universities.

And the inevitable role, of self esteem by standardized test.

"The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value. It’s been said that what those tests really measure is your ability to take tests, but even if they measure something real, it is only a small slice of the real. The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”

I don't know if this is deep stuff. The author of the article is definitely a little douchey. But I am surprised by the vitriolic and knee wrenching provokation it wreaks in myself and my friends. It certainly says something interesting, and even things that are true, but most deliciously, it is so very very uncomfortable.

I have more to say, but most of it involves Proust (as most things usually do). Instead, back to work on saving the world and shit.

No comments: