This Event Will Help You Learn

What “tiger parents” are and how they add to the problem

How to cultivate the moral imagination you need to find out what you really want

Why liberal arts degrees are better for business than business degrees

How arts complement science and one can’t exist without the other

What percentage of people in the highest positions come from elite schools

About the Author

William Deresiewicz was a professor at Yale until 2008. He is the author of the landmark essays “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” and “Solitude and Leadership” and is a frequent speaker on campuses around the country. A contributing writer for The Nation and a contributing editor for The New Republic and The American Scholar, he is the author of A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter

Overview

This book makes the best case for a 4-year, liberal arts, unspecialized college education that I’ve ever read. Deresiewicz wants young adults to build self-knowledge and self-directedness, find meaningful work, forget about the pursuit of easy money, and truly squeeze the nectar from the college experience. If more college students (and parents, and professors, and administrators) took his advice, the American system of higher education would be much more functional than it is today.

Deresiewicz argues for attending college—specifically, colleges with lots of small-group seminars and face-time with professors—but he also speaks highly of doing a gap year (whether formal or informal), taking time off during college, and taking time off after college (i.e. maximizing the period of maximum freedom directly after graduating to continue building self-knowledge).

This book contains the best motivational speech I’ve ever encountered for taking a nontraditional, self-directed life path (find it below, in the quote section, in red), and it tears apart the “tiger mom” philosophy and the MOOC craze in very satisfying ways.

I took away a deeper feeling of gratitude for attending UC Berkeley, which surrounded me with sharp, questioning peers (very few of whom struck me as ultra-privileged or “elite”) for four years at a very affordable tuition rate (affordable in 2001-2004, at least). Living in the Berkeley Student Co-ops for all four years played a major role in this experience, too.

My favorite chapters were “The Training” (on parenting), “What is College For?”, and “Inventing Your Life.”