Is it possible that top colleges take the smartest people and make them dumber?

I went to a very good college. But when I think really, really hard about what exactly I learned there, I can’t help but to hesitate. For a long time I knew that it wasn’t the material contained in the syllabi of the classes I took (I see this more as a kind of ephemeral “micro-knowledge”; something I learned, knew very well right before the final, and forgot promptly afterwards), but I don’t think this should come as a surprise to anyone. I did, however, think that college taught me how to think (a kind of meta-knowledge). That was true until I realized that now, several years out of college, I’m discovering all that I have never realized. I’m more introspective (something I’ve never done in college) and reflective; I see more connections; I simply understand more. And it’s surprising to me that I’m discovering it just now; wasn’t college supposed to have done this? What exactly happened in the past few years that helped me open my eyes?

Of course I may be wrong; perhaps I’m not discovering anything. I may be simply having an impression of discovery. Or perhaps, I wouldn’t have been able to come to what I came to if I hadn’t gone to college (but it seems somewhat slippery to say that the most important contribution of college education is a second-order one). I don’t know; I do wonder though.

The reason I suspect college may have made me dumber is that it seems to have placed me in an artificial ecosystem of overachieving. It’s like a very long video game with really strange rules: there are inflated grades, weekly meetings with the teaching assistant who assesses the quality of your participation in a conversation, and a final event where everyone has three hours to prove to the professor that he or she retained an impressive quantity of the information. Taking on more than is expected is expected (oh the irony). And that applies not just to the number of classes you take–also what positions you hold on boards of various societies. There also seems to be a Zagat-like rating of societies; being on the board of a Juggling Society seems like a different achievement than serving as a board member of the largest minority society on campus.

A lot of my friends (and I) seemed to be caught in overachieving. Now that I think about it, it’s funny because very few of these things actually matter in life. Things that actually do seem to matter–the maturity and sophistication of thought, actual and not manifested passion, creativity, openness, the ability to communicate, just to make a few–have never been emphasized. It’s as if life was a convention that everyone subscribes to and at the end, somebody judges you based on how well you followed the conventions.

On the other hand, following the conventions may be a useful skill. Just like college may have taught me meta-knowledge, it may have taught me the skill of fitting in to conventions. And if one (somewhat cynically but who is to judge) makes an argument that the world is nothing but layers of conventions, perhaps it was essential after all.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 09:14 and is filed under purpose, reductions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.