What is going on here is the need to mark one’s child off as different, unique, stylish, above and—why not come out and say it—just a little beyond the others. And why not? Our little Stefan, Sophia, Luc, Alyssa is, after all, the child of parents of exquisite taste. If not, he or she wouldn’t carry such a special name, n’est-ce pas? These are children, let us face it, aimed at better places than, say, Michigan State or a job selling automobile insurance.
Caitlin Flanagan, a college counselor at Harvard-Wesdake, a prep school in Los Angeles, believes that the silliness about getting one’s children into the best schools is about “class anxiety.” But isn’t class anxiety merely snobbery put into socio-psychoanalytic language? She is charitable to parents, saying that they really only want the best education for their kids. But she adds that it is more than a bit difficult to understand what they mean by the best education. “It’s the kind of education you get at certain places,” she writes, “but not others—at Georgetown but not at the University of Washington; at Duke but not at Chapel Hill. It’s the kind of education you can definitely get at Stanford, less so at Berkeley, much less so at Michigan, hardly at all at Wisconsin, and not at all at the University of Illinois.” Miss Flanagan adds: “That kind of thinking has always bewildered me.” It is called, she should know, snobbish thinking.
I first noticed the snobbish interest in children when my eldest son went off to college. I can recall meeting parents of roughly my own age who, when the time came to discuss children, would ask if my (then) nineteen- or twenty-year-old son was in college. When I replied yes, at Stanford, I felt I was holding a strong card. (I always wanted to say, “Yes, we have a son at Tufts and a daughter at Taffeta,” but somehow restrained myself.) During such discussions, I felt I was in a card game, college-snobbery bridge, in which not suits but schools were bid: Brown, Duke, Princeton, Yale, Balliol College, the Sorbonne, École Normale Supérieure. Clearly, one didn’t want to get into this game with a kid at Alabama A&M (“Our daughter is interested in performance studies, and it turns out they’ve got a really strong department there”), let alone at a junior or community college. To have to make such a confession—concession is more like it—is to cause one’s table mates to wonder where you went wrong in raising this once precious but now hopeless child, and, by extension, what, exactly, is wrong with you.
It can get worse as one’s children grow beyond school age, for one is apparently also responsible for the kind of work they do in later life. As there is college-snobbery bridge, so job-snobbery bridge follows. Are one’s children doing what is construed to be OK work? What is thought OK will depend on the circles in which one travels. Among the enlightened classes, it is OK to have a child who is doing anything in the arts, in (however vaguely) “film,” or is doing something in the line of social work; or is a chef or going to cooking school, is in medicine or science, is teaching, is in carpentry, or is building harpsichords or repairing violins. It’s all the better if the kid is making tons of money doing any of these things, but distinctly not OK if he is making money in what is construed to be some grubby, unimaginative way—as a CPA, say, or running a useful store.
What has made this more complicated is that snobbery has had to make way for downward mobility, or the prospect, a real one for, the first rime in American life, that one’s children won’t do better than one has oneself done. In 1781 John Adams famously wrote to his wife Abigail: “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, commerce, and architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” This probably has to be revised today by many immigrant grandfathers to read, “I must run a dry-cleaning shop so that my sons can go to medical and law school, in order that their sons may study sociology and communications, so that their children can run vintage clothing stores, act in avant-garde theater, and work in coffee shops.”
For all that can be said about snobbery, it isn’t finally all that rigid, but changes with the times. Snobbery might in fact be the best warning system going, foretelling how the times they are indeed a-changing. Snobbery can also be flexible and accommodating, if only to explain the changed situations into which the snobs’ own children have landed them. Not a one-generation thing, snobbery. Sometimes a snob’s children can cause him or her more awkward emotion than an anti-Semite might feel at a Hasidic picnic.
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Dear Old Yarvton
SINCE ROUGHLY 1950 the great divide in American life has not (as I noted earlier by way of Tom Wolfe) been that between rich and poor, black and white, Jew and Gentile—though these divisions were all real enough—but between those who went to college and those who didn’t. One saw this divide even in that most integrated of American institutions, the U.S. Army, where it seemed to surmount that between officers and enlisted men. But one began to see it in corporations, too, where the higher-echelon jobs were simply no longer available to people who hadn’t gone to college, however bright they might be. Having gone to college suddenly became the key to so many things in American life. “Society in Los Angeles,” Ethel Barrymore used to say, “was anyone who graduated from high school.” No longer.
Increased college enrollments after World War Two had an immense effect in producing a more and more classless society in America. Still, after the war college became a sine qua non, indispensable not only in vocational life but in the life of the spirit. Intelligent people who hadn’t gone to college began to feel a great hole in their lives, and those who had gone could usually be relied upon to hide from them what is all too sadly the truth: they really haven’t missed all that much.
Paul Goodman, the 1930s radical who became something of a guru during the student rebellions of the late 1960s and early ’70s, used to enjoy saying that all going to college meant was that in doing so a person showed how badly he or she wanted to succeed in society as currently constituted. Going to college entails a large expense, lots of useless work, and the acceptance of endless onerous, preposterous trivialities, all of which, Goodman liked pointing out, showed that any young man or woman who was willing to put up with this nonsense could be expected to put up with the even greater nonsense of boring and meaningless work later in life. College, in this view, functioned chiefly to turn out useful, moderately high-level drones, finely honed tools of capitalism.
This doesn’t happen to be my view. But my respect for higher education is not much greater than Goodman’s, at least in its nonscientific components. Considered purely as an institution for purveying information and imbuing culture, surely no other system can have been as inefficient as American education over the past hundred years. “If men made no more progress in the common arts of life than they have in education,” wrote Sydney Smith, the wit of the Edinburgh Review, “we should at this moment be dividing our food with our fingers, and drinking out of the palms of our hands.” Quite right.
As someone who has gone to a university and also taught at one for nearly thirty years, I have come to the depressing conclusion that education is mainly a matter of good luck: the luck to have had struck the divine spark of passion for things of the mind combined with the even better luck of discovering, amid the majority of mediocre university teachers, the one or two with the magic tinder to inflame that spark. Some young people are what are known as good students—that is, like good dogs of a certain sort, they fetch well, bringing back in their moist mouths the sticks they were thrown. “The significance of Anglo-Catholicism to T. S. Eliot—go get it, girl.” “Was the Renaissance merely the Late Show of the Middle Ages or the Early Show of the Reformation—bring it back, boy, typed, double spaced, tidy footnotes at the bottom of the page.” Woof, woof. Good student. Here’s your Phi Beta Kappa key, now go get a good job.
Of course undergraduate education is only ostensibly about producing the sound paper on T. S. El
iot or the Renaissance or the Reformation. What it’s really about, or at any rate is supposed to be about, is the development of young minds, teaching them how to think independently, how to combine common sense with proper skepticism, the whole given a fine texture by the attainment of an at first widened and later (after college, acquired on one’s own) gready deepened culture. But what percentage of the 65 percent of Americans who regularly participate in one form or another of higher education do you suppose derive anything resembling such things from their education? I would set it at somewhere between 1 and 2, percent, though that may be too generous. Most people come away from college, happy souls, quite unscarred by what has gone on in the classroom. The education and culture they are presumably exposed to at college never lay a glove on them. This is the big dirty secret of higher education in America.
This doesn’t mean that their having gone to college isn’t worth it. Not at all. On a strict accounting, a college education, expensively priced though it nowadays generally is, probably pays off as well as any investment. Endless studies show that young men and women who attend college earn hundreds of thousands of dollars more over a lifetime than those who, for one reason or another, do not go to college. Why should this be so? For the same reason that degrees in journalism, master’s degrees in business, and other (shall we politely say?) not strictly necessary degrees make for success: because, that is, people who have already paid for these overpriced appurtenances wish others to do so, forming a (not so) little group of those who have already pledged the fraternity.
During recent decades it has become plain that education is the key to opportunity in America. Not only going to college but, as I have said, where one goes to college is crucial. In the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century, college was not considered essential to success. From Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Carnegie to John D. Rockefeller to Henry Ford to Ernest Hemingway, so many of the great American success stories were devoid of a pause for college. H. L. Mencken, who also didn’t bother to go to college, thought it a comically, pathetically wasteful interlude, four years spent listening to hopeless pedagogues and engaged in inane social activities, and surely one that anybody who had any choice in the matter would prefer to bypass. Mencken had a choice—a career in journalism—and took it without hesitation.
In recent years, many extraordinary athletes in basketball, baseball, and tennis have forgone college for the large salaries available to them in professional sports. Whatever else they may be missing out on, no one, so far as I know, really thinks they are missing out on the experience of a fine education. Now it is reported that computer whiz kids are deciding to take a pass on college, too. The money, the excitement of business, and the lure of being in on the swell new things calls them, and somehow it doesn’t seem entirely a mistake to answer the call instead of going off to college, where they can spend four years learning that the glorious culture of fifth century B.C. Athens was little more than a swindle built on a slave society, that Shakespeare was a homosexual serving the interests of imperialistic England, and that women have gotten a raw deal throughout history and up to twenty minutes ago. With so much nuttiness being taught in the liberal arts and social sciences, college, for people with exceptional talent, begins once again to seem less and less worth the time, trouble, and expense.
Many of the privileged who went to the better colleges in the first six decades of the twentieth century did so without any vocational aim in mind; already well connected, they had the businesses of fathers and fathers-in-law and uncles and friends of classmates awaiting. Harvard, Yale, Princeton was not for them a résumé item, an entrée, an open sesame. For them the doors were already open. George Herbert Walker Bush did not go to Yale College because he was hoping thereby to gain a job. He went to Yale College because he was George Herbert Walker Bush, and Yale—and Harvard and Princeton and a few threadneedle Ivy colleges—was the sort of place that families such as the Bushes (and Alsops, Achesons, Harrimans, Roosevelts, and the rest) sent their sons, with daughters going to Radcliffe, Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley.
They went there, as earlier they had gone to the various Choates, Grotons, Andovers, St. Paul’s, and Exeters, as part of a general program in character building. At such institutions they were to learn, presumably, that wealth and privilege had their responsibilities. Intellectual brilliance counted at these schools for less than leadership, artistic understanding for less than the development of sound character. Athletic competition was considered part of this development. Public service was one of the primary ideals at these institutions—“To serve is to reign” was the motto established at Groton by Endicott Peabody, the school’s founder and headmaster—and that ideal was by and large met in practice, as is attested by the endless chain of alumni who went on to become U.S. presidents, secretaries of state, and other cabinet officers.
These arrangements, resulting in an oligarchical American leadership class, might have gone on for a good deal longer but for World War Two, after which things began to change, with higher education providing the foot in the door. First among the things to help bring this about was the GI Bill, which extended the educational franchise by providing financial support to veterans to attend college; and a much greater number of them did take advantage of the GI Bill than had been expected. After the discovery of Hider’s Final Solution, anti-Semitism began to be less easily expressed and less openly enacted in, among other places, university quota systems. (Harvard’s and Yale’s admission policies called for allowing roughly 13 percent of Catholics and Jews among their student bodies.) A decade or so later, the civil rights movement worked similarly to integrate American Negroes—as African Americans then were—into schools they once would not have thought of entering. Jews, Catholics, and blacks became teachers in the same institutions that earlier had restricted their entry as students. What was loosely called “the women’s movement” helped push talented women forward into places from which they were hitherto excluded, among them the formerly all-male Ivy League colleges, which became coeducational. Women now began joining the job market in positions of serious responsibility. In time many women were themselves part of the elite, becoming partners in leading law firms, chief executive officers of powerful corporations, entrepreneurs of a significant kind.
None of this would have been possible without the spread of testing, specifically of the widespread use of the Scholastic Aptitude Test—the famous, scarifying, utterly crucial SAT. In The Big Test, Nicholas Lemann recounts in impressive detail the development of the SAT, which got a big push from the need for testing large numbers of people for the armed forces during World War Two. The installation of the SAT into admissions procedures changed the nature of the college population.
Its immediate effect was to turn American higher education away from its former basis in recent ancestry, in which the children of alumni were given first shot at entry into the best-regarded colleges and universities. After the arrival of the SATs, it was no longer sufficient for a boy or girl to have gone to one of the handful of elite prep schools and have a father or mother who preceded him or her there to gain almost automatic acceptance into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, and the rest. The standard now became more nearly meritocratic, with grades and test results having increasingly greater import than family or the judgment of headmasters about a youth’s good character. No more of the best and the brightest; now only the brightest would go forth, those kids who, when asked to supply three reasons for the Renaissance, came up with seven.
One might think this, on the face of it, a solid blow against snobbery: down with the old oligarchy, up with the new (at last genuine) merito-democracy. What it did above all was put pressure on children to perform well academically from an early age so that they could gain entry into one of the small number of colleges that would give them a substantial jump-start in life.
Allow me to name, in alphabetical order, what I think those top twenty or so colleges are: Amherst, Brown, Californi
a at Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Northwestern, Princeton, Smith, Stanford, Virginia, Yale, Wellesley, Wesleyan, and Williams. (Interesting that whenever one of the elite women’s colleges—Vassar and Radcliffe most notably—became coeducational it lost its prestige, with Radcliffe losing its identity in the bargain.) Get your child into any of these schools, it is felt, and he or she is well on the way to . . . a superior graduate or professional school, making the right connections, getting the best job interview, crashing—make that dancing—into the good life.
Whether or riot this is so, people tend to believe it, which goes a long way toward making it so. James Fallows, writing in the September 2001 issue of the Atlantic, suggests that it may not be so and cites a study that found that “the selectivity [that is, the number of applicants a school turns down] of a school made no significant difference in the students’ later earnings.” He mentions that the four richest men in America currently are “a dropout from Harvard, a dropout from the University of Illinois, a dropout from Washington State University, and a graduate of the University of Nebraska.” He tosses in for good measure that during the past fifty or so years, presidents of the United States, along with one from Harvard, two from Yale, and two from the service academies, have come from “Southwest Texas State, Whittier, Michigan, Eureka, and Georgetown,” and adds Harry S. Truman, who never went to college at all.
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