Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
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Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
#2"It portrayed the average Princeton/Yale/Harvard/Stanford student as extremely bright and morally earnest but ultimately rather uninspired and herd-like conformists."
Colleges go out of their way to select 'herd-like conformists' during the admissions process, so why would they then try to change them once they got there? This Brooks article never made any sense to me.
Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
#3This is one of the reasons I think people err by reading too much into accounts from the 'Stanford Prison Experiment'.
The students then (as now) weren't a sample of all people, but a particular kind of privileged young male, especially deferential and trusting towards professors, and especially willing to role-play with confidence that some other authority was managing the consequences.
Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
#4As a member of generation Y, I think the original "Organisation Kid" article really got what is wrong with my generation. We're not lazy, entitled, or afraid of competition, despite hundreds of articles by gen X/boomers claiming the opposite. We compete and work hard but never ask what it's all for.
Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
#5As a member of generation Y, I think the original "Organisation Kid" article really got what is wrong with my generation. We're not lazy, entitled, or afraid of competition, despite hundreds of articles by gen X/boomers claiming the opposite. We compete and work hard but never ask what it's all for .
When you start to ask "What is it all for?" you stop competing and working hard, because you realize it's an old man's game.
It's 2012. You can get HD pornography on a phone. Are we still expected to worry about all of this menial shit from the 60s?
Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
#6William Deresiewicz's address to West Point, "Solitude and Leadership" (http://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/) remains the best piece on leadership I've read to date. Ironically, as pointed out by Deresiewicz, the address is given to newly minted officers in the US military.
The address was requisite reading in this year's Venture for America application process, and is more than just a guide in becoming a better leader, but a phenomenal exposition on why our educational system has calcified into "hoop" jumping.
Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
#795% of people are sheep, just look around you. Clothing fashions all change with eachother according to what the others are doing. Church: just tell me What to believe. Bars, drinking toxic liquids and smoking radioactive smoke because it's cool. Resumes which plead for others to make us worthy members of society.
It takes a special kind of defiance to say no thank you to What the world expects you to be.
Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
#8That is why people who attended Rudolf Steiner's Waldorf school perform so well in College. It is a school that DOES NOT give grades to students. And the teach write feed back to the students based on whole aspects of their development including social interaction. When college get ride of tests and grade will be a good start.
Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
#9This is one of the reasons I think people err by reading too much into accounts from the 'Stanford Prison Experiment'. The students then (as now) weren't a sample of all people, but a particular kind of privileged young male, especially deferential and trusting towards professors, and especially willing to role-play with confidence that some other authority was managing the consequences.
This is a very interesting observation, while I don't doubt the observation about typical elite university students is true, I wonder if the inverse observation about the "general population" is enormously less true. This would be necessary in order to expect a different result from said experiment.
In my experience, the person who feels no desire to conform whatsoever is an extreme aberration. Far more frequent are people that pretend to be such and actually simply flip the expected behaviour from a conformist norm and behave in a different way but still conforming to some social group.
Sure, they're individuals, just like the other members of their subculture / social clique, etc.
Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
#10Let's be clear, though – hoop jumping isn't relegated to the university/educational system today. It's ubiquitous in hiring, promotion, and general staffing practices in corporations. It's typical in society.
Rare are the people who constantly ask "why do we do what we do," and "how could we do this better."