What mentality is he pointing to when he derides "The idea that every activity they undertake be “a growth experience.”"? Sounds like a damn fine idea to me.
Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
11–20 of 169 posts
Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
#12That 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.
If colleges get rid of grades, however will Peter Thiel know which hedge fund analysts to hire?
Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
#13William 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 be…
I agree; that is an excellent speech.
Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
#14This 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…
Eliezer Yudkowsky, in his excellent essay "Lonely Dissent" (http://lesswrong.com/lw/mb/lonely_dissent/): Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.
Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
#15"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.
The admissions people say they reject excellent-but-bland applications, but perhaps it's a matter of degree.
Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
#16What mentality is he pointing to when he derides "The idea that every activity they undertake be “a growth experience.”"? Sounds like a damn fine idea to me.
I think he means that by framing an activity as a "growth experience", it loses a bit of it's soul. Ghandi, Lindbergh, Jobs - they all changed the world because they had a fire in their belly and couldn't sit still. They didn't pursue things because it would grow their character. They did things because they we're compelled to.
Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
#1795% 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.
The toxic liquids tend to be actually fun to many :)
Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
#18"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.
The admissions people say they reject excellent-but-bland applications, but perhaps it's a matter of degree.
I think by "bland" they just mean that they reject people who don't have enough of the conforming resume-building activities that they expect :)
Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
#1995% 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.
I'll go a step beyond. Most people look to others for cues. Some others bend over backwards to not conform (like the "I wake every day at 4:54 am" weirdo--just say 4:55 man!). Much more rare is the person who just does exactly what they want.
Re: Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?
#20That 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.
Hello fellow waldorf student in the wild! Remember that most waldorf schools in the country DO grade in highschool. However it is process that allows for more feedback and conversation about your performance.