I taught English at Yale University for ten years. I had some vivid, idiosyncratic students—people who went on to write novels, devote themselves to their church, or just wander the world for a few years. But mostly I taught what one of them herself called “excellent sheep.”
These students were excellent, technically speaking. They were smart, focused, and ferociously hard-working.
But they were also sheep: stunted in their sense of purpose, waiting meekly for direction, frequently anxious and lost.
I was so struck by this—that our “best and brightest” students are so often as helpless as children—that I wrote a book about it. It came out in 2014, not long before my former colleague Nicholas Christakis was surrounded and browbeaten by a crowd of undergraduates for failing to make them feel coddled and safe—an early indication of the rise of what we now call wokeness.
How to reconcile the two phenomena, I started to wonder. Does wokeness, with its protests and pugnacity, represent an end to sheephood, a new birth of independence and self-assertion, of countercultural revolt? To listen to its radical-sounding sloganeering—about tearing down systems and doing away with anyone and anything deemed incorrect—it sure sounded like it.
But indications suggest otherwise. Elite college graduates are still herding toward the same five vocational destinations—law, medicine, finance, consulting, and tech—in overwhelming numbers. High-achieving high school students, equally woke, are still crowding toward the same 12 or 20 schools, whose application numbers continue to rise. This year, for example, Yale received some 50,000 applications, more than twice as many as 10 years ago, of which the university accepted less than 4.5%.
Eventually, I recognized the deeper continuities at work. Excellent sheephood, like wokeness, is a species of conformity. As a friend who works at an elite private university recently remarked, if the kids who get into such schools are experts at anything, it is, as he put it, “hacking the meritocracy.” The process is imitative: You do what you see the adults you aspire to be like doing. If that means making woke-talk (on your college application; in class, so professors will like you), then that is what you do.
But wokeness also serves a deeper psychic purpose. Excellent sheephood is inherently competitive.
read more:
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/we-arent-raising-adults-we-are-breeding?s=r
Replies
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