Elite Education | The Point Magazine

As these standards became articulated and expressed more clearly, both in briefings to elite high school college admission counselors and in the results of the admissions themselves, ambitious high school students (and their families) learned how to perform them. They wouldn’t seek to be student body president or editor-in-chief of the school paper... See more

The evolutions of Harvard and the Times point towards a transformed economic reality for institutions in the media and education. Catering to fashionable ideological tastes has become the only way to survive in a market far less oriented around geography. The protests, the firings, the crazy student demands—these are the habits that rise to the sur... See more

These liberal education reformers were attempting to reconcile what the historian of education David Labaree has called the three competing ideals in American education, each corresponding to a different end goal and a different model of the student subject. The goal of “democratic equality” sees students as citizens, with the role of schools being

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Students have lost sight of the teleology, or final purpose, of the education system.7 When you’re in fifth grade, you know clearly that your goal is to get to sixth grade—and it goes like that up through twelfth grade, at which point you’ve spent the past four years of your life preparing for something called “college” along carefully defined line

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Students pay colleges enormous sums of money because they want to grow into better and more knowledgeable thinkers—because they want to, before entering the workforce and adult life, spend four critical years sharpening their most important tool: their brain. And they’re not getting what they were promised. Normally, when brands in an industry stop

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