Wellesley High grads told: "You're not special" - The Swellesley Report

I went to private school, a tweedy institution where kids wore Brooks Brothers jackets with the school seal and Latin motto (Veritas fortissimo) on the breast pocket. Scott learned early that he might have to actually work for a living, whereas I, a product of the New Frontier and Great Society, honestly believed that the world pretty much owed me

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submit that this is what the real, no‑bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.⁠6 Wallace’s p

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Much of our childhood experience subtly reinforces the belief that there are categories of grown-ups, starting with teachers, that share in none of the child’s fears. We may, at a certain age, need such an illusion to make the world feel stable enough. But we pay a high price in loneliness for this faith in the face value of figures of authority. T

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Socrates isn’t giving many graduation addresses these days. Yet this wisdom is at the heart of a new generation of aptitude assessments intended to help individuals, including middle- and high-school students, understand themselves better.

“Up to today, you studied hard and repeated what the world told you. Our purpose in the next four years is to teach you how to think for yourself. If we succeed, you will create something this world has never seen before, but if we do not, you will just be stuck copying others and repeating. Take my words seriously, study hard, but also open your i

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