16 May 2010

Of Reflecting and Rethinking

I came across this article and would like to share with you guys.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

(For those who are interested, you can read it. It is a thought-provoking one though it's quite long. )

For those who are not interested, I will just summarise the main points over here.

1. It makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you.

2. An elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.

3. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value.

4. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure.

5. The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

6. Elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics.

7. Thirty-two flavors, all of them vanilla. The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy.

8. What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude?

9. Now that students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships.


How do we make use of our tertiary education? Very often we have forgotten why we are here, and when you look back at what you have written on your personal statement or application essays, you will wonder,

"Have I really written this?" O_O

*Reflect and rethink of the true purpose that have made you travel so far to UK.*

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