Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

"They've learned to be students," writes Deresiewicz (What the Ivy League Won't Teach You) of contemporary American undergraduates, "not to use their minds." The difference between those distinctions is the focus of this crabby book, which also provides bitter indictments of higher educational institutions and the students attending them. The result is repetitive and interminable. A typical complaint is that few of his students "saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development, one that they directed by themselves and for themselves." A pedagog lecturing students about their inability to learn is pompous, but this is especially insulting as it is intended for an audience of hardworking students and parents paying for college. Mel Foster's even-toned delivery ameliorates the discouraging words, but the discouragement is endless.