Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever

I read this book for an Advanced Placement English class in 11th grade. All participants in the "Meritocracy" of the American educational system will find this book to be deeply satisfying. It entertains with its face-value anecdotes and provokes thought in its discussion of a system that governs the lives of millions of students but is never discussed. I can't say how an adult would feel about this book, but everyone in my class who read it really enjoyed it. I can't recommend this highly enough to any achieving student.

A candid and revealing autobiography of a well known author and journalist filled with painful reminiscences of parental neglect, emotional betrayal, shame, unbridled ambition, and recreational drugs. Not to mention envy, vengeance, deceit and the Ivy League. A pretty unique and gripping coming of age saga with no holds barred.

Walter Kirn has written a memoir of considerable distinction. First of all, his prose is marked by a signal talent for description. The sights and smells of the world he's imaginatively recreating are precisely captured, whether he's talking of Ms. Hannah, a grammar school teacher whose "layer of floral essences...distinguished her from the other teachers - old ladies who reeked of witch hazel and baby powder," or of the Woody Woo Building at Princeton, "a sprawling, stylized Greek temple barricaded from the outside world by an array of slim white columns shaped like vertical strips of Elmer's glue." In addition to his vivid, beautiful, frequently witty language and elegant sentences, Kirn has constructed a narrative which conveys a complex worldview. Far from being yet another tale of a rube from the Midwest who discovers that the class system is still alive and well at Ivy League universities, Kirn's account calls into question the mindset that the later SAT and its goal of a meritocracy have brought into being. His is a two-sided critique, aimed both at the remnants of the old-boy network but even more so at its presumed "aptitude is all," multiple choice test replacement. Neither program, in Kirn's view, has any use for genuine education. Those students still into social class snobbery are of a species basically on vacation at Princeton, after which they'll engage in the real business of life which involves preparing clients' lists, hiring tax attorneys, remodeling summer mansions, etc. SAT scholars, on the other hand, if they are like English major Kirn himself, are devoted merely to passing multiple choice tests, parroting the pretentious lingo of their "confused" deconstructionist professors, and reading as few books as possible. The point of education is thought to be solely advancement and fame, not a broadening of one's own horizons. By the end of his memoir, Kirn happily comes to see both his emptiness and lopsidedness, and we at last encounter him beginning to devour great books, ancient and modern, for their own sake, not for any quest to win advancement. As he comes to evaluate his life, he wittily concludes that "instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be a blank and be filled in."

...then read this book. I raced through it in an evening as it was entertaining to say the least. It was also a very personal and somewhat dark account of a very bright person going through public school followed by the Ivy League. I almost blew a gasket laughing at the 10th grade computer class. I think the college years will ring true with many people from sub ruling class backgrounds that find themselves among people who life in a way alien to the middle and working classes - you don't even have to go to an Ivy League school to experience this. My initial plan was to pass this along to my high school aged daughter but I don't know that I'll do that now. The book is probably better enjoyed with the perspective of distance between the reader and the offending four years. I don't want to scare her.

I just finished devouring this book which I ordered immediately after reading the excerpt published in the New Yorker. I'm from approximately the same generation as Kirn and felt a bit like he was sharing a dirty secret when I read the original excerpt. Most of the book, with the exception of two chapters at the beginning and one at the end, focusses on his Princeton years -- and his "dirty little secret" is more or less that the elite institution he entered in the early 80's democratized, but only sort of. In other words, he had what it took to get into Princeton, but he didn't have what it took to be accepted at Princeton, which, according to him was: a sailboat, cases of champagne, rich family and connections. The eating clubs held some form of secret interviews and people like him were rarely accepted, and his roomates didn't seem to understand that anyone could actually be poor and not be able to afford things like new furniture for the suite. But in this book, he focusses on so much more than the living situation -- he talks about the awakening he experienced when he discovered that the English department was more interested in literary criticism than in literature, and he admits that he kind of "faked his way through" large chunks of his education (what psychologists would call 'the imposter syndrome.') Parts of the story are quite scary, leading up to what he refers to as a breakdown. Personally, I would have liked to have known a bit more about how he eventually made peace with his experiences at Princeton, how he has fared since then, and most importantly, where he plans to send his own children for their education. I feel that his story paralleled my own story at Wellesley, which I entered at approximately the same time period. I never understood the arcane social sororities, or the people who had been to Europe several times, or the girls who arrived with thousands of dollars worth of clothes and headed directly to the Harvard Business School to snag a husband. One finishes the book with a sense of his own loss. It's as if he was so taken aback and ill-prepared that although he was given an opportunity to experience the Ivy League education, ultimately he did not have the tools to really exploit it or make the most of it. He describes a sense of loneliness, a lack of connection with the teaching staff, and summers spent shelving books in the basement of the library -- while others were out scoring lucrative internships and making important connections. I identified with that part of his story too, as someone who spent most of my time reading books and studying languages, but never quite understood the whole social universe of college. It's nice to know I wasn't the only one.