The students

A recent article in Harvard Magazine described students passing their suitemates like ships in the night as they raced from one activity to another. Kids know how to network and are often good at “people skills,” but those are very different things from actual friendship.  

The problem is that students have been taught that that is all that education is: doing your homework, getting the answers, acing the test. Nothing in their training has endowed them with the sense that something larger is at stake. They’ve learned to “be a student,” not to use their minds. 

But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development, one that they directed by themselves and for themselves.

一场又一场社交活动，快餐式的约会，就像在黑夜中行驶的轮船一样，殊不知这些关系和真正的友情相差很远。固化教育使得学生不知道思考，然而大学最大的使命就是教学生如何思考，如何去批判的眼光去审视这个世界。

Excerpted from the book Excellent Sheep, chapter 1.