"It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house." - Anna Haro from Bookmarklet

"It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable." - Anna Haro

"I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow." - Anna Haro

I've run into people like that. It's only painful because they tend to make assumptions about me, so they come off condescending. Ho hum...it's fodder for my blog. LOL - Admiral Anika

loved this: "So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?” - WarLord

I graduated from the top private school in St. Louis and spent two years at Brown before coming back to study design at Washington University here in town - which c. 1980 was still IMHO a marked step down from the Ivies. I cherish the education I got and am still a huge believer in the liberal education as a foundation for life, if an expensive one. In fact I treated design school pretty much like trade school and felt the asset I got from WashU, as we locals call it, was my portfolio - not the degree necessarily. The degree was merely a tuition receipt, in the end. When I started working in small ad agencies, I had a hard time relating to the folks who didn't also have big educations-and the ones who did were few and far between. One of the first things I learned, though: When it came to anything relAted to my education or my schools, the proper thing to do was stfu about the whole thing. - MaryB, BrandingBroadOfFF from iPhone

IMO they come to the Ivies "retarded" (i don't like that term) right out of high school. Not sure this is an ivy thing, schooling, or just how they were raised in the first place...probably elitism in general. - Liz