A Litte Learning Is A Dangerous Thing

The Times today has yet another account of some rich person giving Harvard millions of dollars in a friendly rivalry with some other rich person who has been flinging his money around for education in the last few days.  Harvard is awash in money from their celebrated endowment, to the assessed worth of their physical plant, to the money that pours in a grand scale from their many admirers.  It is amusing in the thick of all this largesse to hear the constant complaint of fear at the lack of funds which will hamper some one or another aspect of their educational mission.  Like the regulars at the court of Louis XIV they just have no idea what life in the educational factories of this country is like.  And by the same token their students, most of whom have been, if not exactly bred, well, then indeed fed, clothed, and exercised to take their place in this exotic and demanding setting are like no other entrants into America's education mill.  They are as borzois paraded out to train before the pack brought out for exercise from the local pound.  The elites talk endlessly of their despair at not accepting or encouraging deserving intellects from low income people into their elite establishment.  I doubt many of them could imagine how very much those folks need to take one sniff of the Cambridge scene to feel an instinctive aversion rise in them.  I used to teach at a humble place, and often talked to those among my students who did make it into Harvard who could regale me with stories of the entirely different language, the different assumptions, social behaviors they encountered.  Children in the United States who are born into affluence are usually also born to ambition; getting them into an Ivy League is usually first and foremost on their parents' plate even as they lie in their basinette waving their chubby legs in the air and murmuring goo goo ever so sweetly, looking up at the Evil Fairy peering down at them, with her Phi Beta Kappa Key necklace, the word "summa" woven into her blouse, her package of Advanced Placement materials at the ready in her capacious bag.  These children are like those who enter the fabled ballet schools in Russia, reared from their earliest days to perform, to accept the ritual and sacrifice of casual normal life for the promise of excellence and all it obtains.  As such they present a facade that cannot be chipped.  Pity the ordinary guy.  Indeed I knew one, a product of my home down, his father had gone to high  school with me.  He came over once to our house when my niece from back home was visiting, and laughingly allowed that he was sure the Admissions Office had accepted him just to have someone "ordinary" on the dorm floor.  He had no illusions about his talents, his ambitions, his drive, nor his chances of developing close relationships with the guys around him whose concern for managing all their electronic equipment was equaled by their nervous expectation of of not correctly anticipating the pressures put upon them by their professors.