By John Tierney
I knew that my earlier post on contemporary student life would provoke comment, even outrage. And it came -- some of it predictable and expected, some of it a surprise.
From the "expected" pool:
My daughter is a freshman at Barnard, and is bursting with excitement about all she is learning. When she came home for break, I had to physically stop her from listing the states and counties in India. More substantively, she gave me a long and thoughtful review of the long-term trauma inflicted on India and Pakistan by partition, with particular
emphasis on the effects on women.
As the parent of a college student, and as someone who has been deeply engaged with her friends and their families over the years, I strongly disagree with Tierney and would be happy to rebut. Quite frankly, I think these kids are way more educated than I was at that age, way more thoughtful about what they want to learn and how they want to learn it,
and way more willing to seek out extracurricular education
I expected that lots of readers would write in with some version of this comment. Yes, of course, there are many hundreds of thousands of very bright, eager, hard-working students out there who are learning an incredible amount and who can put their parents to shame.
I suppose the question is whether Barnard students -- or the brightest, most diligent students on any campus -- are the norm. What is the norm? Will we hear from the parents who feel the tuition dollars they pay are wasted on their kid, who sits in his dorm room all day playing video games and who drinks himself into a dither every night? They're not the parents who boast to their friends about their offspring's intellectual excitement -- nor, probably, have they ever had the pleasure of engaging with their kid in a discussion about partition of the Indian subcontinent.
From the "unexpected-but-unsurprising" pile, this response from a reader who thought my earlier post was insufficiently balanced and scrupulous, and who starts his reply by mocking my loose assessment of the situation:
"It rings true." That's the sort of analytical rigor I've come to expect from elite girls private schools. Really, Dr. Tierney, that entire post was a horror show of overly credulous reading, research from dubious and deliberately provoking books, and a total absence of consideration of provisos, qualifications, and alternate opinion which are the mark of quality social science. You owe your readership, James Fallows, and the academy so much more. I'm genuinely disappointed.
Two points in response: