Short Cutting the System and Shortchanging Success

Since my last blog, I have finished the book Lost in the Meritocracy by Walter Kirn and have started reading my historical nonfiction book for APUSH, The Sixties(Second Edition) by Terry Anderson. I haven’t been able to read as much this time around due to all of the marching band contests we’ve had piling up in the past month, but I was still able to read about 300 pages for a total of about 230 minutes(both in class and out of class).  I decided to pick up Lost in the Meritocracy because I wanted to continue reading nonfiction books following the success I had with Columbine, and it also seemed like a book that would be relatable to me since it dealt with the struggles of trying to get into a good college and compete academically. In terms of reading ease, it was a fairly light read, but some of the issues it brought up really surprised me and were in fact quite disturbing. For example, many of the experiences Kirn describes having had in Princeton involved heavy drug use. The way in which Kirn depicts his journey through the education system from a rural town in Minnesota to the campus of Princeton was really eye-opening for me and exposed me to some valuable lessons as well as some harsh realities.

One of the central themes Kirn focuses on throughout the novel is his ascent up the ladder of academic achievement. Kirn explains how even from an early age he understood that he and his peers were competing against each other. For example, in the fourth grade, Kirn describes how he and his classmates received a set of quiz cards and made it a competition to see who could get through them the fastest. However, Kirn, whose sole purpose was to compete with the other students, took all kinds of shortcuts in order to make him faster than his peers who were focused on actually learning the content rather than seeing it and forgetting it the next day. Kirn’s experiences reflect a fundamental problem with our meritocracy-based education system today in which students are oftentimes more interested in class rank or GPA than genuine knowledge and learning. Students will often take any shortcut they can find in order to get an advantage over their peers and increase their chances of getting into a top college, even if it as the expense of their own learning. However, I do not believe that this is the student's’ fault but rather a flaw with the system itself in which competition is valued more highly than self-improvement. People like Kirn can not be to blame for their ambition and desire to succeed. In an education system where “percentile is destiny,” it is only natural that a student who feels as if he is falling behind his peers will try to find some way to compensate(Kirn 5). Although I do believe that it is a stretch to say that percentile is destiny in America as Kirn claims, I definitely agree with the fact that students are overly rewarded for certain factors such as SAT score and GPA while other less measurable attributes are ignored. As a result, some students are rewarded and elevated into top level colleges due to their academic achievements in high school, oftentimes purely as a result of their ability to outcompete others and stay at the top of their class. When they get to college, they quickly realize that they have learned much less than they expected and without competition or awards to aim for they lose direction and motivation. Kirn himself, for instance, started off as a rural town boy living in Minnesota. His ambition and ability to seemingly “cheat” the education system by presenting a facade of pseudo-intelligence and having a knack for standardized testing allowed him entry into the prestigious Princeton University. However, when Kirn arrived at Princeton, he found that it was just more of the same, a seemingly endless rat race of competition, elitism, and social climbing. By the time he had gotten to the top, Kirn realized that all of his efforts had led to essentially nothing and that without the ability to motivate himself he had become lost. As Kirn reflects, “I’d never bothered to contemplate the moment when the quest for trophies would end, as would the game of trading on previous trophies. Once I had nowhere to go but up. Now I had nowhere to go at all, it seemed" (Kirn 199). Far from being a Cinderella story of hard work leading to great rewards, Kirn resorts to drugs and suffers a crippling mental breakdown before finally realizing that in order to begin truly learning he must first forgo everything he has been working so hard to accomplish.

Kirn’s experience reflects that of many college students, most notably in the top colleges such as the Ivy Leagues. Similarly to Kirn’s usage of drugs after attending Princeton, many students in universities take drugs in order to increase their performance on tests. Drug usage is a pressing problem in universities today and one that is especially prevalent among high-achieving students such as Kirn who seek to gain an advantage over other students. According to a study presented at the annual Pediatrics Academic Societies(PAS) meeting, approximately one in five students at an Ivy League college misuses a prescription stimulant to get ahead academically. This number is almost twice the rate of stimulant drug abusers across a wider sampling of colleges. The fact that drug use is so prevalent in ivy league colleges reveals a major flaw in our education system in which it puts pressure on students to resort to drastic measures in order to keep up with their peers and stay at the top.

Citations:

Kirn, Walter. Lost In The Meritocracy. Anchor Books, 2010. (MLA)

Sloat, Sarah. “Ivy Leaguers Twice as Likely as Other Students to Use Drugs as Study Aids.” New Republic. April 30, 2014. Accessed November 12, 2017. https://newrepublic.com/article/117599/ivy-leaguers-twice-likely-use-drugs-study-aids. (Chicago)