這個標題下得有點蠢：（1）假如不是菁英教育出了問題，這個社會還會亂成這樣且找不到出路嗎？社會有多亂，不就意味著菁英教育出了多大的問題嗎？（2）幾乎所有的發展中國家都在抄襲美國，如果美國沒有問題，這世界還有可能亂成這個樣子，且堅持要沿著錯誤的道路繼續走下去嗎？
朋友寄來一篇文章的連結，作者 William Deresiewicz 是哥倫比亞大學大學部到博士班的畢業生，在耶魯大學教了十年書，失望地離開教職，變成全職作家。（跟我很像？）文章篇名很嚇人 "Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League: The nation's top colleges are turning our kids into zombies"。美國的菁英教育真有這麼糟嗎？
這是一篇英文的文章，但用字不會太難，所以我不想再把重點翻譯成中文，直接摘錄幾段英文的原文，讓你自己決定要不要去讀完全部的原文。
文章開始先說要進入長春藤聯盟有多難，以及這些學生進去時的稟賦、成就有多高，用來鋪陳後來的教育多麼對不起這些可以擁抱更高階人生目標、學習更高段思考的菁英如何被精英大學續練成愛因斯坦所說的「訓練有素的狗」。
注意，文章的重點不是在批評這些精英大學的專業訓練不足，而是在說沒有給他們更高階的教育。
接著是夫子自道：It was only after 24 years in the Ivy League—college and a Ph.D. at Columbia, ten years on the faculty at Yale—that I started to think about what this system does to kids and how they can escape from it, what it does to our society and how we can dismantle it.
作者首先要指責的，是這些大學沒有給學生更高的人生目標 ── 雖然，以他們的資質和高中所表現出來的學習成果，他們應該有資格去追求更高的人生目標。
Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment's notice.（沒有理想，只有野心與虛榮心）
這群學生進大學前太順利，鮮少失敗的經驗，因而害怕失敗，反而比其他大學的學生更怕失敗，更憂慮於未來。學校本來應該要針對這些問題開一些課來引導學生走出「虛榮 + 焦慮」的情結，但是學校並沒有用力於此。結果如下：
The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error.
Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study's 25-year history.
害怕失敗，沒有更高的人生目標，使得這些精英學生變成像賽狗場上的一群狗，只會朝著人家規劃好的軌道盲目地往前衝，變成資本家超好利用的工具，而不去思索自己和社會的未來，不去問對錯，不去問：「我們可不可以有更好的選擇。」
Learning how to think is only the beginning, though. There's something in particular you need to think about: building a self. “What Wall Street figured out,” as Ezra Klein has put it, “is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic and no idea what to do next.”
結果這群菁英沒有在解決社會問題，而是成為幫兇，讓社會問題惡化的力量之一：
This system（長春藤大學的教育）is exacerbating inequality, retarding social mobility, perpetuating privilege, and creating an elite that is isolated from the society that it's supposed to lead.
Elite colleges are not just powerless to reverse the movement toward a more unequal society; their policies actively promote it.
他建議優秀學生不如選擇注重「全人教育」的大學去：
If there is anywhere that college is still college—anywhere that teaching and the humanities are still accorded pride of place—it is the liberal arts college. Such places are small, which is not for everyone, and they’re often fairly isolated, which is also not for everyone. The best option of all may be the second-tier—not second-rate—colleges, like Reed, Kenyon, Wesleyan, Sewanee, Mount Holyoke, and others.
因為，唯有在這樣的大學裡，你才有機會完成最可貴的大學教育：
The first thing that college is for is to teach you to think. That doesn't simply mean developing the mental skills particular to individual disciplines. College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.
