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One of the books that has red-pilled me on how broken our educational system is Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz.

The Case Against Education is the other one.

Excellent Sheep is a searing indictment of how elite education has created a generation of high-achieving but risk-averse, purpose-starved students who excel at following predetermined paths but struggle to think for themselves. 

It shows how our obsession with credentials and prestige has produced smart, talented graduates who are also anxious, lost, and unable to imagine breaking from the herd.

Below are my 10 takeaways from Excellent Sheep. Because Deresiewicz is a gifted writer, I separately highlighted my 10 favorite quotes from Excellent Sheep here.

1. The prestige treadmill to nowhere

Students enter college “as a zombie” with only “vaguely understood objectives – status, wealth, getting to the top” which is their loose definition of success. The system creates students who are “smart, talented and driven but also anxious, timid and lost” with “limited intellectual curiosity and no sense of purpose.”

2. Education has become resume engineering

“Education is an algorithm to be cracked to get to the next level.” There’s a “willful disregard of anything that is not achievement.” The focus on credentials means “love of learning or service to community have to be smuggled into the school.”

3. Risk aversion kills growth

“Kids who get into elite colleges have only felt success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them. It disorients them. It defeats them.” This creates a “violent aversion to risk” where “nobody takes chances on a class they might not ace.” This is one driver of the significant grade inflation observed in the Ivy League.

4. Purpose isn’t a job title

A crucial insight: “Purpose is not being something. It is doing something.” Yet most students “default to these paths as they have no inner purpose that tells them what is worth their time.”

5. The false promise of perfect parenting

Parents exhibit either helicopter or overindulgent tendencies, but “both are forms of overprotection. Each believes you can make the world safe for your children.” This results in “infantilization” where the “child is an extension of someone else.”

6. The hollow core of modern education

“Curricula are a long series of unrelated courses. There is no vision for what an educated human being is.” Students “hear about asking big questions when they enter and when they graduate. And in the middle, they focus on small questions.”

7. Leadership without purpose

What was once “something you did out of a sense of duty” has become “a rain dance passed down from generation to generation. An empty set of rituals to satisfy the gods. Kids do them because they’re supposed to do them.” 

“If students were told they had to stand on their head to get into Harvard, they’d do it as eagerly, diligently, skillfully and as thoughtlessly as they do everything else.”

8. The service trap

There’s a problem with how elite students approach service: “Giving back or giving to others is now about us vs them. It reinforces social hierarchy.” He writes that “kids want to save the world if it lets them get to the top. Service is just middle class messiahs flocking to some cause every once in a while and feeling contentment about that.”

Related: this service trap is also why students, parents and college counselors now create ghost nonprofits to help with college admission.

9. Real excellence requires freedom

“Excellence requires single mindedness and the freedom to follow one’s intuition.” Yet “credentialism is a lust for prestige. It makes it impossible to follow your passion or follow your dreams.”

10. The safe path is the riskiest

The hardest part is that “peer pressure says you’re crazy to forsake the tried and true thing.” Students find it “hard to justify a different type of life” because they’re “haunted by a fear of failure” and “driven by their parents’ fear of failure.”

Excellent Sheep is a great critique of an educational system that’s lost its way, prioritizing achievement over learning, credentials over growth, and safety over discovery. 

“What we do to our kids, we are ultimately doing to ourselves.”

note: Although very different than Excellent Sheep, I also liked The Power of the Adolescent Brain by Thomas Armstrong which I wrote about here.

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If you read this far, some related essays you’ll also like:

1. Degrees of deception: How America’s universities became debt factories
2. Bread, circuses and education
3. The School of Entrepreneuring
4. From myth to measurement: Rethinking US News & World Report College Rankings
5. The perverse incentives driving America’s government schools
6. The endless ladder
7. Students are solving the wrong problems
8. Your kids grades are bullshit
9. Ghost nonprofits and the manufacturing of virtue