Lost in the Meritocracy (Hardcover) ~ Walter Kirn (Author) Cover Art

Lost in the Meritocracy (Hardcover)

By: Walter Kirn (Author)

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Review

"LOST IN THE MERITOCRACY is the confession of a self-labeled trickster youth who figured that success, fueled by ambition, required a brilliant show of compliance with what he perceived as the rules set by the powers that be."

"In his hilarious memoir,...Kirn recounts the many ways that the American educational rat race betrayed him."

"LOST IN THE MERITOCRACY is a funny, self-mocking memoir about how persistently Mr. Kirn went astray....[He] has reduced....[his] terrible angst....to overly apt poetic justice....[a]nd figured out how to frame and package his memories with reader-pleasing finesse, no thanks to his formal education."

"LOST IN THE MERITOCRACY [contains]...penetrating shrewdness....[Kirn] has the satirist's knack for conjuring and dispatching an individual in a single line..."

Publisher's note

Chronicles a long, strange trip through America's ivy-covered temples of higher learning where standardized tests, class rankings and gamesmanship stand in the way of true intellectual fulfillment, and reveals the psychic costs of our advance-or-else educational system.

"Percentile is destiny in America."
So says Walter Kirn, one of our best observers and interpreters of American life, in this whip-smart memoir of his own long strange trip through American education. Working his way up the ladder of standardized tests, extracurricular activities, and class rankings, Kirn launched himself eastward from his rural Minnesota hometown to the ivy-covered campus of Princeton University. There he found himself not in a temple of higher learning so much as an arena for gamesmanship, snobbery, social climbing, ass-kissing, and recreational drug use, where the point of literature classes was to mirror the instructor's critical theories and actual reading of the books under consideration was optional. Just on the other side of "the bell curve's leading edge" loomed a complete psychic collapse.
LOST IN THE MERITOCRACY" "reckons up the costs of a system where the point is simply to keep accumulating points and never to look back--or within. It's a remarkable book that suggests the first step toward intellectual fulfillment is getting off the treadmill that is the American meritocracy.

Annotation

In this compelling and devastating analysis of America's fatally flawed higher education system, Walter Kirn uses his own experience as a Princeton student to reveal how our college campuses have devolved into social playgrounds where networking skills and fallacious flattery are more useful than actual intelligence. Growing up in rural Minnesota, the ambitious Kirn concentrated on filling his college application with extracurricular activities and impressive class rankings so that he might escape his modest upbringing. But after being accepted to Princeton, he found that the innocent gamesmanship of university admissions was only the beginning, as he quickly realized that studying and completing assignments was usually optional, so long as he used classtime to praise and reiterate the views of the professor. Kirn argues that college in America has essentially become an extremely expensive, four-year (or more) party, where leaving with a diploma and a handful of professional connections far outweighs the tedious process of actually learning something.

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