What is problematic about this for society is that since elite academic institutions feed our public institutions, there gets to become a culture of groupthink that can lead to disastrous institutional failures. If you have a newsroom culture that systematically defers to authority, then the government can get away with waging a baseless war. If you have an office culture in a financial firm in which dissent is punished or ignored, then the firm will go bankrupt investing in a housing bubble.
What is required to run the world is not just intelligence, but grit--the courage and the will to place one's own principles and dignity above money and status and the rebuke of authority figures. But a person who spends a lifetime dutifully completing school assignments and taking exam prep courses is not likely to have the history of failure, rejection, and hardship that builds character.
So I was not too surprised to see that the leaker of the NSA spying programs, Edward Snowden, is not a graduate of an elite university but has had something of an uneven history:
...he never completed his coursework at a community college in Maryland, only later obtaining his GED — an unusually light education for someone who would advance in the intelligence ranks.Even if you disagree with Snowden's actions on the merits, I think everyone can acknowledge that risking his entire life and giving up everything for something he believed in was an act of courage, an act that requires true grit.
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