Corrections should be done as follows: Wrong word: underline the wrong word and write the correct word in the blank. Extra word: delete the extra word with an “×.” Missing word: mark the position of the missing word with a “ ∧ ” and write the missing word in the blank. Ivy Retardation It didn’t down on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his value , so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes’ of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry out conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house. It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the latest thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who don’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect in class, these schools are largely homogeneous. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. The second disadvantage is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college — all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think for yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value. There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s intellect or knowledge. There is something wrong with the smugness and self-congratulation that elite schools connive at from the moment the fat envelopes come in the mail. From orientation to graduation, the message is clear: You deserve everything your presence here is going to enable you to get. When people say that students at elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their SAT scores are high . But they don’t. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God does not love them more. (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10)