luv to post pictures of people who have “aged well” “bc they are unproblematic” bc being hot is a point on ur scale of morality & youth is all that matters amen
here’s the thing people are always missing. even in a world where there were no racial or economic inequity and kids weren’t dealing with shit outside/inside of school that made school harder or dealing with diagnosed LDs or mental illness, if every kid had the same amount of ambition, support and grit, getting a 4.0+ in high school would still be pretty much contingent on really specific types of intelligence. having an unusually good working memory, etc. it’s just not that indicative of social intelligence, problem solving skills, critical analysis, or even verbal intelligence, if you can manage to do well on the SAT by cramming the vocabulary and practicing essays a lot.
i know a lot of really smart people who have gone to good schools and i respect them completely bc i could never have pulled that off, but i’ve also known people who went to good schools who just weren’t that smart. they may have been able to make it there with an extremely strong work ethic and a talent for memorization and testing and knowing what teachers want, but they aren’t funny, they aren’t intellectually curious, they aren’t kind, they aren’t insightful, they aren’t good writers, they can’t think critically or creatively, what have you.
so that’s another reason i think the ivy league is a dangerous way to think about education — it confers a legitimacy that isn’t necessarily there. it elevates people who maybe aren’t actually smart in the ways that end up mattering outside of an academic context.
the worst part about reading ancient roman philosophy is that sometimes you’ll read something expressly saying that people shouldn’t do something that you do frequently and it’s like diogenes threw a plucked chicken at you from 2000 years ago
