"Excellent Sheep" by William Deresiewicz Publisher: Jiuzhou Publishing House

Introduction
In 2008, after 24 years at the Ivy League, Yale University professor William Deresiewicz decided to resign from his tenured position and leave the prestigious Ivy League school. He did so because he felt that the current elite education in the United States had fallen into a misunderstanding. Most of the students trained under this system are smart, talented, and motivated, but at the same time they are full of anxiety, timid, confused about the future, and extremely lack a sense of purpose: they are wrapped in a huge bubble of privilege, and everyone is honestly moving in the same direction. They are very good at solving the problems at hand, but they don’t know why they should solve these problems.
When he was about to resign from his Yale teaching post, he published an article titled “The Disadvantages of Elite Education” to discuss these issues. He never expected that within a few weeks, it would be read more than 100,000 times (later, the cumulative number of reads exceeded 1 million). Obviously, this article touched a lot of nerves.
Since then, he has been invited to give speeches at universities across the United States, communicating with students, answering their questions, asking them many questions, and listening to and understanding their answers. This book is his reflection and summary of this experience.
In this book, the author Deresiewicz lists the "several sins" of students from Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton: being overconfident but unable to afford to lose; having homogeneous friend circles and being self-satisfied; having rigid thinking, being out of touch with society, and lacking "common sense intelligence", etc. He also puts forward the view that "going to an Ivy League school is far inferior to going to a public university, as the schools attach more importance to education and their teaching methods are more flexible and cutting-edge".
He further pointed out that although these Ivy League schools have their own characteristics on the outside, they are "places that have lost their souls" on the inside. Many students who attend Ivy League schools have no sense of mission and purpose, and are self-inflated, self-centered, and self-righteous. In contrast, those who do not have these labels can conquer cities and territories on the road of life and achieve themselves in all aspects. And the greatest achievement of some Ivy League students in their lives may be just to have attended an Ivy League school.
Since this book was released in May 2015, it has caused widespread controversy in American society and quickly became a hot topic among major media outlets such as The New York Times, The New Republic, and The Los Angeles Times. It has also been reported in China by media outlets such as Southern Weekend, Phoenix TV, The Paper, Global Times, and The Bund.
About the Author
William Deresiewicz graduated from Columbia University, worked as an English professor at Yale University for 10 years, and as a graduate student tutor at Columbia University for 5 years. His article "The Disadvantage of an Elite Education" has been viewed more than 1 million times on the Internet. In addition to being frequently invited to give speeches at various universities, he is also an influential literary critic, and his articles often appear in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and The New Republic.
About the planner & translator
Lin Jie went to the United States to study at the age of 16 and obtained an engineering degree from Cornell University and a master's degree in education from Columbia University. In order to follow his passion and devote himself to education, he served as an admissions officer for Cornell University alumni, and worked in admissions, teaching and management at two century-old boarding high schools in the United States, while also serving as a fencing coach. Mr. Lin is currently engaged in Sino-US educational exchanges, focusing on Sino-US study abroad and international school operations.