Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever

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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, May 19, 2009 - Biography & Autobiography - 288 pages
A New York Times Notable Book
A Daily Beast Best Book of the Year
A Huffington Post Best Book of the Year

From elementary school on, Walter Kirn knew how to stay at the top of his class: He clapped erasers, memorized answer keys, and parroted his teachers’ pet theories. But when he launched himself eastward to an Ivy League university, Kirn discovered that the temple of higher learning he had expected was instead just another arena for more gamesmanship, snobbery, and social climbing. In this whip-smart memoir of kissing-up, cramming, and competition, Lost in the Meritocracy reckons the costs of an educational system where the point is simply to keep accumulating points and never to look back—or within. 
 
 

Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
14
Section 3
24
Section 4
40
Section 5
48
Section 6
57
Section 7
75
Section 8
100
Section 11
146
Section 12
156
Section 13
165
Section 14
174
Section 15
182
Section 16
189
Section 17
200
Section 18
206

Section 9
118
Section 10
138

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About the author (2009)

Walter Kirn is a regular reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, and his work appears in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Time, New York, GQ and Esquire. He is the author of six previous works of fiction: My Hard Bargain: Stories, She Needed Me, Thumbsucker, Up in the Air, Mission to America and The Unbinding. Kirn is a graduate of Princeton University and attended Oxford on a scholarship from the Keasby Foundation. He lives in Livingston, Montana.

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