Lost in the meritocracy: how I traded an education for a ticket to the ruling class

Define:

Merit and Meritocracy              Social Capital                Cultural capital             Economic Capital

Princeton University                  Ivy League                    Elite                             Ruling Class

 

  1. Describe Walter Kirn’s experience in his apartment with his roommates. Give 2 examples. What did he realize about upper-class people?
  2. What does Kirn learn about Princeton and education?
  3. Describe Kirn’s Friends? How did they find eachother? Describe V.
  4. What happened at the party scene? How did he describe the girl? What did he realize that night and how was he going to achieve it?
  5. Explain Leslie’s prank? How was it a turning point in Kirn’s Princeton experience?
  6. Why did he choose to stay in Princeton during the summer?
  7. How did he get the scholarship? What social capital had he learned in Princeton to helped him get the scholarship?

Explain the following quotes:

  1. “This was the system's great flaw, and it enraged us. A pure meritocracy, we'd discovered, can only promote; it can't legitimize. It can confer success but can't grant knighthood. For that it needs a class beyond itself: the high-born genealogical peerage that aptitude testing was created to supplant with a cast of brainy up-and-comers. But we still needed to impress them: the WASPNew Englanders with weekend cokehabits, well-worn deck shoes, and vaguely leftish politics devised in reaction to their parents' conservatism, to which they'd slowly return as they aged.” What other habits will Kirn learn besides the cultural capital to navigate this social group?
  2. “I started skipping classes, which wasn't like me, since the heart of my personal program for winning distinction, despite my baseline bafflement, was the diligent daily maintenance of friendly relations with my professors. I'd learned that by showing up early to say hello and chat with them, staying late to ask them extra questions, and dropping in during office hours to drink their stale coffee and let them bum my cigarettes (they had always just quit smoking, it seemed, but without conviction), I could pull down Bs, at least. If I also showed signs of having read their books (particularly if the course did not require me to), I could manage As.” How did Kirn manage to get good grades?
  3. What did Kirn realize at the end of his college experience? Had he earned an education? What did he learn that helped him in life?