Empty Sky Witness

Sad

“Holden [Caulfield] is somewhat a victim of the current trend in applying ever more mechanistic approaches to understanding human behavior,” Ms. Feinberg wrote in an e-mail message. “Compared to the early 1950s, there is not as much room for the adolescent search, for intuition, for empathy, for the mystery of the unconscious and the deliverance made possible through talking to another person.”

Ms. Feinberg recalled one 15-year-old boy from Long Island who told her: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’ ”

Gail Collins (in response to David Brooks)

But do you think you could assure the graduates that there’s good education to be had in a multitude of places, many far from the Ivy League? I’m really disturbed by having a Supreme Court made up entirely of people who went to Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Columbia. (O.K., John Paul Stevens went to Northwestern. This was so long ago that it’s possible he did it on the advice of Abraham Lincoln.)

Judging people by the college they went to is almost as bad as judging them by their family tree. It’s the dictatorship of the U.S. News & World Report ranking list.

It is true that the fancier your alma mater, the more famous people you will know when you’re 45. You, however, will not necessarily be one of those famous people yourself. You could very easily wind up being the deputy assistant to a person who graduated 40th in her class at Wichita Tech.

This obsession with picking the right college is the way people who could have gotten a scholarship to a state school find themselves graduating from Nifty University with $100,000 in student loans. Tell the students that the only two things certain as they move out into the world are that the future is unknowable and the loan payments unavoidable.

And don’t forget that reminder about sunscreen. More important than ever in this age of global warming.

David Brooks

At the moment, I’m thinking of talking about the chief way our society is messed up. That is to say, it is structured to distract people from the decisions that have a huge impact on happiness in order to focus attention on the decisions that have a marginal impact on happiness.

The most important decision any of us make is who we marry. Yet there are no courses on how to choose a spouse. There’s no graduate department in spouse selection studies. Institutions of higher learning devote more resources to semiotics than love.

The most important talent any person can possess is the ability to make and keep friends. And yet here too there is no curriculum for this.

The most important skill a person can possess is the ability to control one’s impulses. Here too, we’re pretty much on our own.

These are all things with a provable relationship to human happiness. Instead, society is busy preparing us for all the decisions that have a marginal effect on human happiness. There are guidance offices to help people in the monumental task of selecting a college. There are business schools offering lavish career placement services. There is a vast media apparatus offering minute advice on how to furnish your home or expand your deck.