What we have before us then, is three distinct purposes for a university: the commercial purpose (starting a career), Stephen Pinker’s cognitive purpose (acquiring information and learning how to think) and (William) Deresiewicz’s moral purpose (building an integrated self).

I make honorable things pleasant to children." A teacher from Sparta

(William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self.

How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you?

The point of being a teacher is to do more than impart facts, it's to shape the way students perceive the world, to help a student absorb the rules of a discipline. The teachers who do that get remembered.

Those born in the poorest quarter of American society have an 8% chance of earning a college degree. Those born in the wealthiest quarter of American society have a 75% chance of earning a college degree.

Students are taught how to do things, but many are not forced to reflect on why they should do them or what we are here for.

The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it's not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It's not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It's not nearly as big a problem as the nation's stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent.