"When I think of my own schooling now, from grade
to graduate school, I see it as serving two unintended
purposes: setting me a notch above kids from work-
ing-class families in my home town and creating in me
the most debilitating conformity. This conformity to
the demands of my social caste, this slavery to
assumed moral codes, to philosophical speculation
about the "meaning of it all,'' this wretched pride in
"intellectual accomplishments" - all served well to
turn me into the grotesque, death-in-life figure that I
was as the graduate."
