Prep@Pingree Program Perspective

In an attempt to understand better how the world’s greatest democracy elected Donald Trump, I recently read Matt Taibbi’s Insane Clown President, Dispatches From the 2016 Circus. The book is not a rant about the Left’s dissatisfaction with President Trump. It does not fetishize Donald Trump as the root of all evil and political dysfunction. Rather, Taibbi takes the reader through his experience covering the last presidential campaign for Rolling Stone, likening the campaign to an insular, myopic, traveling circus of both parties. Insane Clown President details the disconnect between much of elite media, business, educational, intellectual and political figures from most of the American population. By the end of the book it feels as if many of us are culpable for the election of Donald Trump whose words and actions can be traced back to the founding of our country.

Consider this paraphrased description of the campaign press pool by Taibbi:

“The moving prison was so airtight that if you needed cigarettes, you had to ask campaign volunteers to smuggle them in. This seemed like merely a strange detail when I first learned about it more than a dozen years ago. But it spoke to a much more enormous problem. It was a perfect metaphor for the distancing of the ruling class from the population. Presidential campaigns were bubbles and the people inside them became myopic codependents. To campaign professionals, real people became fodder for stylized visual backgrounds and nothing more. Who better understands that presidential races are now really just big television shows than Donald Trump?”

I was reminded of Taibbi’s TV show metaphor as I recently toured several college campuses with my son. At all but one school, undergraduate tour guides were carefully scripted, armed sometimes with half truths, misleading or made up statistics and intentional omissions, all of which were crafted by admission professionals and senior leadership as if they were producing a show. The campus tour show left us to read between the lines and gather whatever information we could through impromptu conversation with students, reading uncensored student newspapers, careful observation and independent research.

Enterprises like Pingree understand that they are at risk of creating their own self-deceiving bubble that is divorced from reality, so many embrace programs like Prep@Pingree as one way to generate excellence, relevance and reality. The voices below evidence what happens when we turn away from a TV show production mentality and act beyond our default mindsets, habits and borders.

How does Elon Musk approach learning and new things? In his Reddit AMA, he shares: "One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to." This framework mirrors what Aristotle preached thousands of years ago. Aptly named "first principle thinking," it's the idea that people should aim to understand the underlying elements before reasoning up from there.

How do a Silicon Valley icon and philosophical forefather relate to Prep@Pingree? Well, essential to my experience many summers ago was a rewiring of sorts. As a young person, absorbing knowledge is innate. That's how babies learn to babble and a few months later speak their first words. What's harder is to subvert that normal way of learning and to be more intentional about knowledge accumulation. This intentional subversion... this learning of how to really learn... is a journey that was prompted by my teachers and peers at Prep@Pingree.

This tendency to question and deconstruct ideas to their core lends itself to a certain fearlessness. It's the feeling that no matter how daunting a new task is or how impossible a black box may seem to be, learning and understanding are achievable. This idea that Musk and Aristotle's words speak to is something that I was first exposed to as a Prep@Pingree student. It's a gift that has given me an advantage in every endeavor I've pursued and is a gift that truly continues to give more. Prep@Pingree is a place that is more than the math worksheets and history essays I worked on day to day. It's a place that pushed me to redefine my curiosity and that is why I support Prep@Pingree.