But that’s a lot of kids: how are you going to choose which kids?īut what’s on the test? If the test tries to determine what facts you know, then everything depends on either (a) knowing a lot of facts, or (b) having connections who know what the important facts are, or (better yet) know what’s on the test. So, Harvard got funds for a bunch of scholarships open to kids who were not from New England - kids who couldn’t afford Harvard and whose parents did not get invited to the right parties in Boston and Concord and didn’t visit with the president. But what chance did a farm kid from Kansas have to go to Harvard? It was especially unsatisfactory in the US, which imagined itself to have rejected birthright aristocracy. (You also had to be a guy, of course.)īy the late 19th century, this was increasingly unsatisfactory. In other words, you had to be rich and well born. You had to (a) be able to pay a substantial fee for tuition, and (b) you had to be recommended by well-connected people. In the old days, you could go to Harvard (or Oxford) if you met two qualifications. In this case, the context is The College Boards, and it’s important to remember why the SATs and the College Boards that administer them exist. To “de-emphasize memorization” sounds like a thing everybody can agree on - except that I suspect it really means “we’ve made it so you don’t have to know what actually happened, which makes it easier for you to do well on the test, which makes us look good.īrent has a point, but context is everything. In connection with this, Brent Simmons emphasizes the value of knowing stuff. Texas wants more propaganda and less criticism in the AP History curriculum. There is a price to pay, and she pays it, but it’s not just a big bank loan. Julia is a student who will do anything for knowledge. It turns out there’s an underground world of people who didn’t get into a good school, a world of community college magicians who swap tips and tattoos in dingy basement hangouts. Somehow, the spells of forgetting that were supposed to erase the memory of magic don’t quite work - she’s too smart, she sees the fuzzy edges in her memories - and these lead her into a dark subculture of underground magic, riddled with drugs and desperation. The sorting hat sorted her out and she was supposed to forget the whole thing. The brilliant thread here lies not with Quentin (who is something of a dope) but with Julia, the girl he admired back in his Brooklyn high school and whom he forgot after she failed the Brakebills entrance exam. Efforts to fix things inevitably lead to worse. But things are not quite right, and neither is Quentin, though nobody (least of all him) knows quite what’s wrong. In the company of his classmates, he’s bored and self-involved and he’s one of four kings of Fillory, a world of magic. Our focus again is Quentin Coldwater, who has graduated from Brakebills, the secret university of magic. In this second volume of the arc that began with The Magicians, Grossman continues to explore a magical world viewed in a strictly realist mode. This admirable story raises the same question I’ve always held about Snow Crash: is the central character Quentin (in Snow Crash Hiro Protagonist), who seems to occupy that role and who certainly believes it’s him, or is it Julia (YT in Snow Crash), his abandoned and forgotten high school friend, who claws her way through the underground magic scene to finally reach heights unforeseen (and possibly undesired)? Rereading before starting The Magician’s Land.

Oedipus the king sidenotes