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Summary Of The Undereducation Of An Overachiever By Walter Kirn

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Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever by Walter Kirn is the story of Kirn’s experiences throughout his education. Kirn is a boy from a small town in Minnesota who went on to graduate from Princeton and received the Keasbey scholarship to Oxford. One would think that he is an extremely educated man because of these schools that he attended, but he spends most of the novel discussing how he did not really learn, he just knew how to work the system. This book raises questions about the effectiveness of the American school system and shows why it is both successful and futile.
Walter Kirn knows that he did not get into Princeton due to his intellectual abilities, but because he understood how to take multiple choice tests. Kirn was a master of …show more content…

He used this to his advantage in writing and in conversation, making himself come off smarter than he actually was. He also happened to have a knack for multiple choice, a skill that helped him achieve a perfect score on the SAT. The reason that Kirn succeeded in school was because of his natural skills and his competitive spirit, which made him want to be the best in his class. Yet many kids, even in elementary school worked far harder than him but just did not possess the same ability to breeze through school. In fourth grade, students were encouraged to compete in reading by seeing who could read the most the fastest. Kirn came second only to a girl named Karla. Yet Karla actually read each passage and retained information, while Kirn only skimmed for the multiple choice answers that were at the end. When the school year ends, Karla tells Kirn “Students who

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