Previous
Chapter 2: Teresa DeBrito
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in David and Goliath, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Advantages and Disadvantages
Convention and the Status Quo
Hardship and Resilience
Conviction, Morality, and Empathy
Summary
Analysis
In the 1860s, Impressionist painters like Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro had trouble showing their work to the public. This is because the art world of 19th-century France centered around a yearly exhibition called the Salon, which took place at the Palais de l’Industrie. The only way to gain respect as an artist was to have a piece in the Salon, but the jury that decided which paintings would be displayed had very high, specific standards. Because the Impressionists didn’t conform to the traditional style of painting, they found it nearly impossible to have pieces accepted for the Salon. And when Renoir and Monet finally did have pieces accepted, they were taken down six weeks into the show and moved to a dark back room, where they were hung with paintings “considered to be failures.”
Gladwell’s focus on the Impressionist painters and their fight to be accepted by the Salon follows his examination of Hotchkiss, another elite institution. The Impressionists desperately want to display their work in the Salon because this is the only path in their society toward fame and recognition as artists. If, however, readers consider this alongside the idea that a school like Hotchkiss is universally respected despite its incorrect assumption that small classes benefit students, it’s apparent that Gladwell will most likely challenge the validity of the Salon’s prestige, questioning whether or not it’s as beneficial as the artists think to have a painting displayed in the Salon.
Active
Themes
The Impressionists frequently gather at Café Guerbois, where they debate whether or not they should keep submitting to the Salon. What they want to decide, Gladwell says, is whether they should create their own show, thereby becoming “Big Fish in a Little Pond” instead of continuing to fail as “Little Fish in the Big Pond of the Salon.” Eventually, they decide to put on their own show, and it is because of this decision that their work is now lauded and displayed in the world’s most famous museums. Gladwell notes that this illustrates an important notion—namely, that people often assign too much importance and reverence to what they believe to be “the finest institutions.” It’s not often, he argues, that people break from convention like the Impressionists did. Nothing, he adds, highlights this dynamic more than the way people decide where to attend college.
Before deciding to break away from the Salon, the Impressionists are like every person who unthinkingly assumes that an elite school like Hotchkiss is better than other schools with slightly larger classes. Prestige and reputation, Gladwell intimates, often manage to interfere with the public’s ability to judge the actual merit of an institution. Thankfully for the art world, the Impressionists eventually recognize that they’ll be better off forging their own way, thereby ignoring the status quo and opening themselves up to new advantages—after all, nobody will hang their paintings in a backroom at their own show, so putting on their own show means that the public will actually have a chance to see their work.
Active
Themes
Gladwell introduces readers to a woman named Caroline Sacks, who recalls her childhood as one full of science and wonder. As a young girl, Sacks enjoyed identifying bugs and various animals, and she cherished the idea of becoming a scientist. She excelled in high school, graduating at the top of her class. While trying to decide where to attend college, she visited a number of elite institutions and was eventually accepted to her top choice, Brown University. Her back-up school, she says, was the University of Maryland. When Sacks got into Brown, though, there was no question in her mind that she should go there, so she enrolled in chemistry and several other classes. Right away, she was surprised that everyone seemed just like her—“intellectually curious and kind of nervous and excited.” At that point, she couldn’t have been happier with her choice.
Active
Themes
Gladwell asks readers if Caroline Sacks’s decision to go to Brown might seem less ideal when compared to the Impressionists’ decision to turn away from the Salon. The Impressionists, Gladwell argues, grasped that striking out on their own would have its own set of benefits and downsides in comparison to the Salon, which was somewhat like an Ivy League school. In the same way that the Salon was prestigious and well-respected, Ivy League schools are sought-after institutions. However, the Salon had its own drawbacks. Because it accepted so many paintings, the vast majority of the pieces went largely unnoticed, meaning that the Salon’s prestige was one of its only benefits.
Active
Themes
Get the entire David and Goliath LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
Recounting the story of the Impressionists, Gladwell says that Pissarro and Monet suggested that the group found a collective in which every artist would be treated the same. In 1874, they put on their first show, displaying 165 pieces on the top floor of a building with small, connected rooms. It was a massive success, and viewers were able to see each painting up close in ways they would never be able to at the Salon. These days, to buy one of the paintings displayed at this show would cost more than a billion dollars. This, Gladwell suggests, indicates that it is sometimes much better to be a “Big Fish in a Little Pond than a Little Fish in a Big Pond.”
Active
Themes
According to Gladwell, Sacks’s decision to be a Little Fish in a Big Pond costs her. During the second semester of her freshman year at Brown, she receives a poor grade on a midterm exam in chemistry. In retrospect, Sacks thinks she was most likely enrolled in too many classes and doing too many extracurricular activities, but at the time, she is overwhelmingly disappointed and discouraged. When she meets with the professor, he urges her to drop the class and take it again the following semester. Sacks follows his advice, but when she takes it again, she receives a B: a shocking grade to her, since she’s only ever gotten A’s. This, Sacks says, is especially discouraging because all her classmates are freshmen. Worse, none of them want to talk about study habits or help each other because they are all so competitive.
In Sacks’s second semester of her sophomore year, she takes organic chemistry and continues to struggle. She can’t wrap her head around the concepts necessary to excel. Other students, though, have no trouble at all solving problems given to them by the professor. But no matter how hard Sacks works, she has no success. When the professor asks questions in class, hands fly into the air while Sacks sits silently and listens to her peers deliver the correct answer. She begins to feel “inadequa[te]” and frustrated, and while studying one night at three in the morning, decides to stop chasing her dream of becoming a scientist.
Active
Themes
What’s perhaps most unfortunate about Sacks’s experience at Brown is that it shouldn’t have mattered how good she was at organic chemistry, since she never wanted to be an organic chemist anyway. Many people find organic chemistry nearly impossible, and some premed students even take it at another institution during the summer just to get months of practice before taking it at their own school. To add to this, Sacks took organic chemistry at one of the most competitive institutions in the country. One of the main reasons Sacks quit science, then, is that she was comparing herself to some of the smartest, most competitive students in the entire nation. She wasn’t comparing herself to everyone taking organic chemistry, but if she were, she’d most likely have felt rather competent. Instead, she suffered as a Little Fish in a Big Pond, and it made her feel unintelligent.
Active
Themes
Gladwell argues that Caroline Sacks suffered from “relative deprivation,” a concept coined by a sociologist studying morale. The term refers to the fact that people tend to compare themselves not to all of society, but to their immediate peers. Because Sacks attended Brown, then, she made damaging comparisons between herself and her highly accomplished peers. This, Gladwell says, is simply human nature, since it makes sense for people to compare themselves to others in the same environment, not to some abstract universal. Therefore, “the more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities.”
Active
Themes
What happened to Caroline Sacks is common. In fact, more than half of STEM (science, technology, and math) students drop out of the sciences within the first two years of their course of study. To examine this trend, Gladwell looks at the SAT scores of STEM majors at Hartwick College in New York. The top third of the class received an average score of 569 on the math SATs, whereas the bottom third of the class received an average score of 407. Going on, Gladwell notes that 55 percent of the top third actually ended up earning STEM degrees, while only 17.8 percent of the bottom third graduated with STEM degrees. These figures make sense, since most of the students entering STEM majors with the lowest SAT scores end up switching tracks.
Active
Themes
Continuing his examination of STEM major retention rates at various colleges, Gladwell explains that the same trends hold true for students at Harvard as at Hartwick, even though the bottom third of the class received an average math SAT score of 581—higher than the average score of the top third at Hartwick. And yet, only 15.4 percent of students in Harvard’s bottom third ended up earning STEM degrees. This means that it’s better to be in the top third of the class at Hartwick than in the bottom third at Harvard, since 55 percent of Hartwick’s highest-scoring students received STEM degrees. Even though the Harvard students with the lowest SAT scores are technically smarter than the highest-scoring Hartwick students, more of those Hartwick students end up earning STEM degrees.
Active
Themes
Gladwell’s analysis of SAT scores illustrates that it’s better to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond than a Little Fish in a Big Pond. Looking at the same statistics at a number of other schools, Gladwell further emphasizes the validity of this theory. He also turns his attention to economics scholars interviewing for jobs at various universities. Instead of using test scores as a metric, he looks at the average number of papers the candidates have published in the field’s top journals, finding that candidates who were at the top of their class at non-prestigious schools have better publication records than almost everyone who attended Ivy League schools (except those who were in the 90th percentile or higher at Ivy League institutions). This means that academic employers are better off hiring Big Fish from Little Ponds than Little Fish from Big Ponds.
Active
Themes
Gladwell applies the idea of being a Little Fish in a Big Pond to the debate surrounding affirmative action. The thinking behind affirmative action—insofar as it pertains to college admissions—is that “helping minorities get into selective schools is justified given the long history of discrimination.” Some people, however, believe that admissions should only focus on academic ability. And there’s yet another group who think affirmative action should be based on financial considerations, not race. Gladwell, for his part, maintains that all three of these views take for granted that going to prestigious institutions is an advantage in the first place—an idea of which he’s deeply suspicious. According to him, it’s potentially harmful to take good students who “happen to be black” and “bump them up a notch,” since this will simply put them in the same situation as Caroline Sacks.
Active
Themes
At the same time, Gladwell doesn’t think affirmative action is wrong. His main point is that there are a number of downsides to the “Big Pond” that people don’t consider. Most people take for granted that going to prestigious universities will always increase the chances of a student’s success, but this isn’t the case. Still, though, people have very specific ideas about what, exactly, an advantage is—ideas that aren’t all that accurate. For this reason, people frequently discount the value of turning away from things that are typically considered advantageous. When Gladwell asks Sacks what she thinks her life would be like if she’d gone to the University of Maryland instead of Brown, she gives him an immediate answer: “I’d still be in science,” she says.
