“On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students” by Mark Edmundson
One. What are Edmundson’s misgivings about the teacher evaluations that are filled out by his students?
Education becomes reduced to a consumer experience with numerical metrics like a Yelp review.
Inevitably, such evaluations reward those teachers who entertain and turn the classroom into a palatable “consumer experience.”
However, if a teacher who cares about his students has strict requirements evidencing his commitment to his job, his scores could be low by students who think he’s “mean.”
On the other hand, an enabling vacuous professor with no standards who is “nice” could get higher ranks than the more committed instructor.
Two. Why does Edmundson argue that liberal-arts education is suffering?
Because, he claims, “American culture writ large, is, to put it crudely, ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment, to the using and using up of goods and images. For someone growing up in America now, there are few available alternatives to the cool consumer worldview.”
Society inculcates us into being content with being childish, mindless consumers. Why? Because we are opportunities, prey, if you will, for the predators of profit. Our default setting is consumer on the prowl. It’s a sort of dehumanized autopilot like people inhaling their e-cigarettes in their cars, and people using whatever gadget or product so they can avoid their real feelings.
Three. Why does Edmundson feel discouraged from having as mostly “consumer students” in his classroom?
Edmundson writes that most of his students come from the middle class. They are consumers. They rely on consumerism to get their buzz. The problem with this buzz is that after a consumer enjoys a “buzz spike,” he falls back to his low, thrumming level of existence, banal, perfunctory, and numbing.
Edmundson’s students lack passion, fire, pizazz, and moxie. They are mild-mannered, “self-contained,” and complacent. They rarely argue.
They’re like zombies. To hear Edmundson tell it: “They’re the progeny of one hundred cable channels and omnipresent Blockbuster outlets. TV, Marshal McLuhan famously said, is a cool medium. Those who play best on it are low-key and nonassertive; they blend in. Enthusiasm . . . looks absurd.”
We know longer have to fight to forge and shape our identity; we now buy a product that becomes a proxy for our identity. Apple computer makes us a “hipster.” BMW makes us a “player.” Mercedes makes us the “Apex Predator.”
He doesn’t blame the students for being consumers. They are raised in a consumer culture that is for the most part anti-intellectual.
College admissions are more like a marketing department, the author points out. He also observes that college departments compete against each other for students.
In order to not intimidate students, classrooms are moving away from lecture and Socratic dialogue to “active learning environments” where the students feel unchallenged and “safe.”
Four. How does GPA inflation result from the “Consumer University”?
The author contends that we make grades easier. He writes, “One of the ways we’ve tried to stay attractive is by loosening up. We grade much more softly than our colleagues in science. In English, we don’t give many Ds, or Cs for that matter.”
Five. How does society teach children to grow up and be sedated consumer students?
Edmundson writes, “Is it a surprise, then, that this generation of students—steeped in consumer culture before going off to school, treated as potent customers by the university well before their date of arrival, then pandered to from day one until the morning of the final kiss-off from Kermit or one of his kin—are inclined to see the books they read as a string of entertainments to be placidly enjoyed or languidly cast down?”
Just to remind us, what is consumer culture?
Consumer culture, the religion that entertainment and the acquisition of goods and services are the keys to our happiness, success, and salvation, becomes drilled into our brains at the expense of maturity, critical thinking, and irony.
Irony, I would contend, is the key to becoming an adult. Irony is the enjoyment of seeing life’s absurdities and contradictions. As “ironists,” we become connoisseurs of the absurd. Irony sees the absurdities behind the façade of glamour and happiness that consumer culture sells us.
Someone steeped in irony would be repelled by mindless consumerism, with all its infantile absurdities and inevitable banalities.
An ironic person is the opposite of a consumer person. But I imagine an ironic person with lots of money could buy a Mercedes and Rolex and enjoy those items while being aware of the “irony” of the situation, possibly posting the absurdity of their luxury possessions in a social media humblebrag, an insidious form of bragging by pretending to whine or “suffer.” (“It’s so weird flying first-class to Dubai”). A true ironist knows that the humblebrag is BS, though.
Here’s another key ingredient to being an ironist: He sees the BS behind the hype whereas the consumer buys the hype and is a Kool-Aid Drinker for consumer culture’s hype.
Getting a liberal education, becoming literate, and developing critical thinking skills inevitably give us an ironic view of life and warn us of the dangers and imbecilities of becoming Consumer Kool-Aid Drinkers.
The author’s lament in this essay is that the cultural forces that make us Consumer Kool-Aid Drinkers are winning. As Edmundson writes, “The consumer ethos is winning.”
Writing Assignment Option (adapted from book):
In a 1,000-word essay, develop an analytical thesis that compares the denigration of education that you see in Edmundson’s essay and Kozol’s. Draw examples from your own education as you develop your thesis.
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