Comparing Edmundson's 'Other Voices, Other Rooms'

Maria Ruiz
English Comp. 101
Prof. Courtney Stanton
Sep.14, 2014 Gerard Graff’s Influence on Edmundson’s Argument What is Education? It is clear to us that education is an essential part of everyone’s lives and our future depends on it. Despite the differences found in both Edmundson and Graff’s works, Graff supports the different ideas Edmundson has toward education. Edmundson, who writes “On the Uses of Liberal Education”, tells us that today’s priority of education has changed; colleges have turned into a market mentality. Graff’s focus in “Other Voices, Other Rooms” is not this market mentality, but to stress the different factors as to why education has deteriorated. One of the factors is compartmentalization. Both, Edmundson
Edmundson starts telling its readers why he dislikes class evaluations at the end of each course. Edmundson extends this to the idea that universities have adapted a market mentality (vendors and consumers). In other words, the universities will change things around just to satisfy their students (consumers). Moreover, professors usually have to make their own changes, so that they receive good evaluations and make students “comfortable”. Graff supports the idea that universities don’t care about education, but they just want to make the students’ life easier, with those “easy classes”. Edmundson talks about how his students usually say that it’s a fun and interesting class. However, these comments don’t make him happy, instead it gives him a self-dislike feeling. He wants to hear something different; “I want some of them to say that they’ve been changed by the course” says Edmundson (Edmundson
An exemplary example of how Edmundson wishes students should be is, Joon Lee. “Joon Lee is endlessly curious”(Edmundson 324), his personality and interests separate him from the crowd, who just “go with the flow”. Edmundson says that the only thing students care about are grades. Graff supports this by using the example of one of his undergraduates, when he asked her which course she prefers and she said, “Well, I’m getting an A in both”(Graff 328). This tells both authors that students don’t really care about learning but they only look after their own interests. In other words, they have lost a sense of curiosity. Graff goes on saying how students take classes that result in a “cognitive dissonance”. This means that students become confused by ideas presented to them in class that contradict themselves, but they never question authority. “Each course was challenging enough on its own terms, and to have raised the question of how they related would have only risked needlessly multiplying difficulties for myself” (Graff 340). Like Graff, Edmundson wishes students would challenge themselves and develop different interests on education. Students are satisfied by acquiring a good grade and then forget what they have learned right after. Both authors don’t support this way of thinking. Students can’t do anything about it, because the university has allowed this to