Summary Of Why Teach In Defense Of A Real Education

In his book, Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education, Mark Edmunson includes an essay titled “Liberal Arts & Lite Entertainment in which he talks about numerous phenomena happening in American school systems. About halfway through the essay, while on a rant about colleges competing against one another for students, Edmundson adds that individual departments also contend for students, and more specifically how the humanities “now must struggle to attract students” (14).
The professor offers a couple of effects that loosening up has had on the branch. First, he claims that grading is not tough and students are hardly allowed to fail. This is understandable—the students are the customers, right? In a world where the producers of America bend down to the consumers, the customers will always get what they want. But where’s the competition? If A’s and B’s are handed out like candy to everyone who takes an English class, then how is it hard to believe that students never take such courses seriously, let alone the idea of devoting one’s whole life to it? Why is it more
This generation is lazy and undetermined. Students nowadays (and especially in grade school) love to get away with bare minimums and things that only take them a few minutes to complete. So why was the answer to that question rarely English, or history, for that matter? There’s easy grading, and the courses don’t have steps or varying levels of difficultly like calculus or physics. In my own K-12 experience, I maybe once heard a student admit that his favorite subject was English. Most of the time, it was something under science or social studies (economics, usually—who didn’t want to learn how to be a millionaire by the time you retire?). Math was rarely an answer (as one of those students who prefers math, I never understood the dislike for it), but it was heard more than