Summary of "On the Uses of Liberal Education"

Mark Edmundson in "On the Uses of a Liberal Education," examines college student's lack of intellectual curiosity and relates this to the consumer-driven society we live in. The multiple choices students have today in college have made the university a facile learning environment, resulting in complacent students. For example, he ridicules the fact that students have the ability to withdraw from classes with a month left in the semester and professors are making their classes interesting rather than languid, as he puts it, in order to meet the needs of the students. Pop culture has created a perfect, utopian world vision for students, who are now so concerned with their consummate personalities they lack the courage to challenge conventional thought, afraid of being debunked.

Along the same lines, passion has been nonexistent in the classroom, according to Edmundson. Students have been too focused on conforming to society--a society which dissuades eccentricity and imperfectness. This devoid of passion has led to the end of striving for genius, leading to uneducated and uncurious individuals. However, Edmundson notes that the problem does not just lie with the students but with the professors as well. Good professor evaluations, which are a criteria of whether professors recieve tenure or not, often require students to be "interested" in the class, forcing professors to, again, satisy the students rather than challenge them.