Mark Edmunson, a professor at the University of Virginia, has just released a book, “Why Read?” that takes on the modern educational system. In this excerpt, he points out how the liberal arts has been reduced to pure entertainment–education as commodity.
All Entertainment All the time
So I had my answer. The university had merged almost seamlessly with the consumer culture that exists beyond its gates. Universities were running like businesses, and very effective businesses at that. Now I knew why my students were greeting great works of mind and heart as consumer goods. They came looking for what they?d had in the past, Total Entertainment All the Time, and the university at large did all it could to maintain the flow. (Though where this allegiance to the Entertainment-Consumer Complex itself came from?that is a much larger question. It would take us into politics and economics, becoming, in time, a treatise in itself.)
I want to credit this link, but I’ve lost the link page! Whoops.