Ideas and Education
There’s a pretty thoughtful (and almost, but not entirely, rant-free) post today in Rate Your Students.
American higher education reflects the values of American society and those values are largely consumerist. Which is to say, anti-intellectual. On the other hand, most professors in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences value intellectual effort, if not always for its own sake, for reasons that go beyond the consumerist model of education. We think ideas and knowledge are important, not just because one can turn a profit with them, but because one can use ideas and knowledge to think about the world and understand it. But the whole purpose of consumer culture is to anesthetize one to ideas.
Although I generally disagree with much of that site’s posts (which typically excoriate students; I’d be identified as a Pollyanna), I often nod in agreement about the observations of higher education. The quote above seems very much on track, from my own experiences, and brought to mind a presentation at the NCWP‘s Summer Institute a few weeks back. Heather, one of the participants, was using corporate accountability publications (from places like Starbucks) as a way to facilitate her community college students’ critical thinking about consumer culture. I hate it when students suggest that an idea in class is being “over analyzed,” when we’re really only beginning to analyze something. But I suspect that their resistance is not so much powered by a (perceived) desire to shirk hard thinking, but rather comes from the discomfort associated with questioning the consumerist dogma we’re raised to embrace in the US.
July 13 2008 11:16 am | NCWP and Reading and Work
This is a real bummer. And it makes me think too much!