Edmundson: Liberal Arts & Lite Entertainment Analysis

There’s a longing for university teachers that want to help a generation change towards a passion pass just obtaining a degree or just trying to “get by” with non-solid attempts to pass classes with purpose instead of mediocracy. In Edmundson’s essay titled: Liberal Arts & Lite Entertainment, he displays a stern direction for students to go beyond surface levels of education despite of the professors’ complacency have “created a university environment in which facile skepticism can thrive without being substantially contested” (20). His motives and purpose started to show early in the text “I want some of them to say that they’ve been changed by the course. I want them to measure themselves against what they’ve read.” (Edmundson 5). He wants

His claim of fact sheds a light upon an issue that goes unnoticed in the heat of the moment of lecture time. His argument shows that a new wave of college students becoming less passionate and more offended towards teachers that challenge them to a significance. He supports this facts that says: “Teachers who really do confront students, who provide significant challenges to what they believe, can be very successful, granted. But sometimes… have been offended.” (Edmundson 17). In some way, it’s like Edmundson is displaying that students didn’t sign up for getting an education, but to incline more on a marketing consumer itch that they want scratched. He stated his claim towards the reader and allowed them to see that it exists when he asks this relatable question: “is it a shock that kids don’t come to school hot to learn, unable to bear their own ignorance?” (Edmundson 19). This fact alone makes his argument against the mediocracy that universities go through, but he continues to go deeper into his

He says: “Perhaps it would be a [clever] idea to try firing the counselors and sending half the deans back into their classrooms, dismantling the football team and making the stadium into a playground for local kids, emptying the fraternities and boarding up the student-activities office.” (26). Although his policies were explicit they combat the extremes of the problem that he sees in his college and colleges nationwide. He goes deeper and backs up his policies for change: “what our current students are given to read, many of them will simply translate it into melodrama, with flat characters and predictable morals.” (Edmundson 25). The problem indeed exists in universities, but there’s still some optimism and “the library…the occasional teacher who lives to find things greater than herself to admire.” (26) and some students haven’t surrendered to ordinary