Summary Of Mark Edmundson On The Uses Of A Liberal Education

Arifah Syuhada Ahamad Razman

Professor David Marroquin

English 101A

7 February 2015

Mark Edmundson : On the Uses of a Liberal Education

Mark Edmundson is an English professor at University of Virginia and has published many articles focusing on literary and cultural criticism. In one of his articles, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education”, Mark Edmundson claims his feeling of disappointment and distressed on evaluation day which required his students to rate him on scale of one to five. Even though he gets a lot of positive feedback from his students addressing him as interesting and fun, he feels uneasy in a way that education has changed into consumer-driven society. Despite of interesting and fun, he expects to hear about changes

from his students that he has made through the course and he wants his students to measure themselves to what they have learned. The devotion into consumerism of education that he claims can be seen from where the university’s funds go to. The upgraded gymnasium with branded machines, building new dorms and constructing an aquatics center has relation with what he labels consumerism. Colleges and universities are no longer aiming for the quality of education through what the students have learned and the implication they will made to the outside world, but the coziness and comfortableness they will experienced. What make it worst is when most of the instructors and teachers shift their focus of the classrooms and softening the grades in order for them to be successful. Thus, this makes Mark Edmundson thinks that students nowadays have the power over their own teachers.
In this article, Mark Edmundson also provides an example of his student, Joon Lee, who he finds admiring and different from his other students.

Joon Lee’s curiosity and enthusiasm have made him charmingly peculiar with other people. Joon Lee doesn’t mind if he doesn’t fit in with the rest and extremely stood out of the crowd. Rather than making efforts on how they will shape themselves through what they have learned, most of his other students are only interested in mixing and blending with the society. Another reason why most of his students do not have the passion Joon Lee has is that they are worried if working too much on their education will affect their future financially. Mark Edmundson points out that these students’ attitude is taken from consumer-culture serves by the “tube” which runs flawlessly on the screen. With this kind of attitude, he says that they will be no new genius born in the future because they never try to strive for improvement even if they are intelligent. In the end of his article, he concludes that universities and colleges need to change their focuses toward education and put what actual learning means back to priority. He also determined to serve the correct way of teaching even it means to challenge his students’ thoughts and mind

critically.