Mark Edmundson Flaws Of Education

The education system has many flaws which prevent students from reaching their full potential when learning. Mark Edmundson and Paulo Freire form their own theories for why the system is flawed and how to fix it. Edmundson believes it is flawed because the education system is forced to adapt to the consumer culture, to make students want to learn more and to persuade the students into favoring their professors. Freire believes it is flawed because of the lack of communication between the teacher and students. This causes the teacher to brainwash their students with information that the teacher wants them to know. I believe both Edmundson and Freire’s theories are correct for why the modern system is flawed. There is a lack of student engagement, …show more content…
The essay mainly focuses on students, explaining how they are affecting the system and causing the liberal-arts education to fall into a crisis. Edmundson believes that the students have forced the most successful professors to “decenter” their curriculum from learning the most important information to collaborating in groups. This prevents the students from expanding their perspectives, knowledge, and vocabulary. They are only sharing existing ideas and opinions with their classmates (Edmundson 8). Rather than learning the information in-depth, they collaborate in groups, sharing their opinions on the current topics and influencing each other’s views. Due to consumerism, the current student generations are also pressuring the professors to make their classes easy and likable, rather than difficult and useful. Through student consumerism, students can simply avoid taking classes with professors they don’t like. “If the clientele dislikes [the professor] en masse, [the professor] can be left without students” (Edmundson 7). For this reason, professors adjust their teaching styles to fit the students’ demands, rather than using the best teaching method to provide students with the maximum amount of …show more content…
Collaboration in certain classes, like English, is useful because it helps students understand the symbolic meaning behind statements and understand the readings better. From my experience in high school, when the students in my class collaborated more with themselves than with the teacher, they would share their own opinions, persuade their classmates to change their opinions, and would also get off topic often when the teach wasn’t watching. The curriculum must be changed to improve the educational system. Teachers should have a strict curriculum that they follow. This will ensure the students receive the most important information possible, allowing the students to develop their own opinions and beliefs. There should be a moderate amount of collaboration between the students and teacher in the classroom, and the students and teacher must teach each other. The universities should not allow students to choose which professor they want, and evaluations should not be allowed to impact the professors’ career based on the results. This will prevent the professors from being pressured by student consumerism to change their teaching styles and