Book Review: Why Teach? by Mark Edmundson

No one does bitterness and scorn quite as well as old white guys, and no old white guys are so well equipped to express their discontent as college professors, hurling scrolls of invective from their ivory towers.  For most of this book, Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education, Mark Edmundson does his pitch-perfect impression of the angry old white professor dude, but, then, the tone turns and becomes unexpectedly tender and personal.  For a short while.

Edmundson's main gripe is with what his beloved liberal arts university has become in the modern age.

In the old days, when the university was a quasi-churchly institution, the professors largely called the shots. ... But in the new university all this changed.  Now the professors were the people who gave the grades, period. ... anyone who revered them for their wisdom or wanted to emulate them was tacitly understood to be half-cracked (x).

As you'd expect, Edmundson is a university professor, and he dislikes his loss of prestige and power, to put it plainly.

Who's to blame?  The easy demon: society.

To me, liberal arts education is as ineffective as it is now ... [because] university culture, like American culture writ large, is, to put it crudely, ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment, to the using and using up of goods and images (6).

Well, then, we only need reverse the prevailing trend of American culture over the past three generations.  And a nice little book like this (ranked #396,984 in sales on Amazon) might just turn that tide (See?  I can be sarcastic, too!)

But Edmundson also blames the university itself, which in America (as we do all know) has become nothing more than a diploma mill where those who pay their tuition bills receive credentials in exchange, which they can then parley into money-making careers.  Still, he holds out hope for those little pockets of genuine education secreted throughout the country.

If you want to get a real education in America, you're going to have to fight ... against the institution that you find yourself in ... you'll need to struggle and strive, to be strong, and occasionally even to piss off some admirable people (52).

His pastiche of the "corporate city" type of university, bent solely on commerce and credentialization (yes, not really a word, but Mark will get the joke), is worthy of Mencken:

Universities that have made themselves into corporate cities are not hard to spot.  Most of the students - and many members of the faculty - are buzzing from place to place, always feeling a bit self-important, always feeling a bit behind, like that poor rabbit in Alice in Wonderland (107).

And the values they promote stand for similar biting review:

Why is excellence a bad word?  It's not, in and of itself.  But people around universities who use it are people who want to talk about worldly distinction without talking about ethics.  Excellence means we're smart, we're accomplished, we're successful - and we can be these things without any obligation to help our fellow human beings. ... Why is leadership so bad?  In itself, it's not.  But what people usually mean by a leader now is someone who, in a very energetic, upbeat way, shares all of the values of the people who are in charge (109).

But no one falls in line for harsher rebuking than the students themselves, in whom ever positive qualities betray an underlying stupidity.

... the reason that the kids are so open and appealing is that they're innocents.  Their naiveté is what's beguiling.  And part of what creates that innocence is ignorance.  They don't go from place to place pressed to the ground with the burden of the past - in part because they don't know much about that past (101).

Keep in mind that we are talking about college students at a prestigious university, "kids" who aced AP history courses, and Edmundson's depiction of them as grinning buffoons is all the more damning.  These "kids" are incapable of any intellectual discourse altogether.

It's this kind of dialogue, deliberate, gradual, thoughtful, that students immersed in the manic culture of Internet and Adderall are conditioned not to have (45).

So culture, the moneyed university, and the ignorant, complacent, drug-addled students have turned higher education into a sham, in Edmundson's view.

Then - and I know I've made you wait a while for it - the book turns.  Edmundson recalls the high school teacher, Mr. Meyers, who woke him from his unintellectual torpor and taught him that education is an act of rebellion.

Before Meyers arrived, I never rebelled against the place, at least not openly.  I didn't in part because I believed that Medford High was the only game there was.  The factories where my father and uncles worked were extensions of the high school; the TV shows we watched were manufactured to fit the tastes for escape that such places form; the books we were assigned to read in class, Ivanhoe, Silas Marner, The Good Earth, of which I ingested about fifty pages each, could, as I saw it then (I've never had the wherewithal to check back into them), have been written by the English teachers, with their bland, babbling goodness and suppressed hysterias (122).

Perhaps Edmundson's students, whose laptops are no longer welcome in his class since he discovered they were watching booty-shaking videos and emailing during class rather than taking notes, are a reflection of his younger self?  Maybe they see his book choices as he saw his teachers'?  Shockingly, this possibility does not occur to Edmundson.  But if, as he posits, education is an act of rebellion, then his students are rebelling effectively, against him and his worldview.

Verily, Edmundson seems to turn his firehose of vitriol on everyone but himself.  While on the cusp of self-discovery he backs away and returns to his comfortable weapons of sarcasm and high dudgeon, facetiously advising the imagined straw man of a new humanities professor:

... students believe it is up to the teacher to describe the book so appealingly (to advertise it, in short) that later in life, given leisure, they might have a look.  The summary and description should be carried on in a diverting way.  There ought to be copious reference to analogous themes and plots in recent popular culture.  Jokes ought to be offered at the expense of at least some of the characters, preferably all. ... In no event should the instructor hint that the author or the characters in the book are in any way superior to the students who have condescended to encounter them (145).

Indeed, Edmundson's greatest enemy appears to be the professor who does exactly thus, who tolerates a lowering of intellectual standards and embraces the familiar demon of pop culture.  He openly acknowledges his need to demonize.

Every essay on education needs a villain.  There has to be someone or something preventing the liberal arts from being the world-changing enterprise we all suspect they can be.  And I suppose so far I have supplied a few (203).

Ah, yes, Professor, you have supplied a few villains.  But I'm giving your book a C+ in that you propose no other hero than yourself, and you, Professor, cannot save education because education does not need saving.  Popular culture has always been a bane of lowbrow, mindless entertainment, but it is the intellectual's job to elevate these things by seeking to understand them rather than dismiss them, to write about baseball like Roger Angell, to write about Madonna like Camille Paglia, and to write about drug addicts like William T. Vollmann.

So I'll answer the book's question: Why teach?  We teach because we believe in deep thinking and the power of deep thinking and writing and reading to change the world in lasting, positive ways.  And we realize that we cannot do so by ourselves, and so we teach to train an army of thinkers - not to spurn and scorn them as dimwits, but to grab them by their souls and give them a good drubbing, saying, "Wake, sleeper, wake!  Wake and see what the world truly is!  See what you truly are!"