"On the Uses of a Liberal Education"- "As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students" Part 1 by Mark Edmundson

Mark Edmundson has got a point here. While reading this essay I couldn’t help but measure myself against the melancholy description he uses to generalize my generation. I cringed to find laid before me such a painfully accurate description of the group of sedated and seduced young adults that I associate with, and unfortunately, belong to. I appreciated his analysis of the various forces in the world that combine to create an apathetic environment, and then proceeding to fill the internal space with commercial goods. I felt for him when he spoke of the way he was required to relate to his class in pop culture terms in order to elicit any interest. These youths more closely resemble zombies constantly interacting with mechanized devises used to avoid human interaction. Instant gratification is something that has bred like a virus into every corner of our society. Critical thinking and application of imagination and creativity is long and hard. Too hard, it would seem for many people who simply take gratification in hiding from the meaning of existence and just blandly exist. Fear has so much to do with it, as the author pointed out. It is not the young peoples fault that generations before have led us to this precipice of intellectualism. It’s not our fault that the school system has come to pander to our comfort and become enablers to a path of complacent, insipid futures. But it is our fault that we sit back and accept the way of things. We must brush the moths from our coats and plunge head long onto the imposing and difficult road that other great minds have trekked. After reading this essay, I was overwhelmed with the sense of guilt in my part of a unified failure to bring forth and appreciate any true genius. These minds are salvageable to us and we are surely doomed to remain ignorant while we allow these essential contributions to our beings to be shoved aside in favor of momentary commercial delight. I am already an avid reader, but this essay has shifted my literary goals to obtain much more of that excitement he feels towards knowledge and inflame some earnest desire to be even better than I think I might.