Have It Your Way: Consumerism Invades Education

The Updated Consumerist Student

Going through college should not be as easy as going through a drive-thru at a fast food restaurant. Young adults should be interactive and critically thinking throughout their education, not disinterested of it. Author Simon Benlow, in his essay “Have It Your Way: Consumerism Invades Education,” believes that students are turning to consumerist ways, not thanks to the college’s culture (139). Since my return to community college, there has been a trend with the younger adults: Not caring.

College is not walk in the park, especially when someone’s eyes are glued to their phone. Those students who suffer from “separation anxiety” when they don’t have their phone in hand, are the recent consumerist students. Benlow believes that consumerist students think that everything just gets handed to them, when they want it and they way they want it (141). If students spend

most of their time in class, looking down, pretending that they are not texting, they obviously are not learning the material. Yet they wonder why they are on academic probation, and tend to blame it on the professor.
Focusing on the use of cell phones in colleges is very important.

The cell phone is an evil that is blocking the young adult from absorbing any information. The newer the cell phone, the more of a consumerist attitude the student will have. If college’s penalized students for using cell phones in class, like they are supposed to, then maybe it will crack the student and allow them to see what they are missing. Trying to find a solution to the consumerist student problem is very complex, but it does focus on the lack of students paying attention.

I do remember a time when I thought that my social life was more important than my education; Simon Benlow may have considered me as a consumerist student. Over the years, I have learned to change my ways and I realized what Benlow states, “In college, students cannot simply consume knowledge. Even in its most packaged form, the textbook, knowledge must be regenerated, revised, reinterpreted, and remembered…(141)” Once the consumerist student realizes that college does take a lot of work, they may start

achieving.
Simon Benlow has a very clear understanding of the difference between students and customers. It is a shame that not everyone notices the problem that is happening within colleges all across America. Colleges need to use techniques to make consumerist students focus on their education. It is a two-way road with the colleges and the students within. Benlow states, “I fear they [students] will become increasingly more confused by the expectations of college, and that in the nightmarish long run, colleges will become simply another extension of the consumerist machine…(142)” This should be a shock to those students how know that they are a consumerist, it will just take some actual critical thinking, without a cell phone to get there.