Simon Benlow’s “Have It Your Way: Consumerism Invades Education”: A Summary Students are being seen as consumers when it comes to their education and the university they choose. Benlow argues that companies are buying access to student’s brains. The phrase “Have it Your Way” is used to describe how the universities keep the students happy and to decide to choose the certain college that pertains to the students’ needs in the best way.
The phrase, “Have it Your Way” promotes the idea that the university will set their entire process to the needs of certain individuals influencing a consumerist culture changing the way a student may see college. In today’s society it is so easy to get whatever we desire. The consumer culture limits the communication between people and allows us to act in a lazy manner. Consumers are encouraged to be passive in such a way as to let our needs and wants be met by the work of other people.
Benlow thinks, other people can imagine and create whatever we desire with no energy exerted to by the individual. This is ideal is based on intellectual inactivity. Students are encouraged to be active and sway away from the consumerist culture. In college, students cannot consume knowledge: it must be regenerated and reinterpreted in order for the student to think deeper. Students who attend college with a consumerist attitude have a difficult time learning the principles needed to be understood before truly gaining knowledge to be successful in their chosen career.
Students need to be encouraged to go beyond and invent. Everything a student learns is going to come from the teachers who have a consumer free attitude and are always gaining knowledge. Students need to be aware of the consumerist culture and stray away from it. College and consumer are two separate things, and if we combine the two together to conform to a consumerist college a student will not be successful. They will become more confused and their expectations of college will be completely different than what they first expected.
