Education’s service-industry turn makes intellectual difficulty embattled

Evidence

But now that teaching is itself being pressed into becoming a service industry (delivering measurable outputs in the form of exam results) and teachers are required to be both child minders and entertainers, those working in the education system who still want to induce students into the complicated enjoyments that can be derived from going beyond the pleasure principle, from encountering something difficult, something that runs counter to one’s received assumptions, find themselves in an embattled minority. Here we are now entertain us. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1217

Categorization

• CANDY: ‘Here we are now entertain us’ — the repurposed Nirvana lyric as a deadpan thesis sentence is a genuinely quotable turn.
• XREF: Extends the book’s recurring critique of managerial/service logic converting every cultural activity into measurable output. — connects to: Making education artificially easy distorts the training needed for genuine intellectual work.; Higher education now produces skills instead of ideals or emancipation. — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 359; Intellectual work now faces a constant downward pull toward relaxed standards (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Making education artificially easy distorts the training needed for genuine intellectual work. #corroborates (0.90)
• Intellectual work now faces a constant downward pull toward relaxed standards #corroborates (0.85)
• Higher education now produces skills instead of ideals or emancipation. #corroborates (0.75) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 359
• School is being reframed as a study sanctuary distinct from information processing #contradicts (0.75)