"The customer is always right" is touted routinely as an enduring pearl of wisdom regarding retail purveyors. However, when someone suggests that college students should be treated as customers—or even consumers—faculty members are generally quick to pounce. As the recent TCCTA Fall Conference for Faculty Leaders in Austin demonstrated, instructors are diverse in their opinions and can be disputatious on many issues. But, in listening to informal conversations, they seem united in their distaste for market-oriented approaches to education.
Teachers certainly understand how they prepare students for the market. They just don't buy into the pedagogy that some are peddling.
As the comments poured in after the recent death of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, it is interesting to note that at least one important business leader (Jobs is compared to Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, and Alexander Graham Bell) believed that the "rightness" of customers is bunk. In his obituary on the New York Times’s Web site, John Markoff quoted Jobs on market research: “It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”
Closer to home here in Texas, Herb Kelleher, the legendary founder and CEO of Southwest Airlines, consistently maintained that the "rightness" of customers can be a destructive idea. For instance, the customer could be abusive or drunk, he said. He backed up his employees for the most part, and his company prospered.
Of course one can believe that students should be treated as customers without believing they are always right. But this distinction is blurred easily.
Perhaps it is important to remember another thing. In the marketplace, the vendor generally places few demands upon the customer. Teachers, on the other hand, place rigorous demands upon students, to challenge them intellectually. Education, properly understood, is not about seeking the path of least resistance. In fact it is often the exact opposite.
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