Why teach? : in defense of a real education / Mark Edmundson.

Liberal arts & lite entertainment -- Dwelling in possibilities -- Who are you and what are you doing here? A word to the incoming class -- Do sports build character? -- Glorious failure : 2005 convocation address, University of Virginia -- The globalists -- The corporate city and the scholarly enclave -- The English major -- My first intellectual -- The Pink Floyd night school -- A word to the new humanities professor -- Against readings -- Narcissus regards his book : the common reader now -- The uncoolness of good teachers -- Teaching the truths -- Under the sign of Satan : Blake in the corporate university.

Presents a collection of essays that explore a college education as a means through which serious-minded individuals broaden their minds and acquire life skills, arguing that higher learning is an essential remedy for today's problems.

"Mark Edmundson's essays reclaim college not as the province of high-priced tuition, career training, and interactive online courses, but as the place where serious people go to broaden their minds and learn to live the rest of their lives. A renowned professor of English at the University of Virginia, Edmundson has felt firsthand the pressure on colleges to churn out a productive, high-caliber workforce for the future. Yet in these essays, many of which have run in places such as Harper's and the New York Times, he reminds us that there is more to education than greater productivity. With prose exacting yet expansive, tough-minded yet optimistic, Edmundson argues forcefully that the liberal arts are more important today than ever. Why Teach? offers Edmundson's collected writings on the subject, including several pieces that are new and previously unpublished. What they show, collectively, is that higher learning is not some staid, old notion but a necessary remedy for our troubled times. Why Teach? is brimming with the wisdom and inspiration that make learning possible." -- Publisher's description.