not a shop

There is a good discussion of what education is for, and how different disciplines use different tools, in the post How to speak truthfully about what it means to be human: a user’s handbook.  All of it is interesting, but there is one paragraph that speaks forcefully about why students are not “customers”, itself a quote from another piece (my emphasis):

We go to school, not to get what we already know that we want, but because we want to receive an education. Here, we would expect teachers not just to give students what they know they want or say they want or are able to identify as what they want, but to move them beyond what they already know that they want. We want teachers to open up new vistas, new opportunities, and help children and young people to interrogate whether what they say they want or desire is actually what they should desire. To turn the student into a customer, and just  work on the assumption that education should do what the customer wants is therefore a distortion of what education is about, a distortion that significantly undermines the ability of teachers to be teachers and of schools, colleges and universities to be educational institutions rather than shops.

Hear, hear.