I think the customer metaphor may not be great for describing the student-teacher or student-school relationship.
1. Students may be paying for education, but often the government is also paying for it (consider the cliché that "even full tuition only pays for half of your educational costs at our university.") This is particularly true at community colleges, where the students are more like the beneficiaries rather than the customers.
2. Teaching might sometimes be akin to coaching (or even therapy or parenting), where the instructor is trying to help students improve in ways that they presumably want in the long run but might occasionally vigorously resist in the short term due to the difficulty involved. Ideally a learning or training curve would be perfectly smooth, balanced, and self-motivated, but this isn't always the case.
3. Possibly contradicting #2, it probably isn't possible to teach someone unless that person is, at some level, willing to learn. Which is to say that teachers are like facilitators who help students to succeed at teaching themselves.
4. Most university students aren't paying out of pocket, nor are their parents; often they are saddled with massive student loans. This means that the loan company may be the paying customer the university is actually catering to, and the student is more like a token that is being passed around.
I think the things you pointed out about students, is also true for customers to some degree at least for B2B services and products.
Most of the time the person you are interacting with often isn‘t the one deciding to hire you. The interests of an employee may not be aligned with the interests of the managers that decided to hire you. They don‘t pay you their employer does.
I had instances where we worked closely with lower level management and helped them convince management of something and other instances were we worked more closely with management and had strict guidelines on how to interact with employees and lower level management.
A lot of your points are correct but ultimately it’s the students who write student reviews, not the parents or the government. So therefore the students are the salient comparison to readers of my books in the essay.
I think the customer metaphor may not be great for describing the student-teacher or student-school relationship.
1. Students may be paying for education, but often the government is also paying for it (consider the cliché that "even full tuition only pays for half of your educational costs at our university.") This is particularly true at community colleges, where the students are more like the beneficiaries rather than the customers.
2. Teaching might sometimes be akin to coaching (or even therapy or parenting), where the instructor is trying to help students improve in ways that they presumably want in the long run but might occasionally vigorously resist in the short term due to the difficulty involved. Ideally a learning or training curve would be perfectly smooth, balanced, and self-motivated, but this isn't always the case.
3. Possibly contradicting #2, it probably isn't possible to teach someone unless that person is, at some level, willing to learn. Which is to say that teachers are like facilitators who help students to succeed at teaching themselves.
4. Most university students aren't paying out of pocket, nor are their parents; often they are saddled with massive student loans. This means that the loan company may be the paying customer the university is actually catering to, and the student is more like a token that is being passed around.