I will confess: I am slightly addicted to reality TV. Not all of it--just the shows that put people in quasi-professional situations and require them to demonstrate their creativity, coolness, skill, and craft under adverse and unusual conditions. Project Runway is my favorite, with Top Chef a close second. The people who compete in those shows are remarkable artists, and that makes them fun to watch.

But I am convinced that this is not the only reason why we watch shows like these. I know that part of why I am attracted to them is that they stage for me--in admittedly contrived form--a value and a standard that has lost favor in our society. They stage for me the ideal of meritocracy--the ideal of a working world without excuses, without special dispensations, without double standards, blind to race and sex and class but alive to the imperatives of fair play, where the bottom line is the quality of the work you do. Love it, love it, love it. I even love it when it's Tyra Banks delivering the message.

These shows know what they are tapping into--just look at the prizes they offer. If you win Top Chef, you get enough money to start your own restaurant--and the winners do just that, and sink or swim on the strength of what they do with that chance. If you win Project Runway, you get similarly hooked into the design world--and you sink or swim on the strength of what you do with that chance. The winners of Make Me a Supermodel and America's Next Top Model get signed with major modeling agencies--and then sink or swim. In other words--the prize is an earned opportunity (not an automatic outcome) within closely guarded and hugely cutthroat professional worlds. The crafting of those opportunities varies, of course, from show to show. American Idol is an excellent example of how you don't have to win the competition to get the exposure you need to launch your singing career--just look at Jennifer Hudson.

Digressions aside, I was quite taken by Thomas Hart Benton's current Chronicle of Higher Ed column. It seems I am not alone in connecting the profession-oriented reality shows to widely held but socially starved fantasies about a world in which an insistence on merit--and all that merit implies--once again defines key aspects of our culture. Here is Benton on FOX's version of Top Chef, Hell's Kitchen:

One thing about being an English professor is that you tend to consider almost everything in light of your profession. So while watching Hell's Kitchen, my conversation with my spouse inevitably turns to Chef Ramsay's virtues as a teacher, how he's able to extract so much from his "students" without turning them against him.

The essence of his teaching method seems to be placing the quality of the food and service above all other considerations, including the feelings of the contestants, some of whom are humiliated on a weekly basis before an audience of millions. He is a figure of indisputable authority, and he doesn't wrap criticism in a warm fuzzy blanket of reassurance. If someone serves a sloppy meal, he'll call that person "a dirty pig" in a way that everyone will hear, remember, and, most important, learn from.

That is completely different from the way most faculty members in the last couple of generations have been trained to respond to students' work. We fear hurting their feelings, alienating them, or provoking them into complaining to some higher authority. So instead of calling a student out, we respond with something like this:

"The absence of conventional spelling and punctuation in your paper --while something we shall want to address at some point--certainly shows an abundance of creativity. Self-reliance is a good thing to have, but you may want to use some sources next time, too. Overall, your essay demonstrates considerable promise for even greater success in the future. Good job! I'm so glad I had the chance to read your work. B+"

Surely that is not the way to produce more capable scholars. Instead of keeping our focus on the work--maintaining high standards as a categorical imperative--we contemplate the consequences: Do we really want to deal with being told that we're "mean" and "unfair"? And then have to spend the next two months troubled by a brooding presence in the back of the room?

So our students learn only a fraction of what they might have learned if we had demanded perfection from the start instead of perpetually straining to praise the mediocre.

Ramsay sets high expectations from the beginning. In the first show of the season, the competitors are asked to prepare what they regard as their best dish. He tastes each one as the others look on: "Your scallops au gratin a la Abilene is disgusting. Bleeeech." A moment later, after a reaction shot from the contestant, Ramsay might say, in his British accent, "Oh, God. I'm going to vomit." He spews into a nearby trash can and wipes his mouth angrily, glaring, as the contestant--who had privately bragged that he was the best chef in Kansas--skulks back to the line.

An important lesson is being taught: The teacher is no fool, and he doesn't work for you. He doesn't want you to like him; you need to earn his respect. One might say that Chef Ramsay--like other fearsome reality-TV judges--is a warrior in the battle against snowflake culture.

If you're unfamiliar with the term "snowflake," then you probably haven't been inside a classroom in the last couple of decades. Snowflakes are the products of educational and child-rearing practices aimed at convincing every child that he or she is "special," as "unique and beautiful" as every flake of snow that falls from the winter sky.

Snowflakes seem to believe teachers exist to learn from them. We often hear that, too, in the rhetoric of teaching today; at the end of a semester, an eminent professor might say to her class, "I am so pleased to have had the opportunity to learn from all of you." Snowflakes are trained to believe that they are doing their teachers a favor by just showing up. After all, everyone works for them: Their professors are no different from their hairstylists.

They will actually say, "I deserve an 'A' because I am paying your salary," without any sense of having to hold up their end of the bargain. They do not regard their teachers as accomplished people; snowflakes have already achieved more. Everyone has told them so.

The snowflake has become so ubiquitous in academic life that there is even a blog (http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com) dedicated primarily to smacking them down, if only in anonymous fantasies, like letters to the Penthouse Forum.

Hell's Kitchen includes a few snowflakes in every team; I suppose they are hard to avoid. In the current season, a contestant named Lacey fits the bill. She describes herself, without irony, as having had to overcome being a "pretty face" so that people would take her cooking seriously. In the initial rounds, under the pressures of the kitchen, she walked out and took to her bed while her fellow team members worked, causing them to turn against her. Ramsay moved her to the men's team, and she seems to have changed once it became clear that nobody was going to accept her excuses. In addition to firmness, teamwork seems to melt snowflake behavior because peers are not bound by the ethic of dishonest flattery of the young.

Like tone-deaf wannabes on American Idol, the contestants on Hell's Kitchen are forced to see themselves as others see them, and that can be like a painful conversion experience. They break down. They cry themselves to sleep. There is nowhere to hide; cameras are everywhere. They talk about quitting. Sometimes they lose their will to continue, and, if they don't snap out of it, they are kicked off the program. It happens to seasoned cooks.

But sometimes there are contestants who are completely out of their league, yet they survive through many rounds because they learn quickly and refuse to give up. Hell's Kitchen appears to show, on some level, that snowflakes know that their sensitivity is a pose.

Deep down, there is a stronger self that can be realized if only there is someone--and a set of circumstances--to force them, against their own inertia, to realize their full capabilities.

For teachers in higher education, Hell's Kitchen is a fantasy about having the authority and personal strength to bring out the best in our students. It is, of course, not something that we can live in reality. ("Turn in a pathetic essay like that again and I'll throw you out of here, you brainless sheep. Now piss off!")

We cannot hold our students captive in a panopticon of 24/7 video surveillance, exposing their moments of weakness for criticism. We cannot kick them out of our classes for failing to live up to our highest expectations. We cannot punish students by making them gut squid or reward them with a trip to Le Cirque. We cannot promise them fame and fortune. We can't even promise them a job. Moreover, our task is not to identify the "best" performer, but to improve the performance of everyone in the class.

The artificial conditions of Hell's Kitchen provide Ramsay with a portfolio of motivational tools unavailable to most teachers. But his program does offer a much-needed shot of confidence in the ability of teachers to transform snowflakes into serious students by believing in the value of our disciplines and worrying less about what our students think of us.

It's often said that the toughest teachers receive the highest evaluations. Hell's Kitchen may not correspond precisely to the classroom, but Chef Ramsay's approach--judiciously modified--might encourage some of us to take that leap of faith toward a style of teaching that demands excellence and that our students, beneath the surface, actually want more than inflated praise, permissiveness, and mediocrity.

Not that I recommend using the F-word as a pedagogical tool.

That said, allow me to introduce you to two people you really must meet, if you have not already. The first is Adam Lambert, a star who is being born on the current season of Idol. The second is Susan Boyle, a Scottish spinster whose voice is a reminder that excellence happens in the most unlikely places--and that, as jaded and judgmental and shallow as we collectively are--we still possess the capacity to see that.