Excerpts - education

The Value Of Dissent by William G. Bowen, Forbes, September, 2010 -

In all that it does, a university...needs to have a clear understanding of the special place that it occupies in society...Its purpose is not to indoctrinate but to educate...The historian Lawrence Stone...wrote, "whenever society is precarious--and it usually is--there is inevitably a demand that dissidents and heretics be suppressed."

"The new ideal," to create open and adaptable minds ready to question and challenge established facts and conventional wisdom, did not really take hold in this country until the early part of the nineteenth century. "I want to stress," Stone said, "how novel this [the new ideal] was, and how rare and fragile... For most of recorded history, those in authority have thought it wiser to create closed minds than open minds, to educate students to conform to traditional values and to follow the accepted wisdom."...Our insistence today on openness and independence is rooted in a distinct educational philosophy that embraces critical thinking and active debate as the best ways of pursuing truth, correcting old errors, and developing new ideas...constructive dissent is a form of loyalty.... full text