I think there are other ways to expose children to the dangers of the world than putting them in the middle of a stupid high school fight and they get pepper sprayed just going to class.

And an average adult doesn't experience something like that on a daily basis.

You can teach without giving an opinion. You simply present the facts. An education isn't getting brainwashed, it's learning. Getting brainwashed is opinion based.

An excellent post overall. I was, in fact, the product of an overly-cautious secondary education system that avoided discussing any topic that had the slightest possibility of controversy, and hence we ended up naming things and reciting chronologies more than anything :P

I don't quite agree with the final point though. Education at primary/secondary school often does consist of pure information-feeding with little room for dissent, a very unfortunate phenomenon. But the further you go up the academic ladder, the more wriggle room you have - the more you are not only allowed, but encouraged, to have unusual opinions. Education at the higher levels involves an opening up of narrow minds: the questioning of ideas that you took for granted, or ideas that you didn't even know existed, is the prerequisite to finding answers to such questions.

If you voice opinions contrary to mainstream beliefs, naturally you would encounter significant opposition. But this doesn't show that educated people stifle dissent; rather, it shows that the process of academic debate is working. If they didn't oppose your opinions, how would they test whether your theory is defensible, and how would you get the chance to refine it?

Of course, even the most educated people are prone to human errors like bias, favouritism, and stubbornness - sometimes they go beyond academic opposition and into personal enmity. If you propose a theory that opposes someone else's, don't be surprised if they don't like you anymore. If you propose a theory that opposes most other people's theories, don't be surprised if most people don't like you anymore. But this sort of behaviour is hardly an ideal of higher education; it's a fault and rightly recognised as such.

In other cases, apparent restrictions on academic freedom are not put into place by the academic community, but by government policy or public opinion. Take, for example, a piece of headline news from a few years back: A PhD student wrote a thesis on the Holocaust arguing that there were significantly fewer Jewish victims than conventional historians believe. He was awarded his doctorate, and kept it for years until the media uncovered this incident and stirred up tremendous public backlash, and the university had to rescind the degree. Notably, it was the general public - i.e. the generally less educated group - that reacted in favour of curtailing academic freedom. (Note that I'm not arguing in favour of Holocaust revisionism - I'm only raising this as a high-profile example.)

Heh, the very fact that I saw the need to include such a disclaimer shows how much pressure there is to conform, and be clearly seen to conform, to certain accepted statements like "6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust". But the pressure largely comes not from the highest educational echelon of society - while individual academics may feel strongly about this issue, academia in general doesn't pump out tract after tract of denunciations of the Holocaust. It is the popular media and the general public that repeat the ritual phrases "Holocaust denial", "offensive", "neo-Nazi", or "racist", and then these opinions seep into law when politicians seek to ingratiate the voters. In a university classroom, sitting among a dozen postgraduate history students, I wouldn't need to make a disclaimer; it'd be taken for granted that I'm making no comment about it, and that even if I were, it would be a comment that I could back up with sound argument. But in a public forum frequented by people of varying educational backgrounds I cannot assume this.

Educated people, in general, cherish the freedom to argue for any position they like as long as their argument is rational and supported by evidence. The curtailment of this freedom is usually caused by a lack of education: either a loss of rationality on the part of an individual who is so passionate about his theory that he cannot accept opposition, or the submission of the highly educated to the less educated when public opinion prevails.

@BurritoLunch .