Whatever happened to objective eduacation?!

Submitted by Amendment9 (Israel), Feb 9, 2005 at 12:08

When I was in high school, I had a truly great history teacher who was fond of quoting a famous statement on free speech (I forget who the source was), the gist of which was: "Though I may hate what you say, I'll defend to the death your right to say it." -- He liked to encourage students in our debates to research and defend opinions to which we were opposed, just so they could be well informed on different sides of an issue. Can any of these outrageous professors even BEGIN to conceive of such a concept?? I'm sure their response would be something like: "What do you MEAN, argue the opposing side of my opinion?? There IS NO opposing side!!"

To me this is truly an insane development in so-called "higher" (and I use the term loosely) education. This is coming from a person who considered himself quite a radical (leftist) in the 1960s, but EVEN THEN I at least had the integrity to stay informed, in a substantial way, of the opinions and rationale of the conservatives.

What is happening now is TRULY frightening. Just why do opposing ideas scare these radical leftist professors so much? Could it be that they are merely COWARDS hiding behind the red herring "free speech?" - and quick to shout "McCarthyite" at anyone who dares to criticism them? - when it actually THEY who are the TRUE McCarthyites? They are either too arrogant ot just too LAZY to consider viewpoints other than their own, and apparently need their students to be sycophants instead of performing their true duty of educating them how to think for themselves. The only way to achieve this is to allow exposure to a variety of viewpoints.

---

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".