"Propaganducation"

When I reflect on my time in class at North Central College (which, as my peers will tell you, was neither long nor frequent), I find that my Economics classes were strikingly different. And I'm not going to paint North Central as the "bad guy". That's not the idea here. There are no good guys or bad guys. Just "guys".

Anyway, I always felt like my NCC Econ classes really championed free markets with unwaivering support. The overtone that resonated above all my Econ classes seemed to be "Free markets are awesome. Government intervention screws things up. Teh End." And yes, "teh" is intentional. Of course, I felt I could tolerate this. After all, NCC is a private college. Hence, I was attending a very pro-free market school. I guess the unsettling thing about it was that I felt like North Central was a political breeding ground in that way. That is, I often felt like some of the things I was learning in my classes was "breeding" Conservativism in me. I guess that's no crime. Every prof has a bias. I should be equally as concerned if NCC was breeding Liberalism en masse. Colleges ought to be fairly objective in regard to politics in the classroom. Of course, they're not. All you need to do is look at University of California-Berkeley or University of Colorado-Boulder or Wheaton College....I think it's pretty obvious that politics are alive in the classroom.

I guess my beef with the whole thing is that I don't like being told what to think. I don't like being told that I must view something a certain way and hear only one side of the story. Is that really education at all? It's more like (and I made this word up just now) "propaganducation". And I can point to many times where I felt like both sides of a certain issue were equally represented in class. But I think it needs to be a hallmark of every school. I think schools need to stress it more. Schools should abide by this saying (and I just made this up just now)..."We won't teach you what to think. We will teach you how to think." Because isn't that what colleges/universities should be doing? Am I totally off-base here? Well, that's enough for now. Until next time, I'm robbymcdobby saying, "Always tip your local pizza delivery boy."