The problem I have with college is that, unlike K-12 schools, I have the ability to think critically and form my own opinions independent of others. College is supposed to be, or perhaps historically, a place to seek truth and engage in rigorous intellectual discourse. Recently, however, I have found myself in several seminars where I am being told what is morally correct and what is truth, as if the presenter has direct access to Truth. I regularly think about Plato's three pillars of knowledge and I find myself being told beliefs with poor justification. I understand that there are many beliefs that are true and therefore comprise knowledge, but there have been many things in human history that we believed to be knowledge, but were missing truth. What annoys me is that not only may we be lacking truth, the justification isn't all that good either. In college, we should at least be able to have reasonable justification for our beliefs, but I see a lot of poor justification for morals that people want to believe. Or on the other hand, morals they don't want to believe. There is a lot of room for discussion still on what is moral and what is not, but we can't even agree about what the moral being discussed means. There are alternative definitions for facts that are plain to see and we are left with a confusing, often hypocritical, and self-comforting belief about the world.
I'm not sure if this form of education is a good or bad thing. It's possible that the world runs on cognitive dissonance because it allows us to not get caught up on things we don't understand, but it feels to me that college would be a great space and moment to get caught up on the things we don't understand. There is an issue, of course, with setting up college as a time for intellectual discourse, which is that most people are not attending college to participate in discourse. They want to be told what to believe and to walk away with a good job.
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