[legion]

I eat a Quigley's every time I'm up there! Still, I went through middle school and high school in Naperville. No question the education was excellent, but I saw my grades suffer any time I had an opinion that wasn't exactly the same as a teacher...

For example, in a history class, a teacher assigned us a project supposing our team was the president's cabinet and it was the Great Depression. It was our job to help the country out of it. Every other team flipped ahead in the text book and copied down some New Deal programs. Most got "A"s. We decided it would be best to invade Mexico and Canada steal their resources and enslave its residents. We got a "D". We explained that we would never actually do this, but we didn't see any benefit in copying the textbook either. It didn't help our case.

I ran into this in college too. As a business major, I had one tenured professor for a senior-level management class whose sworn duty was to get us to drop out of the College of Business. I know this because he told us so on the first day. His entire class consisted of studying cases like Bhopal, India, Dalkon Shield, and asbestos. (Enron hadn't happened yet.) We learned nothing about management. I ended up getting a "B" in the class because I didn't adhere to the professor's dogma...and he knew that if he gave me anything lower I would have taken it up with the department head.

Rather than teaching how to objectively evaluate information, I think our education system is preoccupied with imposing what it has judged is the acceptable viewpoint.