Academia poses a huge danger to true intellect. In university, students consume information, process it, memorize it, and take it as absolute truth. If humans in the past did this, we would perhaps still think we are the center of the universe. If Einstein did this, we would never have calculus. we are in danger today of brain-death. People are susceptible to believing everything they read if it is printed in a book, if a professor teaches it in a classroom.
We fail to realize that nothing is absolute, nothing is final. this is why academia is a danger to true intellect. Students get in to the habit of blind acceptance, for they are taught to trust and worship every word that slips from the mouths of their professors. students aren’t asked to question or to challenge what they read and hear, but process it, compare it, rewrite it–rather than invent something of their own, something critical and examined.
And this habit, of reprocessing, of letting others do the real thinking, leaks out in to their daily lives. They define love by the spectacles and exhibitions that Hollywood produces, through emulating television stars, they develop loose morals and lack principles, they desensualize and devalue sex, they degrade the value of relationships-romantic and platonic. Academia needs to shift before it destroys our minds.
