Liberal Education vs. Conservative Education

A liberal education is about:

- Fostering critical thinking skills.
- Giving students a rational framework to distinguish fact from fiction.
- Exposing students to a wide array of information.
- Letting the students exercise their critical thinking skills by digesting the information, deciding what is fact and what is fiction, and forming their own conclusions.
- Encouraging them to constantly question authority, question the status quo and challenge "established facts" using their critical thinking skills.

A conservative education consists of:

- Establishing an Authoritative Source for All Knowledge.
- Disseminating that knowledge by rote memorization.
- Locking the doors on the knowledge. Nothing you hear after this is true. Stick with what you know.
- When faced with new information that contradicts the established Authoritative Source, close your eyes, plug your ears, recite the facts you know, and wait for the new information to go away.
- Under no circumstances should conservatives ever doubt what they "know to be true", no matter how compelling the evidence to the contrary.

I ask you. Which of these approaches to absorbing complex information, analyzing data and making decisions makes the most sense as an approach for solving societies problems?

Go!