#powerless students

Critical thinking skills are best taught from the beginning.  Reasoning, learning facts, trying out experiments, observing what other people have done.  This is already what children are wired to do, and they're constantly doing it.  But by the time they've reached a prestigious college, what they've mostly learned is conformity, learning what will be tested and spouting it on command.  They've already learned that teachers don't actually want honest, blunt answers.  They've learned to be mealy-mouthed, polite, tactful, disingenuous, because that's what's rewarded in school.  They've learned that their peers will abuse them verbally and possibly physically if they stick outside the norm too much, and they've learned that some teachers will not humbly accept criticism but will lash out.  They also learned that students are, in the end, powerless.  Powerless to change the system, powerless to say, I want to take these classes and not those, powerless to say, this is an asinine set of requirements with little bearing on what I want to do with my life, and make it stick.