Epistemological Panic, or Thinking for Yourself

I have been a college teacher for some of the happiest years of my life. When I tell people what I do for a living, what I really do, I say I teach people to think for themselves. It’s still a wonderful way to make a living, but over time I have begun wondering whether I have been fooling myself. I could just be teaching them to think like me, or how to package the conventional wisdoms that they have scraped off the Internet. I find myself wondering, therefore, what it really means to think for yourself, what it means for teachers, for students, and for a society that tells itself it is free.

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