Eduation without rebellion - what's the point of that?

As George Ritzer said in an interview in 2002, Universities today are designed not to give students the freedom to think for themselves: 'Students don't want to talk to me about ideas,' he said, 'only about grades'.

Otherworlds is long dead as a course, but it was founded on the principle that it is the thinking that matters, not the grades. At the end of the first lecture I gave on that course a student came to me and said 'What is the key thing we will learn if we take this course'. My answer was simple: 'To think'.

I didn't want to impart facts and 'knowledge' or even to 'educate', I wanted to get each individual student thinking about how they might go out into the world and find things out for themselves in unique and radical new ways that said more about their true human condition than their grade average would at the end of the term. I wanted to wake them up.

Naive perhaps, but I can't be alone in thinking learning should be about something more than getting grades to fit into the best paid jobs. What about learning to live a life which might question and challenge the structures which deny individual freedoms, the structures which give all to the few and nothing to the masses...? The very structures which now govern the educational establishments, which might once have given a few lucky individuals a critical edge to get them thinking there might just be a better way...