There are reasons for this. Institutes of higher learning have a mandate to not only foster discovery but to preserve and conserve knowledge that has been learned in the past. There is an inherent suspicion of challenges to established doctrine. For the most part, this is good, because to become established, new information needs to pass through a very high hurdle.

However, there are also many pressures to conform to ideologies that are just taken for granted and not justified. When writing a thesis, advisers tend to apply pressure to favor their pet theories. This inhibits the freedom to really explore the full scope of ideas because typically one is encouraged to just make a minor adjustment to the current system, not a complete overhaul.

Anyway, the reason the topic of this post came up in the first place was that I read this new article this morning called 14 Examples of Revolutionary Students and it made me realize how prone most of us are to just play the game the way we are told to play it. Sometimes I wish more of us (including myself) had the guts to seek real change.