You can lead a student to knowledge but you can’t make them think. Case in point:   as a freshman at Stanford, I refused to read Marx and Engels.  Indeed, I refused to attend the lecture introducing Marx for my track of the Western Culture program.  I’d have to dig up my syllabus again to double check, but I believe the expert lecturer whose talk I disdained to hear was none other than Sidney Hook. Why not read Marx? Because Marx meant Communism, and Communism was anti-American.  It was a dangerous, pernicious idea or set of ideas, and I felt that Read more