Indoctrination in Education

Among those with a sense of mission are those who teach the young, whether teachers in the schools or professors in colleges and universities.  Those among the academics or school teachers who lack either the inclination or the talent to become public intellectuals can instead vent their opinions in the classroom to a captive audience of students, operating in a smaller arena but in a setting with little chance of serious challenge.  In such settings, their aggregate influence on the mindset of a generation may be out of all proportion to their competence — not simply in what they directly impart, but more fundamentally in habituating their students to reaching sweeping conclusions after hearing only one side of an issue and then either venting their emotions or springing into action, whether by writing letters to public officials as part of classroom assignments or taking part in other, more direct activism.  In these cases as well, there are few, if any, constraints beforehand and no accountability for the consequences afterwards.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.515