I’ve written about this in the past, but I think it’s the type of thing that deserves thorough repetition. This comes from Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda, by way of quotation in the prologue to John Taylor Gatto’s Underground History of American Education:

The individual has no chance to exercise his judgment either on principal questions or on their implication; this leads to the atrophy of a faculty not comfortably exercised under [the best of] conditions…Once personal judgment and critical faculties have disappeared or have atrophied, they will not simply reappear when propaganda is suppressed…years of intellectual and spiritual education would be needed to restore such faculties. The propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda, will immediately adopt another, this will spare him the agony of finding himself vis a vis some event without a ready-made opinion.

I really resonate with what Ellul is saying here, because I often get accused here of “talking about things that I don’t know about.” Which is laughable to me, because investigating and diving headfirst into the unknown is more or less the whole fucking point of education as I see it. I think you’ve got to exercise your judgemental capacities if you want to get anything done. But the trick is to be always honest about it, to put your biases on the table, and to accept revision of your assumptions when you’re presented with better information and reasoning.