Democracy Survives When Students Taught How to Think, Not What to Think, Nov. 18, 1925

Breathe Free Thought Frank Urges Students. . . Brillian President of University of Wisconsin Declares Colleges Should Teach “How” Not “What” to Think

Democracy may be stabbed to death in its universities.

Everything depends upon the kind of universities a democracy develops. Universities that teach their students WHAT to think are a danger to democracy. Universities that teach their students HOW to think and then trust them to decide what to think from year to year in a growing world are democracy’s one indispensable safeguard.

The university Is not a retail store dealing in facts; the university is a temporary retreat from the world where young men and women may breathe the air of freedom and achieve emancipation from the obsolete dogmas, the unworthy loyalties, the irrational inhibitions, the tribal conformities, and the cowardly precautions that crush and kill the uneducated mind.

May I repeat that if the university attempts to safeguard popular thought by teaching the students what to think instead of how to think the university becomes the betrayer instead of the savior of democracy. Trying to run a university with a set of changeless doctrines instead of with courageous and creative minds is like sending a child into live equipped with book maxims instead of character.

--Glenn Frank

From the front page of the Maroon and Gold, student newspaper at Elon College, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 1925

newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/2015236757/1925-11-18/ed-1/seq-1/