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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by unchallenged? Marxist ideas are challenged every day, almost everywhere you go. Now, even if they are wrong (I am not going to enter into this discussion), studying them would increase your critical thinking abilities in trying to disprove them. So, the professor was right all along!

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That largely depends on the depth of the engagement.

Reading Das Kapital should be an exercise in critical thinking, regardless of one's political persuasion. For example, where in the software industry is the labor theory of value a reasonable model? Where is it not reasonable? Why? Answering these questions requires what any reasonable person would call critical thinking.

Conversely, hearing a bunch of passionate lectures about worker's rights movements is considerably less enlightening...

I don't see any problem with passionate lectures about worker's rights movement. In college I also heard passionate lectures about the marvel of free markets, and had to endure them. Different professors have different persuasions and that is all right, they're not trying to fool anyone. It is up to each one to form his or her personal views of the world, and use the information they get from history and philosophy to enlarge these views.

By "unchallenged", I presume thescribe means that the professor gave only the pro-Marx side of the story, and gave it as if it were The Truth. They called it critical thinking, but it was really just propaganda.

I understood exactly what he said. But any college student knows fully well that there's nothing that is The Truth in a class, after all this is not a church. I believe that if the professor presented only the pro-Marx side of the story this is just fine, after all, this is America, everyone knows the other side of the story. For the professor to present the arguments anti-Marx in his class would in fact be just the opposite: capitalist indoctrination, where you would be lead to believe that Marx was really wrong and capitalism is the only "correct" system.

> I believe that if the professor presented only the pro-Marx side of the story this is just fine, after all, this is America, everyone knows the other side of the story.

That's probably true.

> For the professor to present the arguments anti-Marx in his class would in fact be just the opposite: capitalist indoctrination, where you would be lead to believe that Marx was really wrong and capitalism is the only "correct" system.

Also probably true.

The problem, though, is that the professor is only presenting the Marx side, while claiming to teach critical thinking. That's not critical thinking! Critical thinking means criticizing both sides.

Now, if the professor wanted to teach the Marx side "as a balance to what everybody else says", that's OK too. The problem is the one-side-only combined with the claim of "critical thinking".

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