Back in the 1970s, when I lived in Europe, Europeans were delighted and envious of American education, which, they proclaimed, focused on teaching students to think for themselves. "The more the student disagrees with the professor," they extolled, "the more delighted he is!"
Fast-forward to today.
Conformity is demanded. "Education" has become indoctrination. To think for oneself is anathema. Dissenting opinions are crushed.
Once treasured American education institutions have degenerated into crass hubs of low standards and intellectual and moral confusion.
This is part of the decadence of Western Civilization in America. All standards are lowered.
The great tragedy is the lowering of standards of education. The pursuit of truth--truth for its own sake--the utter foundation of Western Civilization, with all its priceless gifts--is abandoned, and by the very people to whom was entrusted this sacred duty.
Read Excellent Sheep from 2014, written by a Yale professor about Yale students. The successful candidates for Harvard, Yale, almost any medical school all are outstanding in any measure of general intelligence that can be devised (legacies and DEI excepted).
But in the current and rising generation they also share a characteristic which their very high IQs and adaption of sociability conceal, which is what the book is about.
THEY ARE EXTREME CONFORMISTS. They are, "excellent sheep".
At an early age, and partly because they are so smart, they are better than their other smart beings at scoping out what will please the teacher, and eventually the professor. These students have an unusually fine tuned sense of discovering what THEY want, and how to give them bucket loads of it.
The problem with this is their deficiency at problem solving when the pre-existing rules, the anterior probabilities if you will, are unspecified.
In military science, this gives us Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Gaza. In medicine, it gives us unswerving adherence to "guidelines", all of which require firm belief that the diagnosis given to one at the start of a shift or when first encountering a problem is correct.
I was taught to question the diagnosis - always. It was in fact beaten into me, until it eventually became routine. Ask a student now who tells you a patient has, say, pneumonia, "OK, how do you know?" and more often than not they don't understand the question.
The elite students don't have to be indoctrinated. They ALREADY KNOW what "they" want, how to give it, and that their place in the ruling class depends on it.