Once upon a time, education was supposed to be about training people to think. In the Middle Ages, you had to learn Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric (the "Trivia") before you actually got into the "real" studies. Knowing how to read and write, how to follow an argument, and how to express one were considered the elementary stuff.
Not any more. Now that these skills, once considered elementary, are nearly vanished, the aim seems to be to preclude debate, not to foster it. Why do you think the libs are so apoplectic about talk radio? I will take the liberty of answering for you: They don't have any confidence in their ability to defend their position, though they have a religious certainty of its rightness. And the attempt to silence or preclude debate (the natural resort of the ideological monopolists) is in the best tradition of the Spanish Inquisition (bet you didn't expect that!)