[T]he range of alternatives students should be invited to consider, though not limitless, needs to be wide. Liberal-arts education is not catechism class. Students should not simply be presented with officially approved views—even if they are the right views. I want my own students to consider seriously a range of possibilities, including some—Marxism, for example—that I think are not only unsound but also reprehensible, and whose record in human affairs is a record of death and abomination. I certainly want them to hear the profound arguments advanced against Marxism by people like Friedrich Hayek, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and John Paul II, but I also want them to understand how it was that Marxism could have attracted the allegiance of many intelligent and even morally serious (if seriously misguided) people. I want them to know the arguments Marx and his most intelligent disciples made. In fact, I want them to consider these arguments fairly on their merits. The task of the liberal-arts teacher, as I envisage it, is not to tell students what to think; it is to teach them to think . . . carefully, critically, and for themselves.
(Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism, American Ideals and Institutions Series, ed. Robert P. George [Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2013], 35 [ellipsis added])
