I owe a lot to Gary
Mahoney.
He was the campus conservative back in the middle ’70s, when I was a student at the University of Southern California, and we went at it hammer and tongs a few times on the opinion pages of the Daily Trojan. I no longer recall the details of our disagreements. What I do remember is realizing that he was good and that I had to up my game tighten my reasoning, sharpen my logic if I hoped to stay in the ring with him.
He made me better in the same way college itself did. Nearly five decades later, I value those years less for any specific thing I learned in class than for the fact that I learned how to think. Not “what” to think, but how, i.e., how to gather and evaluate information, how to analyze and extrapolate from it, how to defend my ideas in the scrum of intellectual conflict.
Leonard Pitts: No mystery why conservatives find education dangerous
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Pitts: No mystery why conservatives find education dangerous
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