Are we creating a society without thinkers or thinking?

Comment published on New York Times online blog in response to Paul Krugman, Times columnist, “Intellectuals, Politics, and Bad Faith,” New York Times, June 4, 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/opinion/conservative-free-speech.html?comments#commentsContainer

The right-wing is mostly media-based and involves making ad hominem attacks against scholars and others they disagree with rather than actual arguments. The left-wing is university and art-world based. While these rows and harassments are happening, our public schools have already mostly renounced literature and critical thinking through writing; they "teach" by commanding the students to obediently remember facts. Our universities have turned to a corporate model with bloated administrations, and increasingly cheap casual labor for teaching without scholarship or writing. Financing is through massive and crippling student debt, and students are encouraged by market pressures to only learn business or tech skills, while humanities majors are cut back. 

This is part of the dumbing-down of America. We may already not have a functioning citizenry of thinking people. As has long been common in this country, reasoning is a dirty word, and debates or negotiations are replaced by angry fights. The media are not good forums for stimulating thought, but turn on sound bytes, impressions, and contagious "memes."

Scared students desperate for the few high-paying jobs they need to pay the debts demand to be taught what and as they want, and compete furiously with peers partly through rows about the minority status that liberalism puts in place of social criticism and change. 

Academics have one thing in their favor: the discourses and methods of their own disciplines.