I'm not sure I completely agree about college, but I'm willing also to cop to having attended a very small liberal arts university, and I share some of your skepticism about the effect of the curriculum. It's the people you're around and the experience of being away from the conditions that shape you that produce the changes in viewpoint that conservatives seem to hate so much, not your English professor assigning you some hoary treatise by Derrida or an antediluvian work of Marxist theory.
You don't read the Great Books to "learn how to think"
I'm not sure I completely agree about college, but I'm willing also to cop to having attended a very small liberal arts university, and I share some of your skepticism about the effect of the curriculum. It's the people you're around and the experience of being away from the conditions that shape you that produce the changes in viewpoint that conservatives seem to hate so much, not your English professor assigning you some hoary treatise by Derrida or an antediluvian work of Marxist theory.