"It is very nearly impossible to become an educational person in a country so untrustworthy of the independent mind."

In a country, or rather, if truth be spoken, in a world where conformist mindsets are all the rage, and one’s attempts to steer away from any type of mainstream thinking are viewed upon with skepticism and open-mouthed contempt, one can’t help but lose touch of what it truly means to attain a state of mind that is liberated from the shackles and constraints of society. One can’t help but be intimidated by the prospect of questioning, much less criticizing norms that have already been set in stone. One can’t help but delude oneself into thinking that education does not entail independence of mind, but perhaps more importantly, one can’t help but lose sight of the discerning line between dependence and interdependence of mind. In a time and era so predominately reigned by the media, anything and everything that contains even the slightest semblance of significance in our lives is at the mercy of the venom spread by the slow-poisoning of censorship, with common people only being exposed to that which the beau monde has spread out for us.

Let’s say in the critical thinking section of the SATs, where students are expected to ‘critically analyze’ the passages, does it never occur to us that our frame of mind being limited to a mere set of five multiple-choice answer options undermines the very essence of critical thinking altogether? Does it never cross our mind that our failure to recognize the impositions that have been levied on the fundamental growth process of our mind means that we have resigned ourselves to this pseudo veneer of intellectual independence, when in truth what lies behind this veil of feigned free-thinking is, in fact, heaps and heaps of carefully constructed ignorance? As the media and the government slowly but surely mold us into a populace that is unable to challenge the established nuances, and we become fashioned to believe every word they say, it leads to us following their muted instructions blindly. In fact, we have grown so acquainted to this notion of playing the role of the cat’s paw, that following their instructions, their fads, and their trends has become as commonplace as reading instructions on recipes off a cookbook. We correlate their words to the words of the Bible, failing to realize that there lies a world outside the idiot box. It is world within the realm of our minds, and it yearns to march to it’s own drummer.

Zuha Jamil