How Academia's Echo Chamber Problem Could Be Reduced

There is a gigantic problem in today's universities and colleges: the fact that the classes of such institutions often act like echo chambers that repeat endlessly the dubious dogmas and "old wives' tales" of academia, which are often groundless triumphal boasts.  Consider a typical lecture hall in a large university. We have many students gathered together in front of some professor, who maybe has a giant screen to make his dubious truth claims. Typically there will be no student comments allowed until a brief "Question Period" at the end of the lecture. In such a "question period" students are supposed to merely ask questions, not dispute claims that the professor has made. The lecture hall may look like this:

Dumb dogma taught at a college

In such an environment, there is no real opportunity for a student to challenge dubious claims of a professor. If the student stands up and says something of substantial length, he will probably be told to "keep it short" so that other students can ask their questions. Moreover, the student will fear that if he stands up and disputes the professor's teaching, that this will negatively impact his grade. 

We have in such an environment an "echo chamber" effect. The students are all being conditioned to think that good students accept whatever the professor teaches. A student may fear very much standing up and making some point or discussing some experience that may cause him to be ridiculed as an oddball or an outcast. Imagine the professor is claiming that people who report psychic experiences are all liars or mentally disturbed.  Will a student dare stand up and make a statement like this:

"No, professor, you are engaging in a shameful gaslighting of  witnesses of the paranormal. Many millions of respectable people are such witnesses, and they tend to be regular, good-thinking people just like me. I myself once saw the apparition of my dead father, before I learned that he died. And very many other people have had the same type of experience." 

Will a student dare stand and say such a thing, knowing that the professor will probably make some facial expression that serves as a "laugh, students, laugh" signal, leading to a cascade of ridicule and scorn? Probably not. In such an environment an echo chamber will be preserved. 

But I can imagine some ways in which the echo chambers in academia could be busted, so that real debate could occur. One way would be to have a two-screen system. Any professor giving a lecture could use the large screen shown on the left in the visual below. The large screen on the right would be reserved for student comments, which would be displayed as soon as the comments were typed and submitted. It would be an anonymous system, so that any student could type a comment without anyone knowing that he had sent the comment. Since all the students would be taking notes on their laptops or digital pad devices, no one could know which student had sent the comment. 

We would then have healthy situations like the one depicted below, in which the comment on the right is an anonymous comment by one of the students in the class. 

Academia's "echo chamber" problem could also be reduced by having all-electronic college textbooks, textbooks that allow any student to anonymously insert a comment at any point in the textbook, causing all other students to read his or her comment when they read from that page. So if page 233 of a textbook teaches some silly old legend of academia, and student John Smith recognizes why the page is making a dubious claim, John Smith will have the power to insert a comment into page 233 of that textbook, causing all of his fellow students to see his comment when they come to that page. 

Academia's "echo chamber" problem could also be reduced by encouraging online student newspapers that include anonymous essays. In such essays students could make negative commentaries on any college lectures they received that had shortcomings of credibility.  A typical essay might have a title such as "Why Professor Smith's Biology Lecture This Week Was Largely Unbelievable Nonsense." 

Another idea for reducing the "echo chamber" problem of academia would be to phase out or sharply reduce the moldy old custom of requiring students to attend professor lectures. The custom of educating students by having students assemble for lectures in front of some teacher is a custom that made sense before the invention of the printing press. In the age of the Internet and very powerful and affordable digital devices, the custom no longer makes much sense. Almost anything you want to learn you can learn by reading information online and by watching free online videos; so professors giving in-person lectures are no longer needed for most fields of study. Advances in AI do very much to make conventional classroom habits outdated and unnecessary.  It is becoming less and less necessary to even have professors to grade papers, as such routine work can be largely automated by AI systems. 

Having people listen to lectures is not even a very efficient way for above-average students to learn. For anyone with good reading skills, reading tends to be a faster way to learn things than listening. Reading also has the advantage that you can go back and re-read some passage, and vary your reading pace, reading more slowly the more important and hard-to-understand parts, and skimming over  "boilerplate" material of less importance. You can't do that while listening to a professor lecture. 

So in an age when people can educate themselves very well at low cost through independent study without going to college lectures, why do universities still teach students as they were taught thousands of years ago at Plato's Academy, by having a group of about 30 students gathered around taking notes while some expert talks? It is partially for profit reasons, to justify exorbitant tuition fees. A college or university may try to maintain the no-longer-true idea that you need to learn by listening to some highly paid professor, as a justification for some $40,000 annual tuition it charges. 

Another reason is that the old outdated tradition of having students listen to endless in-person lectures from authorities is one that helps with the ideological indoctrination that is a huge factor in the business of today's universities. We must always remember that colleges and universities are ideological enclaves, belief communities dedicated to the propagation of old belief traditions such as Darwinism and materialism. If you are someone trying to preserve some old belief tradition, the last thing you want is for people to study a topic by independent inquiry involving seeking out information and opinions equally from very many diverse sources. Instead, what you want is to preserve some old authoritarian teaching tradition that helps to enforce a conformist echo chamber, and that encourages a semi-mindless kneeling to authority. So we continue to have endless college and university lectures in biology and psychology that can be schematically depicted like this, with the "blah blah blah" parts representing cherry-picked facts or dubious boasts:

The authoritarian "mind-kneel to your master" dynamics in such a conformist lecture hall are exactly the same as in the conformist lecture halls of seminaries training preachers or priests, with the "suppression of dissent" effect and the "follow the herd" effect being ruthlessly effective. It's a crappy way for people to learn about topics such as biology and psychology, but great for enforcing old socially-constructed belief customs.