For your second paper, I would like you to take a position in response to the idea that education changes who we are as people. Rather than give you a single, prescribed prompt to respond to, I’d like you to explore a position that you find intriguing and would like to explore further. Some possible directions you might take would be

  * Should learning change us?

  * How do, or should, we respond to challenging ideas/concepts that we encounter in our education?

  * Is the primary responsibility of a college education that of preparing us for a vocation or that of challenging our ideas of how the world works?

  * Is college a level playing field in which students and faculty can explore new and challenging ideas equally, or does the unequal power relationship make this kind of exploration impossible, making it more of an “indoctrination factory”?

Just to be clear, I am not asking you to write a paper in which you address ALL of the above questions in a formulaic fashion. They each represent a single paper topic, and you might think of a question you’d like to explore that isn’t on my list.