We came back to school exhausted wrecks. We could hardly walk upright. If thought were pieces of desert sand on the beach, we would have linked one or two of them. The rest was putting together what we knew from others and many would argue that we were deceiving ourselves about that. We need to reconstruct objectivity into a more coherent statement useful to our purposes, not disregard it because the dictionary meaning puts it on an unrealistic pedestal.
Education means using our culture's common sense to go beyond it.
That is as close to thinking for ourselves as we can come. That's plenty close enough for me and many of my students. Their term for it is honesty. My term for it is sociology. My challenge is to make the changing findings and mentalities of our intellectual age comprehensible to students.