It depends partly on your fellow students. What's your impression of their open-mindedness?
You're bringing back memories of a class I took where I thought the teacher was wrong about a number of things (sorry, details forgotten), and being told a number of times by fellow students that they were there to listen to the teacher and not to me.
I'd say that what you're dealing with is not an emergency, and if you want to oppose those ideas to a large extent (if you want to do disagreement in class now and then, I'm not going to argue with you), post it at a social website where students are likely to see it.
My impression of their open mindedness is that it really is an individual thing. Some people agree with me because they want to please people (which isn't what I'm after),
Some people disagree with me and hit me with a confident "but that's just your opinion" (which drives me absolutely insane, what can you even do here?)
Some people listen to my arguments, think about them (this is what I'm after), then come to some sort of conclusion.
I suppose its the second group of people that really frustrate me and make me want to not bother. I say that the i...
I think that raising the sanity waterline is a worthwhile goal, but picking your battles is absolutely necessary. It doesn't matter how formidable your argument is if you're arguing in the comments of a youtube video, you've lost by default. So where is the line in the sand? Where would you feel compelled to take action, and to what lengths would you go to? What price would you be willing to pay?
I'm a psychology student, third year and currently doing a unit called "cultural psychology". The lecturer has advanced notions of "multiple truths" and how "reality is socially constructed". To quote him directly in regards to this:
"There is a tendency for those who believe in one reality to use the physical world as a basis for argument, while those who believe in multiple realities use the social world. Even in physics we have 'reality' changing as you get closer to the speed of light, and the laws of physics don't apply prior to the big bang. These are fairly extreme situations. In this course we are dealing with social realities and the point is that different cultures operate in worlds that can be quite different. To see this purely as a perspective risks the dominant social grouping seeing their reality as the true reality, and others as having a different perspective on that reality. The assumption that cultures can have different realities places every on a level playing field with a dominant culture calling all the shots."
You can see in the last line the conclusion he wants his premises to support. The exercise is not to pick his argument apart, find all the holes and write a crushing riposte (although you can if you're so inclined).
The question is, if the goal is to raise the sanity waterline, is this a battle worth picking?