After four years on campus and countless classes, I’ve participated in my fair share of classroom discussions. Some have been more lively than others, that’s for sure.

But it wasn’t until this semester that I began taking notice of how these classroom discussions have yet to foster any extreme disagreement with a professor, and a questioning of the credibility of statements made by lecturers.

To make it clear, I don’t believe that professors don’t know what they are talking about, but there is seldom any challenge to a professor by students. Instead, we learn passively and take for granted that what we are learning is “the truth.”

But what kind of education does this foster? Not a very good one, I would say. The point is, discussion and learning should not be a passive task, especially at the college level. If we adults with hopefully some strong, well-formed opinions disagree with something a professor is telling us, we should say something. And on the flip side of that coin, professors should welcome the disagreement.

In an opinion piece for Huffington Post, Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, an educator and writer, stated: “Many teachers have observed that students sitting in classrooms today are bored by the frontal authoritarian model of learning.” And how true is the use of “authoritarian?”

We’ll sit in classes and take notes on the professor’s Powerpoint slides (which could probably take up a whole other opinion column for me) and take for granted what they say — but this is not fostering good learning.

In some ways, I think this passive learning is equally the fault of students and professors. Discussions are used in almost every class offered on campus, yet how often are we too passive to really argue during a discussion, or feel like we can argue without being singled out and worried our grade might suffer?

I’ve always been an opinionated person, and while I’m fairly quiet, I’ve never really been one to speak out in class. That is, until this semester. I’m currently enrolled in a class that is primarily discussion based. While we mostly talk about cultural topics, the discussion will often veer to talking slightly about a certain issue that is all over the news. And, of course, my opinions differ greatly from that of the professor and some of the more vocal students.

But whenever this topic of discussion is brought up, I feel the pressure to keep my mouth shut, because my views (which are actually pretty moderate) differ from those of the professor and the other students. And over the course of this past weekend, I finally realized how that impacted my learning experience in this class. I’m an opinionated person, I’ll grant you that, but I’ve never been one who is not ready to discuss why I believe what I do.

I need to be challenged and questioned in order to learn, and I believe a lot of other students do, too. And professors, in order to have what they are teaching students stay relevant and fresh, need to be challenged once in a while as well.

We can’t have a full education until there is a healthy argument once in a while.