Universities may have cured us of some forms of indoctrination but exposed us to others: for example, nuclear power was demonized for decades is academia and our avoiding it has set us back as a civilization.

The "answer" here isn't education per se. A would-be censor might look at the spread of an inconvenient idea and conclude the education isn't working and therefore harder measures are justified.

The answer is epistemic humility and historical literacy. A good education instills both. They teach us that one can be wrong without shame, that testing ideas makes us stronger, and that no good has come out of boost ideas beyond what their merits can support.

Specifically, I want universities to do a much better job of teaching people to argue a perspective with which they disagree. A well-educated person can hold the best version of his opponent's idea in mind and argue it persuasively enough that his opponent agrees that he's been fairly heard. If people can't do that at scale, they're tempted to reach for censorship instead of truth seeking.

Another thing I want from universities (and all schools) is for them to inculcate the idea that the popularity of an idea has nothing to do with its merits. The irrational primate brain up-weights ideas it sees more often. The censor (if we're steelmanning) believes that coordinated influence campaigns can hijack the popularity heuristic and make people believe things they wouldn't if those ideas diffused organically through the information ecosystem.

This idea is internally consistent, sure, but 1) the censorship "cure" is always worse than the disease, and 2) we can invest in bolstering epistemics instead of in beefing up censorship.

We are rational primates. We can override popularity heuristics. Doing so is a skill we must be taught, however, and one of the highest ROI things we can do in education right now is teach it.

> Most people don’t even have an internal monologue

Is there any scientific indication that whether private thoughts are automatically verbalized actually has an impact on cognitive activity or function?

Also where do you get this idea that most people lack an internal monologue? Afaik research indicates that totally lacking verbal thinking is very rare.