I was fascinated to read that the U.S. Army is now training soldiers to be professional skeptics.  The era of the yes man may be in jeopardy.  At Ft. Leavenworth's University of Foreign Military and Culture over 140 solders have been trained to question   conventional wisdom.  They are referred to as Red Team University and their unique mission is to serve their units by questioning battle plans or other military doctrine in order to assure that more appropriate options were not overlooked.
It seems that the military understands that group think can lead to faulty conclusions and dangerous assumptions.  In our community, there is an unspoken acceptance of consensus thinking that cries out for honest skepticism.  Such thinking results in conclusions that effect how we work, worship, learn, and even dream.  Our version of group think has concluded that work is for suckers, that being literate and facile in spoken English is a worthless attempt to be white, that women are simply pieces of tail to be used and abused, that having a job is preferable to owning a business, that only one political party  really cares about our community, etc
What we need more of today is skeptical thinking; men and women who are unwilling to accept the conventional wisdom of our past.  If we continue to think or act as we always have, then we should never expect the future to be different.  If we continue to wait for the largess of the majority to somehow make life for our children better, then we will wait forever and see nothing any better for them than we have seen for ourselves.
Therefore, now more than ever, it is important that we examine the common thinking of our day in the light of critical suspicion.  Skepticism is never popular.  Skeptics make us nervous.   They appear irreverent, unconventional, and untrustworthy. But skepticism may be the only real therapy for the unquestioning thinking that has kept us in intellectual bondage for too long.