I like "dropout" as an addition to the American Dream language because it's brief and it's clear. What I don't like is that we use it almost entirely as a dirty word. We only apply it to people under twenty-one. Yet an adult who spends his days and nights watching mindless TV programs is more of a drop out than an eighteen-year-old who quits college, with its frequentl mindless courses, to become, say, a VISTA volunteer. For the young, dropping out is often a way of dropping in. To hold this opinion, however, is little shoer of treason in America. A boy or girl who leaves college is branded a failure- and the right to fail is one of the few freedoms that this country does not grant its citizens. The American Dream is a dream of "getting ahead", painted in strokes of gold whereever we look. Our advertisements and TV commercials are a hymn to material success, our magazine articles a toast to people who made it to the top. Smoke the right cigarette or drive the right car- so the ads imply- and girls will be swooning into your deodorized arms or caressing your expensive lapels. Happiness goes to the man who has the sweet smell of achievement. He is our national idol, and everybody else is our national fink.
Objectivity by researchers has not, and probably never will be attained. People will always have biases; some will be created by cultural values and others by personal views. The search for objectivity lies in the realm of philosophy along with the search for reality. Even though objectivity can never be reached, people are better at making observations, discoveries, and decisions if they attempt to set aside their biases.

As I have learned in my Theory of Knowledge class, perception and thought are intimately connected. While the same rays of light may enter two different peoples eyes, what they see may be very different. The brain takes the input from the eyes and processes it to form an image. That image is not the only thing the brain produces; it also provides extra information based on generalizations and bias. This unconscious addition of information changes the observation of an object. By attempting to reduce the addition of extraneous information being added to the observation, by being objective, a true observation of an object can be more closely approximated.

Discoveries, especially in the scientific realm can be doubly