I hope I can do something that promotes free thinking in the future such as becoming a research professor or simply doing mathematical research, but i honestly hate the way that the formal modern educational system is put together (if your referring to educational stand point). The way i see it is this, if your goal is to find new knowledge or pioneer a new way of thinking, then school is not the place for you. Think about it, if you are looking for something and had people helping you, would you group up and all look in the same spots as a whole or would you split up and cover more area? The idea of education being a generalized system has, in my opinion, helped to contribute to the mass amount of ingorance that people possess because they cannot think for themselves. In school there is no learning, because learning is not just memorizing, learning is understanding and memorizing. In the academic world, especially early education, there is generally a severe lack of understanding information and more of memorizing it.
EDIT: and of course the massive amount of knowledge that we currently have at our fingertips also contributes heavily into the inability for a large amount of people to think for themselves, I just believe that the educational system plays a huge role in it as well as it can be improved.
