Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.
I grew up in England and we spent most of the time on Latin and Greek and very little on science, and I think that was good because it meant we didn't get turned off. It was. . . Science was something we did for fun and not because we had to.