作业贴： Issue153

hychlavenderUID: 2697566

TOPIC: ISSUE153 - "Students should bring a certain skepticism to whatever they study. They should question what they are taught instead of accepting it passively."
WORDS: 536
TIME: 00:58:31
DATE: 2010/1/31 17:42:43

Through the process of civilization and improvement of science, we could easily recognize the importance of skepticism, it is not only the core motion for scientist to revise the old theories and establish new ones, but also the indispensable character for students to gain more profound understanding of dry theory printed on the book. This character gives students a more active way to interpret what he had got rather than passively.

First of all, it is the scientific and technological improvement that demand the skepticism for every scientist and student. As we known, seldom does a scientist or theorist dare to announce that his theory is faultless, almost every theory may suffer from flaws more or less due to limitation of the scientist' capability, so, it is extremely important for the student, who learning this theory, to hold a sharp eye to what the former has claimed and then to find out its fallacy and defect, which may contribute to the generation of a revised or totally new theory. Just replete with these "questing and revising" procedure, the horizon of our science could be expanded, the level of our technology could be improved. The experience upon the Leaning Tower gives us a good example. With the skepticism, Galileo interprets fully of what faults the precedent theory contains, then ranges an experiment to demonstrate the new theory's correctness. It is hard to imagine how can a person absent of skepticism could accomplish this revolution.

In turn, the skepticism will enhance the students’ overall ability in area of study and research, and deepen their interpretation of knowledge, all of which would guarantee the success for the students’ career. For instant, the study of the Federal Tax System: if student just passively read through the teaching material without any skepticism, he would get any information other than several numbers. However, holding a heart of question, he would find some merits that progressive taxation is beneficial to the low-income family, at the same time, he may also dig out some defects which could be used by financial companies to evade tax. If so, the student is entirely possible to submit his finding and proposal to the federal office which may come to a new law revising the system. After this progress, how can you say that the student do not get a comprehensive and profound understanding of the tax system?

However, apart from the merits brought by appropriate skepticism, the disadvantage together with undue skepticism may result in jeopardizing of the interest towards learning and coming to a halt in study. The indiscriminative suspicion towards everything, containing those natural fundamental, would set the student into a dilemma, because the student never has a theory that he regard as feasible to dispute with the so-called susceptible theory. The longer you stick in such dilemma, the lower passion you have upon the further study. It is common in realm of philosophy that some ideologists suffer from the torment: they suspect everything’s factuality, because he hold a skeptic eye towards all stuff.

In conclusion, although undue suspicion would lead to undesirable consequence, skepticism, as an indispensable character for every student and scientist, is capable to strength understanding and facilitate the road to revolution.