【kaleidoscope】小组第12次作业 issue153 by rjyuu

rjyuuUID: 2591508

TOPIC: ISSUE153 -"Students should bring a certain skepticism to whatever they study. Theyshould question what they are taught instead of accepting it passively."

Should students totally believe in whatthey are taught or should they remain suspicious about these knowledge? As faras I am concerned, the latter would undoubtedly be a better way of education,as discussed below.

To start with, the knowledge itself isalways problematic. Humans are not creators. They theorize everything happeningaround them merely to better understand the world they live in. In other words,there is no guarantee that the theories we believe to be right now are free offlaws. Chances are that these theories, although tally with all extent dataperfectly, may one day turns out to be in conflict with some newly observedphenomena--like although Newton's theory of gradation wasonce regarded as flawless, it was soon disproved by Einstein's theory ofrelativity, according to which the former theory only be used in limitedsituations while in others it is no longer accurate. If Einstein absolutely believesin Newton's theory just like most other people, how could he make so great adiscovery? If we accept whatever we are taught passively, we will miss thechance to find the flaws of extant theories and in are areas of science humanendeavor will stay static.

Besides, all too often we witnessgovernment tampering textbooks to reinforce their rules. Like Japanesegovernment denied their cruel holocaust in World War Two, glorifying theirinvasion as "bring hope to Asia countries and save them from tyranny"; Chinese Communist Party intentionally avoid mentioning Kuomintang’scontribution in world war two and create an impression that they are the heroessaving Chinese people from invaders .To avoid be a victim of the government'sbrainwash, everyone should remains suspicious about what is wrote in thetextbooks and what is taught to them.

Another reason why students should remainskeptical to what they are taught lies in the function of education is toproduce innovate people capable of learning undated knowledge to explore newuncultivated areas, rather than millions of machines with abundant acceptedtruth stored in their mind. Students’ skepticism will enable them master theway to learn. Let's take learning a new physics formulafor example. A passive student may spend 3 minutes to keep it in mind whilethose who suspect it may spend a whole morning trying to figure out how thisformula was verified. They may try to deduce it in a math way by theirown, or go to libraries to check out what experiment has be done for it and howthe statistics from these experiments turns out to support the conclusion. Ifall the efforts fail to bring them a satisfied answer, they may refer to somerelated textbooks and finally exclaims “So simple! Marvelous! “At first time,one may regard them as stupid to spend so much time on something widelyacknowledged, yet in the long wrong the latter kind of students will definitelyhas a brighter future. Not only did they make a deeper impression about whatthey are taught, but also that in the process they gradually developed anability to deal with something brand new. After all in their later life fewer definiteconclusions will be given and on most occasions they will need to exploreuncultivated areas with no conclusion available.

Admittedly, sometimes too much skepticismmay be harmful. A typical example is those who suspect so much that they gettrapped in nihilism who believes in nothing at all. But on most occasions, inorder to better educate students, being skeptical should be emphasized, asdiscussed above.