【kaleidoscope】小组第十二次作业issue153 byAtticus

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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: 527
TIME: 00:45:00
DATE: 2009-8-22 10:13:31

Should students bring certain skepticism to whatever they study? I totally agree with the speaker for the reason skepticism is essential to cultivate the students' ability of critical thinking, which is the vital goal of education and the premise of the advance of society.

To start with, let us take a look at knowledge itself, including social science and natural science. Neither of them have been flawless during the thousands of years' passing down from one generation to another. The ancient people had a belief that all creatures in this world were created by Adam and Eve, while scientific evidence showed all this attributed to evolution and natural selectivity. Without skepticism, people held the former belief for thousands of years. What's more, even the great Greek philosopher Aristotle, had mislead people by nearly 1,500 years when it came to the center of the universe. People accepted all this knowledge passively without any personal dubious, which greatly hampered the development of science technology. Even more, social science, which is always embodied with contemporary politics, can be affected by political ideology and does not appear to be that objective as well. Take the Japanese history textbooks for example, during the authority of
, the Japanese young generation was taught history with a textbook where the fact that Japanese had invaded most of the neighbour Asian countries and caused tremendous disasters was erased. Hence if the young students could not bring a skepticism on what they had been instilled, they might formed a partial and prejudiced opinion on this issue, and the ethic education came to pale. In short, as is what we have known or see is not usually absolutely correct or objective,
we need to take leave to doubt before accepting any fact as knowledge.

In addition, skepticism, which serves as the driving force of the under-break theories, is mostly effective to break the traditional constrains and bring about new atmosphere. This is specially obvious in chemistry field. The discovery of new element, for example, oxide, was based on doubt of the strange phenomenon of the experiment. Galileo, who was the first who turn the telescope to the sky and climbed the leaning tower of Pisa to drop various weight, was brave enough to overthrow Aristotle and Ptolemy, which gave birth to new theories that was proved to be foundations of Newton's famous laws. Without skepticism, maybe these discoveries would postpone for thousands of years.

Moreover, Students' doubt at what they are taught not only enhances the development of science, by also help to cultivate themselves. Skepticism plays an important role in cultivating students' critical thinking capability, which perhaps is what ETS cares. The analyzing writing section of the text, which require test-takers write an issue to substantiate their own positions, calls for students' skepticism on a certain topic. Looking back all the great figures in history, we find that few of them were strictly conforming to the traditions, instead they acted more or less against the existing rules.

In sum, students all should have a skeptical attitude towards what they are taught, not only for themselves, but also for the development of our society.