Students should always question what they are taught instead of accepting it.

GRE Writing Topic: Students should always question what they are taught instead of accepting it.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.

Do students need to always question what they are taught? The speaker claims so. I agree that questioning is a great method to learn knowledge, while sometimes barely questioning may interfere learning.

First, questioning is an effective way for students to learn knowledge. In schools, teachers may always tell some facts and boring formulas and students only learn by rote. In this case, raising questions is a great way to help students understand what they learn and also let teachers explain more about knowledge points. For example, if a teacher is talking about matrix in a math class, students can learn through asking what problems a matrix can solve, why we need matrix to represent numbers. In this way, students surely master this knowledge well. Otherwise, they may only remember that matrix is just a bunch of numbers and it is useless.

Besides, being critical and curious about knowledge is the source of development of science and technology. Being critical about knowledge is essential for our human. If students all passively accept what they are taught in class and take it for granted, creative research may be extinct and science and technology may stop progressing. Many tremendous scientific findings are derived from questions and doubts. For instance, Einstein did not believe things would be the same with an extremely high speed and he finally found out the theory of relativity; Copernicus doubted that the earth was the center of the universe and he proposed the Heliocentrism.

However, barely questioning would hinder learning in some situations. As technology developed rapidly and information accumulates with a high speed, sometimes a simple question may need a long explanation. For example, if a student simply ask why we can trust the answer of a math expression from the computer, he needs to spend a few days to learn how a computer works. In this case, questioning and answering could cost a lot of time and students should learn to accept some basic facts rather than be critical all the time.

To sum up, the proposed suggestion has both advantages and disadvantages. It should be prudent to put this theory into practice on case to case basis.