Students should always question what they are taught

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  • polisci2021fall
    University: Stanford University
    Nationality: Chinese
    August 20, 2020 at 2:16 am

    Many students around the world, no matter in primary schools, middle schools, high schools, or colleges, tend to accept what they learn from their teachers passively without reflecting on the knowledge carefully and learning to use them in practice. This is definitely a problem that needs to be taken seriously by educators. Accordingly, some people claim that students should always question what they are taught instead of accepting it passively.   I do appreciate the attention on the importance of critical thinking and independent learning in this recommendation. I nevertheless believe that this position is too extreme. It may produce negative consequences if being applied to all situations without adaptation.

     

    Accepting what they are taught without critical thinking and independent learning is indeed a serious issue that may lead to unhealthy learning habits and reduce the quality of education. Therefore, students should actively question what they are taught. Throughout human history we can see many examples where critical reflections inspired students’ academic interests and eventually led to scientific progress. A common way towards critical thinking and learning is to subject what one learned upon their familiar contexts to see whether the conventional wisdom holds true. By questioning what they are taught by religious authorities and schools controlled by religious authorities, early European scientists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Newton, made important scientific breakthroughs. Most, if not all, those scientists started by paying attention to small but interesting changes and phenomenon in real life, and then revisiting what they learned from school and books based on what they had just observed. In modern social sciences, there are numerous instances where scholars subject conventional theories upon social phenomenon in their familiar countries and societies and find that reconsideration of the conventional wisdom is needed in order to explain their familiar contexts.

     

    Beyond this point, however, I think the claim that students should always question what they are taught instead of accepting it passively is too extreme. There are many ways in which the claim is unlikely to hold true. First of all, the recommendation is not always feasible. Instead, accepting what they are taught may be strategically beneficial for students studying for exams and required courses. Imagine that there are one hundred students in a math class. Then, would it be possible for every student in the class to question every single piece of information that their teacher conveys to them? If every student did in this way, the teacher would not have enough time to move on to the next point of knowledge and finish the class. Similarly, consider a student’s perspective. In many cases, students study for exams and not genuine, intrinsic academic interests. In other words, their goal is usually limited to passing an exam and getting a degree or certification. Therefore, passively remembering what they are taught is likely a highly cost-efficient way for students whose goal is merely to pass exams.

     

    Second, it is a fact that not everything that stude

    polisci2021fall
    University: Stanford University
    Nationality: Chinese
    August 20, 2020 at 2:17 am

    I was not able to post the complete version of my response. Here is the rest:

    students learn from schools can be questioned in a meaningful way. For examples, when a student is taking a Chinese language class, it may be helpful for this student to ask his or her teacher why the Chinese language has four different tones while the English language does not, why there are so many dialects in China, and how Chinese characters have been evolving in the past few centuries. However, it would be unnecessary and unhelpful for the student to ask why a specific Chinese character is spelled in a specific way or why sometimes there are so many different ways to spell a single Chinese character.

     

    In sum, I agree with the speaker in that critical thinking is a very important virtue for students, no matter whether they are in primary schools, middle schools, high schools, or universities, and that accepting what they are taught passively can be detrimental in many circumstances. Nevertheless, the speaker does not pay due attention to the many ways in which his or her view may become overly extreme or may produce negative consequences. The speaker’s view may probably become unfeasible if students merely want to pass exams or if students are learning languages or basic mathematical skills. Therefore, I encourage the speaker to fully specify the scope conditions of his or her insightful claim.

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