"Students should bring a certain skepticism to whatever they study. They should question what they are taught instead of accepting it passively."
Assume, there existed conveyances to go back in time and imagine, you are sitting in the intellectual auspices of some celebrated pedagogoue in post-Coppernicus and pre-Galileo times and you hear him showing his pupils a model of the solar system, you know so well to be heliocentric, with the earth at the centre with the sun orbitting it! And still worse, the pupils are all awestruck and listen attentively.
When Galileo came up with his model of the heliocentric solar system he was ridiculed and even condemned. The folly of the reaction to his theory can be clearly discerned today many years after space exploration has become a reality. This incident in the annals of history could put one very serious point through and that is, what is the veracity of all the putative scientific theories in existence currently?
Right from school, students are made to think that what is present in their textbooks is beyond the scope of questioning as to how much of the content is true. This notion being ingrained, they never stop to question, reason or attempt to practically understand what is being taught to them. What we rarely realize is that most theories are primarily assumptions of the error-prone human mind and that these premises many not always turn out to be accurate. One may counter that all inventions and discoveries are derive basis from established facts and observable phenomenon. But again, how much ever one may try to stick to facts, somewhere subjectiveness of the inventor may take priority not to mention trivial assumptions will certainly be made throughout the creative process and some of them may turn out to factitious though they were unintentional.
Take for example, the famous Big Bang Theory that is nowadays, almost invariably quoted when explaining the origin of the universe. According to the theory, the original singularity that eventually exploded is quanitively defined as one which is of infinite mass, infinite temperature and infintesimal size none of which have been simulated in any laboratory.
Does that mean that the this theory is factitious? The answer is exactly what I am trying to get at. Theories are ongoing processes, in that they are the culmination of the research of many people and still many more will continue to add to them by means of skepticism, followed by further research and leading to new findings and herein lies the choice the individual in deciding whether he chooses to be a part of this process or just be a passive observer.
