In all honesty, sometimes I am afraid of my students. Most of them have just emerged from their teenage years, and a few of them seem to me to be "terrible teens". However, the teenage years are a great time: a time of learning, by study and also by application. Some of the lessons are painful. Some of them are spectacular. All of them build our youth into the people they will eventually become. I feel blessed as well as burdened to play a part in that process.
Teaching is challenging for me because I am frequently there for a different reason than the students. Since I teach chemistry, most of my students are there to mark off a box on their degree requirements rather than learn about chemistry. Mostly, despite my best efforts to the contrary, they still worry about grades more than about knowledge. I wish they were interested in the search for truth as much as they are interested in the search for answers. Rather than care about learning, they care about what they can do to obtain grades.
Proper scientific investigation is supposed to be the search for truth. However, most scientists go at the research with an agenda- hoping to prove what they already believe. We're a rather arrogant lot, more concerned with getting our name in scientific papers than we are in getting into our work to teach students as we once were. In truth, most people are not searching for the truth. They secretly hope the truth will corroborate what they already happen to believe.
The problem comes from how we begin the search for truth. Although all the students know that scientific method begins with an observation, most of the research begins based on the biased observations reported by others. Rather than seeing something ourself, we piggy back on what someone else saw, sometimes beginning with a false premise. We rely far too much on secondhand knowledge. One of my students wrote in answer to a question on the exam that a thing was so when the instructor tells us that it is. We do not know anything about a subject by our own investigation. We sit there and let other people tell us. We do it with the news, with schooling, and even in church. That's because it's easier and doesn't cost us as much as it does to go and actually read something. I cannot tell you how much time I spend online proving that famous people did not say the things people attribute to them.
Things have changed since I was a student only a decade ago. Much of what we learned was only true from a certain point of view or in certain circumstances. Now we have access to more information at a more rapid pace, and yet we do less reading and less research than ever. I warn my students about the internet, about what people write and say, and about what they hear without the rest of the story to back it up. As Arthur Conan Doyle warned us, "It is useless to theorize without the facts...you begin to bend facts to fit your theories."
Knowledge and truth are related, but they require us to actively look and learn. Effort is required, but it is effort that is worth the price. We can learn more about gravity in a year than Newton learned in his lifetime, but the way in which Newton learned made it real firsthand accounts. In a court of law, hearsay is inadmissible, but in the court of public opinion and public research, secondhand knowledge is primary and in many cases preferred.
Reliance on secondhand knowledge lays a sandy foundation. If you begin with a false premise, logic dictates that false cannot lead to truth. We waste enormous amounts of time and money attaching emotions like hope to a particular bit of information and calling it irrefutable truth when it's an editorial masquerading as fact. In this season of political accusations, we hear that a particular candidate wants seniors to go without healthcare, doesn't care about his garbage man, and killed a steel worker's wife. When you look into it, you find that even if true, it's coincidental, but that's not sensational and not important to "the story". Moreover, the education system is complicit with this deficit of truth. Nobody loses his PhD when his thesis is refuted.
When he is called before Pilate, Jesus sets an interesting example. Pilate hauls in Jesus on the word of other men. When he sees Jesus, he probably couldn't believe that an unassuming man could possibly rouse the rabble to their fervor, and so he asks Jesus if he is the king of the Jews. Jesus answers: "Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee of me?" Pilate then refuses to do anything other than rely on what others tell him.
Reliance on secondhand knowledge enslaves us to other men. When we rely on what others tell us, we in essence do their will. When we rest on what others tell us, what we claim as our personal knowledge is their opinion. When we rely on men, who never have all the facts, we leave ourselves with an incomplete picture and miss often the most salient points. Learn it for yourself. Go research it. Don't let others tell you what to do or think or be. Do your own homework. That's always good advice.
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