▶ Your Answer :
I disagree with the statement which says
"It is more important for students to understand ideas and concepts than
it is for them to learn facts". My take on it is that learning facts is so
important thing for students that this is more important for them than
understanding ideas and concepts. First, learning facts is a basic and
fundamental thing to do before understanding ideas and concepts. Since some
ideas and concepts are too ambiguous and abstract, it is not very easy to
understand them before learning the facts regarding them. So, after accepting
and analyzing facts related with these ideas and concepts, students can clearly
understand ideas and concepts regarding the facts. Sometimes, some ideas and
concepts could be understood naturally when students learn facts even before
they try hard to understand them. For example, the ideas like 'democracy' and
'capitalism' are too difficult that students cannot understand these ideas well
just by reading and memorizing the meaning of the terms, but they can
understand these ideas much more easily by learning the facts regarding them
like voting for the president and the congressmen(democracy) and the movement
of money in a capitalist country(capitalism). Moreover, understanding ideas and concepts
prior to learning facts could be very dangerous in some circumstances. Some
ideas and concepts are too subjective and reflect the thoughts and visions of
certain sides or groups in a society. If students learn these ideas and
concepts before learning the facts, they could be caught by certain creed and
biased easily. They cannot see and learn the facts objectively. For example,
the ideas regarding social structure and the gap between the rich and the poor
could have huge effect on the sights for the facts regarding them. In this
case, students should learn facts first and decide whether to accept the ideas
and concepts by themselves. Lastly, there's no time to learn facts well
except at schools or colleges. Students should learn facts strenuously while at
schools or colleges and build up on them after graduation. Facts which they
learned as students are common knowledge in a society. So after graduation
everybody presumes that he/she knows the facts already. In other words, people
can understand ideas and concepts through their whole lives, but they don't
have enough time to learn facts after graduation.
To sum up, learning facts is much more
important than understanding ideas and concepts for students, since it is a
basic tool to understand related ideas and concepts and live their lives well
as a participant in a society. |