▶ 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. |