But you have to remember it's extremely laborious for us to do so, especially since these accumulated knowledge exceed anybody's ability to learn it within their lifetime.
I don't think it's a flaw per se to focus on the facts, knowledge, and concept at the expense of scientific thinking, but we all ought to acknowledge that much of our knowledge of the world essentially relied on faith.
You want to teach the scientific method and
skepticism? Fine.
But you have to remember it's extremely laborious
for us to do so, especially since these accumulated
knowledge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
It's a method with six steps. It's usually something primary education science teachers spend like, twenty minutes on at the beginning of a school year. It's not laborious.
(For maximum effect, the concept of the scientific method is then of course reinforced throughout the rest of the class, whenever experiments are performed. Assuming classes will be doing these experience anyway, this is not what I would remotely call "laborious")
skepticism
* Relativism The misconception that statements cannot be objectively true or false, but can be judged only relative to some cultural or other arbitrary standard.
* Instrumentalism The misconception that science cannot describe reality, only predict outcomes of observations.
* Justificationism The misconception that knowledge can be genuine or reliable only if it is justified by some source or criterion.I know the Earth is round, because I have observed that when a ship sails away from me, the top portion of the ship is the last to fade over the horizon. When flying, the shadow of the plane has a surrounding glory.
In the end people get skeptical around a tiny number of scientific facts like climate change, evolution, and vaccination but they have no problem accepting everything from the MOS hardness scale, echos, buoyancy, etc etc. Why most people object to just those specific things has absolutely nothing to do with evidence, it’s completely part of a wider social phenomenon.
The Mohs scale is pretty easy to validate, and the exercises typically done when it is taught tend to serve to do that.
The Mohs hardness scale is actually extremely difficult to demonstrate across a full range of natural materials. It’s intuitive that if A scratches B and B scratches C then A should scratch C, but testing a few samples is nowhere near enough to demonstrate across every natural mineral. It’s even more difficult to show this is a stable property that doesn’t very significantly over time.
So, sure a teacher might hand out a few samples and show what the idea is, but that’s little more than hand waving.
Well, sure combinatorial explosion and the difficulty of gathering every possible natural material makes it impractical to show that:
(1) the scale measures a real trait that exhibits the same consistent transitive behavior across all possible combinations of natural materials, and
(2) every natural material with a rating on the scale is correctly rated.
It's relatively easy to establish that the set of standard examplars for the integer ratings consistently show the relative properties the scale is supposed to measure.
Of course, it trivial to then verify the same is true relative to the examplars for any other material with an established rating, or to establish (within the bounds of the ceiling/floor integers) the rating of any material for which one doesn't have a measure and confirm consistency against examplars and any manageable sample of other rated materials.
Your ability to know that the Earth is round is based on facts and knowledge acquired, not thinking from first principle.
The ancient did all the hard work, we just co-opted it.
That's simply made up. There are two examples in my comment. They are not from long dead ancient squabbling scientists of natural philosophy but from my own experience of setting experiments to prove empirically whether the Earth is round or flat.
Maybe for many people, but this is not a given. I obviously don't have deep knowledge of every discipline, but with an engineering undergraduate degree (20 years ago) I feel like I have strong tools to understand the world around me down to first principles, question what I'm told and situate it within the axioms I firmly believe, and in general apply the scientific method. There is almost nothing they feels like "magic" to me, even if I'm not a specialist. I think it's a question of critical thinking, understanding a bit about the philosophy of science (not the current religious version) and thinking about cause and effect.
I'm prepared to accept we're all living within a simulation, or in some reality constructed by a diety, or some other currently un-testable unknowable thing, but in the world as we perceive it, there is a lot of order that can be understood in general, without having to be a specialist and without requiring faith
Absolutely some things you may need to take on faith; but you shouldn't base your world view on only taking people in authority's views on faith. The more you use the scientific method, the more you know when you need to use it or not.
It's not a matter of mindset but the sheer impracticality. As individual, we can only question small parts of humanity's knowledge base.