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HerKing Okay, I get it now. I wasn't implying that scientists claim that scientific theories are true. Or even that teachers actually say it, for that matter.
What I am claiming is that, throughout grade school, the various science classes that children take end up teaching the children the mainstream scientific views without taking the time to make sure that the children are told which theories are theories and which theories are fact. By nature, most of these children take these things as fact. The a similar concept exists in a lot of mathematics classes, where the teachers will only accept one method of solving a problem instead of allowing children to actually use their brains to find ways that work for them (though it appears that common core is addressing this problem somewhat, to the chagrin of much of society). And, similarly, philosophy is looked down on as something outdated and wrong because most branches of philosophy have a tendency to not prove things right or wrong.
The similarity, that I am pointing out, that connects these things is the view that binary systems are 'right' and any other systems are 'wrong'. By nature, children pick up on this and grow up into adults that think in binaries. This kills critical thinking abilities.
Now, we could say "well why don't we just have them teach science the way that science is instead of as the binary system that it definitely isn't", but I would argue that this way of thinking has already been proven to be a slippery slope (where people call the 'slippery slope' a fallacy, I don't think that it is unreasonable to assume some logic behind a slippery slope if there is a precedent for it). Instead they could teach and work on the scientific method in a core philosophy course, and could even cover a lot of things that are covered in science classes through the scope of both science and philosophy. This would encourage critical thinking skills instead of discouraging it the way that modern grade school science classes do.
On top of teaching general critical thinking skills, 12 years of philosophy would expose people to a huge range of viewpoints from some of the greatest minds of the last few thousand years, which would make for a much more intelligent populace. For one, they would learn about rhetoric and propaganda and be better able to discern when political figures and organizations are manipulating them.
People like to think that science single-handedly brought about the rise of modern technology, but the truth is that science is just a set of tools that helped us to get where we are. We shouldn't have stopped teaching the mental tools gained through thousands of years of hard thought just because a new set of tools helped us to advance our knowledge and technology in ways that the old tools couldn't, because the old tools help us to understand things in ways that science cannot possibly hope to do alone.
