The current model of education has created a society of people incapable of thinking and using common sense for themselves.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Pualo Friere, he discusses the problems with our current education sytem and how it keeps students ignorant.

He states that “the more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world.”

Students within this model of education can’t understand how to consciously evaluate the significance of the words or symbols they are taught or how to apply it to their personal experiences of the world" (source: Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire).

This makes students complacent to learn and discouraged to explore their curiosities as they get older.

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One debate that has created a ripple in mainstream media is the question of where we actually live.

While many people instinctively know how to breathe and how to walk; most people also consciously know the earth is round. This concept has been taught to us for the past five centuries and ultimately has been considered fact due to scientific theories, experiments, and visual proof.

Though this is seen as common knowledge to (almost) everybody, there is a growing movement of people all across the world who believe the world is...flat.

(Yes, flat. No, not like a literal 2D structure or a drawing on a piece of paper.)

It was in 2015 when Mark Sargent posted his flat earth "clues" on his YouTube page. This video sparked an online movement to actually start asking the questions that nobody else would. Some of these questions include things such as; 1. the curvature of the observed flat horizon; 2. the fact that we have never seen a real image of the entire ball earth; 3. the fact that the moon doesn’t reflect the same light as the sun; 4. the fact that we have never seen real videos or observed any debris from the thousands of satellites supposedly orbiting our planet; 5. the fact that the official world map is the flat earth map of the world (and United Nations logo) etc. These are all different questions that the Flat Earth Society challenges with experiments and visual proof.

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While it is currently common knowledge that the earth is round, it is strange to me that hundreds of thousands of people (check out the flat earth international conference here) are using science to disprove science by completing and recording experiments that counteract the information that is presented for the globe earth model.

This debate is significant because it allows us, as a society, to stop and question the education system and the knowledge that people have been taught their whole lives.

Do you know what you know, or do you just think you know? Can you know what you know without knowing what you don't? How would you know what you didn't know if you didn't continually question and validate your beliefs?

According to Freire and Socrates, we cannot be wise men in any society without the ability to balance being a teacher and a student at the same time.

(P.S. I wish this was a joke, but I wouldn't write the debate off as a conspiracy until you've seen both sides of the debate for yourself.)

(P.P.S. Test what you think you know! Spending 5 minutes on the debate might not be adequate research!)