Actually no. Everyone here has been great for the most part. What I really mean is that most of the textbooks I have read only give a little info that is treated like fact. I just want to see how they came to that conclusion. Many here have been giving me just what I was looking for. Thanks
It is challenging to write a text book for lower levels and have to leave a
lot out like 98.3 %). The tentative nature of the approach to nature shows up all the time in actual scientific papers. You see words like "suggests", "may" all over the place.
This is left out of high school (and most higher level texts) because it clutters up the text and is misunderstood in colloquial English.
"Fact" isn't black and white. It shades from somewhat likely to very, extremely, highly likely. In science the approach is to try to remember that it never quite reaches 100 %. However that doesn't mean it is as much as "fact" as one can find anywhere anytime. This is left out of most writing to not clutter things up.
Generally, the right thing to do is to teach kids that the material presented is the consensus at the time of publication. It would be good to occasionally supplement this with a look at newer information to help them understand how things change with new information though.
It would be useful for you to supply some of that info that is treated as "fact" so it maybe discussed.
For example, that life has evolved is as much "fact" as the sky being blue. Details are, sometimes, shaded down the certainty scale a bit.
However given even a tiny part of the back up for that "fact" would require that a year or more of school be devoted to just biology and that isn't practical.
Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Fix the all important italics code.
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