Soap Box

From olden times when a speaker would literally stand on a soap box to gain height, before making an impromptu speech, often about politics. Used metaphorically to describe a person airing their strong views unofficially and often uninvited, as in: “He’s on his soapbox again”

I was really annoyed last night after reading this post where Angela, a student paediatric nurse, tells us that in her essays her own opinion is viewed as worthless unless she can backup what she says with references to other peoples work.

As I said in the comments section of that post, since when can a student or “ordinary” person not come up with a groundbreaking idea of their own? And I list just three examples:

1. John Nash – who was a student when he came up with his equilibrium theory, which won him the Nobel Prize in economics 44 years later.
2. Patch Adams - who was a student when he envisioned a free hospital which treated patients with love and laughter. He realised this dream for 12 years until the hospital was forced to close due to lack of funding, but he now takes his unique form of medicine around the world to orphans and refugees.
3. Augusto Odone - who had no previous medical background and yet educated himself on his sons condition, Adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), and came up with a pioneering preventative treatment for the disease.
   

Clearly people don’t have to be highly educated professors who have spent their whole lives studying one particular area, before making a groundbreaking discovery of some kind. All scientific discoveries have to be based on a theory first, which by its very nature is unproven and has no “evidence based practice” to refer to.

I couldn't understand why the views of Angela’s markers had annoyed me so much, but as Mr Man put it "It stifles creative thinking". People should be allowed to develop and become more than what they are in various ways. Intelligence cannot be measured by how much of someone else’s work a person can quote, but by how much they can reason and discover themselves.


Mr Mans Wife steps down from her soap box.