Question: Is it important to question the ideas and decisions of people in positions of authority?
It is imperative that we as a society live our lives unafraid to question authority under the right circumstances. We must never automatically assume that what we are told to do by an authority figure is the morally or logically correct thing to do. Granted neither is it acceptable to continuously question authority no matter what the situation or circumstance.
For instance, I volunteer at a community outreach program aimed at assisting poverty-stricken families and the homeless. Being merely a volunteer in a vast network of employees in the organization, I have many superiors. In this particular case we were handing out boxes of food to impoverished families, and I was told to include sugary drinks in the boxes. I offered an explanation that given many of these families are afflicted by diabetes, including sugary drinks for nourishment would be counterintuitive. So by questioning authority I was able to provide healthier food choices for impoverished families.
Questioning authoritative figures in your life if done politely, implies no disrespect towards authority, but instead conveys your respect for and desire to improve the decisions of these figures. For instance, my Academic Decathlon teacher told the class to research appropriate academic debates relating to our book that we were supposed to read as a class. Many of the students found these advanced debates interwoven with bewildering academic language, to be very confusing. I raised my hand and offered a suggestion where each student provided their own thesis and perspective on the book so that the class could better understand and analyze the literature since it was written by their peers. Because I had politely questioned and offered a more adequate adaptation of my teacher's lesson plan, she adopted my suggestion and thus, our class was able to learn much more because a student wasn't afraid to question authority.
Finally one must understand that by questioning authority under the right circumstances, they are paving the way for continuous change and improvement. After all, a modern society cannot maintain it's progression without a reasonable degree of change, stemming from those who were unafraid to question the present, so as to assist in creating a brighter and more efficient future.