False.
Ideas (I presume you mean formulations of scientific hypotheses and theories) are not arrived at in high schools. They are formulated in technical journals and other interactions among established scientists.
High schools are near the bottom of the food chain--they are consumers, not originators, of scientific thought. High school students, and most high school teachers, are simply not equipped to evaluate a "competition of ideas." They fall short by several years to decades of intensive study.
The problem is that many scientific ideas use very specialized terminology and notation; such notation (and even the concepts) being not only obscure, but "counter-intuitive".
So in an attempt to translate the concepts into lay language, many of the essentials are shunted aside or simply morph into something "neither fish, nor fowl".
Try explaining (for example) Hartree-Fock theory, or expansion of a function in a known basis, then translating to another basis set.
Most undergrads (if they follow at all) will immediately jump at the wrong conclusions, and consider each new term as a specific correction or modeling a discrete feature--the concept of numerical convergence just isn't something they are familiar with.
Cheers!