- In light of apparent controversies like climate change: How do we know when we should trust scientists?
- In light of the Charlie Hebdo affair and the subsequent news coverage: How do we know how to judge the reporting of important news events?
- In light of a recent report that some 50% of the world’s wealth is owned by 1% of the population: How do we know how to balance the competing goods of freedom and equality?
- In light of cultural diversity and multiple perspectives: How do we know how to hold true to our own values while remaining open-minded?
- In light of the UWC Mission: How do we know how to act to build a peaceful, sustainable future?
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| In education, for tough questions, our aim cannot be to provide answers – we have no monopoly on the truth, |
These are not easy questions to answer. Some of them have been asked and written about since at least the Greeks and Upanishads, and recur every generation; others are new, and reflect the challenges posed by living in the early 21st Century. But these, and many other such questions, are the questions that our children face, and if we do not equip them to begin the search for the answers, then we will have failed them. Our aim cannot be to provide answers – we have no monopoly on the truth, and in any case we are not in the business of indoctrination. The next generation has to find its own answers, and to ask its own searching questions. So what should we do?
I believe that one of the most important things we can do is to ensure that students are aware of the complexity of these questions; and we have two courses specifically designed to do exactly that. Our Global Perspectives iGCSE looks at complex issues from multiple viewpoints, and our Theory of Knowledge course raises the level of thinking to the abstract by asking more generally What do we believe? What are the reasons we believe? Are these good reasons? I’ll write more about Global Perspectives next week; my focus this week is Theory of Knowledge.
Our premise here is that we cannot know how to respond to complex challenges unless we systematically examine what we mean by know in the first place. And starting from there, there are plenty of important questions that the students can get to very quickly: Do scientists know in the same ways as economists? Can we know ethical truths in the same ways as we know mathematical truths? What are the similarities and differences in knowing via reason, intuition and emotion? Can we know that God exists? Or know that he does not? Is there anything at all that we can know to be true with absolute certainty? If not, why not? And if so, what?
Addressing these questions is far less intimidating that it might seem – because all Diploma Programme students already study six subjects, they are already deeply immersed in different and contrasting methodologies, approaches and visions of knowledge. That means they are implicitly addressing the questions anyway – so Theory of Knowledge is a great place to make them explicit, and to critically engage with them without pressures of syllabuses to cover. They are, in addition, at that crucial stage of forming their own knowledge about themselves, and together, these academic and personal experiences form a wonderful springboard for inquiry. These questions can elicit passionate and heart-felt reactions from students; in trying to answer them they find their own voices and they take a further step in forging their own identities. In discussing their thoughts with others who hold, profoundly different views with a conviction equal to their own, they also learn something about other perspectives, about the value of pluralism, and a lot about intellectual humility.
Thus, I believe this is a course closely aligned with our loftiest aims as educators and as parents; and you won’t be surprised to find that classes consist largely of carefully scaffolded and structured conversation. Conversation, philosopher Michael Oakeshott, writes that it is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize… …it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure…its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering.
… it is the ability to participate in this conversation… which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilised man from the barbarian… …education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognise the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance[i].
The assessment of the course tells us a lot. There are presentations on real life situations (which I cannot easily share) and also essays, whose titles are worth examining. Here are some examples:
- “That which is accepted as knowledge today is sometimes discarded tomorrow.” Consider knowledge issues raised by this statement in two areas of knowledge.
- “A skeptic is one who is willing to question any knowledge claim, asking for clarity in definition, consistency in logic and adequacy of evidence” (adapted from Paul Kurtz, 1994). Evaluate this approach in two areas of knowledge.
- “Doubt is the key to knowledge” (Persian Proverb). To what extent is this true in two areas of knowledge?
- How important are the opinions of experts in the search for knowledge?
Notice how these questions allow students to answer with reference to their own interests, their own experiences, their own cultures and their own beliefs. We have found that it is through this sort of opportunity that students are most likely to come to the profound understanding of complexity that we seek – and here are some recent essays by students that show you what I mean. I appreciate they are not exactly light reading, but the combination of knowing how to write, and having something interesting to say (the latter something school overlook all too often, I believe) is little short of astonishing. These are not the best, nor from the most obviously academically successful – but if you ever needed evidence that our students can think, and think very well, here it is. You’ll see a few different ideas here, and you’ll see the same question tackled in different, though equally sophisticated ways. This is so very far ahead of anything I could have written when I was a teenager, indeed perhaps even an undergraduate, and I am so proud of them. It’s the clear intellectual flexibility, the capacity to see different perspectives and the resourcefulness needed to shape, re-shape and create these that impresses me more than the ideas themselves. It’s work like this that leads me to believe our graduates will be more than capable of dealing with whatever new, different challenging situations they come across – even ones like those I asked at the start of this article. What a great thought!
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