Course Helps Students to Find Missing Link in Their Studies
Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre make more than guest appearances. Warm greetings are extended to Alfred North Whitehead, Spinoza and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Aristotle’s entelechy--the essence in you--and Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” depart as Nietzsche’s “will to power” rears its fascist head.
At 8:45 on a Monday morning, this is not “Welcome Back, Kotter!”
And, appearances to the contrary, it is not a philosophy class. A unique course of study required on the road to the International Baccalaureate diploma, the Theory of Knowledge program helps students place their learning in a larger perspective and, at the same time, understand themselves as knowers.
“Higher knowledge is always when you can explain, not just describe,” Sue Bastian said to the juniors in her class at the United Nations high school in New York.
It is the 12th year that this native of Kansas, who was educated at Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, has taught the Theory of Knowledge sequence. She is considered by IB’s sponsors in Geneva to be the best of the best teachers who teach its most original curriculum.
“Even the French admit to her talents,” said A.D.C. Peterson, a founder and former director general of the IB in London.
The IB is a pre-university diploma program geared to the academic needs of motivated and often gifted students. The curriculum aims to develop competency in writing, mathematics and a foreign language during the last two years of secondary education. At the same time, it gives students a sound introduction to the liberal arts--the humanities, social science and laboratory science.
Six courses are studied, three for two years each and three for one year each. Required subjects are two in language, one’s native tongue and a second language (“You can’t really study one language alone and say you know a language,” said Peterson); the “Study of Man in Society” (which includes history, geography, economics, philosophy, psychology and social anthropology); experimental sciences (chemistry, biology, physics, physical science); mathematics, and an elective, which might include art/design, music, computer science, Greek or Latin.
In addition to these subjects, a diploma candidate must take a Theory of Knowledge class. The course, a key element in the educational philosophy of the IB, is a a two-year study linking other subjects into a unified intellectual experience. For many students, it provides the missing link, enabling them to think across disciplines, said Elizabeth G. Vermey, director of admissions at Bryn Mawr College.
“We have to write at least one 500-word essay a month,” said Tanya Byker, a junior in Bastian’s class. “One of the reasons I like TK so much is that she presents us with a question that has no answer.”
The class meets for an hour twice a week. During Byker’s two years in the program, she will write at least 5,000 words as she grapples with epistemological distinctions, various “isms” (such as empiricism and rationalism), great (and not-so-great) thinkers, and debates more than a few topical subjects. One trap she will be encouraged to avoid is simply looking at knowledge as a cluster of methodologies.
Instead, this course asks students to realize “there is no immaculate perception,” said Bastian. “Evidence is not always self-evident. It does not always announce itself.”
Bastian is not a proponent of an intellectual creed of relativism, or neutrality, however. She seeks to instill in her students one of the highest joys she feels that a teacher can offer, that “evidence and knowledge are a triumph,” she said as she writes one of her favorite equations: K = JTB (knowledge equals justified true belief).
The idea of teaching how morals and religion shape thought suggests how great a task the IB sets for itself in the Theory of Knowledge course, says Peterson. “It is not easy to put into place; you need top-quality staff in all the domains.”
Students are helped to see the limitations that arise if each discipline thinks it discovered truth, rather than deducing knowledge along its own line of reasoning, its own definitions, Peterson says.
In standard secondary school programs, “students didn’t understand the relationships between the subjects in school, why different ways of knowing affect what it is that is known,” he said. “Students did not understand the past as historical truth, or scientific truth or mathematical truth or moral truth.” So the IB planners created the Theory of Knowledge course.
Asu Kirdar, a senior and Turkish national enrolled in one of the three classes Bastian teaches, said simply: “She’s wonderful.” With plans to attend university in Europe and possibly major in history, Kirdar said she is “much more conscious of what historians do as historians. I have much distance, more objectivity from the course.”
All this may sound heady for high school students, but Bastian sees immediate benefits. Some students would argue that the existence of God had been disproved by science, she says. But then they would realize that this contradicts the collective experience of many classmates who came from different backgrounds. She informs her students that intellectual honesty requires them to resolve so fundamental a difference of opinion.
The way to start, she tells them, is to think like a scientist, then compare that to how a theologian thinks and see what each has to say to the other.
