Shanghai Community International School

By Emmet Dunphy, Upper School Head of Language & Literature and Individuals & Societies at SCIS Pudong. 

Picture the scene. Three millennia ago, a farmer, anywhere in the world, wakes one morning and sets out to tend to his fields. He tills the land in the same way his father did; he plants the same seeds in much the same way; he spreads manure to ensure the fertility of his land in a manner unchanged for generations. He is guided in everything that he does by the slow procession of the seasons, the lengthening and shortening of the days, the subtle movement of the earth in its orbit (although he doesn’t know anything about this).  

A millennium later, anywhere in the world, another farmer awakens to tend his fields in much the same manner, much the same way.   

A millennium or more beyond this, say in 1900, barely a century ago, another farmer wakes, and sets out to tend to his fields. In much the same manner, in much the same way.   

Now, picture the same scene, in 2020. A farmer wakes, and she doesn’t set out to tend to her fields. Instead, she reaches for her laptop or tablet. She researches the efficacy of a certain type of fertiliser; she reads the latest literature on the benefits and challenges of organic farming; she checks, through a computer programme, the readings of sensors dotted around her fields. She factors the data gathered into a cost-benefit analysis of continuing with a particular type of crop. She considers the relative gains of using a genetically modified strain of corn against continuing with a strain that is less robust but whose seeds aren’t patented and owned by a major conglomerate. She watches the news, scrolls through posts on social media, and considers what impact climate change might have on how or what she farms.   

She hasn’t yet set foot outdoors, she hasn’t lifted a hoe or stepped into a tractor, yet she has made in a few hours more decisions, based on more information and more analyses, than countless previous generations of farmers would have had to make in their lifetimes.   

To be a farmer is one of the most ancient of professions. For millennia, the knowledge, understanding, and skills required to farm successfully remained much the same. And yet, this seemingly most conservative of practices has been utterly transformed in less than a century from an occupation very much focused on the manual to one increasingly characterised by the skills of analysis, interpretation, and evaluation- by critical thinking skills.   

The story of farming is indicative of the extraordinary transformations wrought across the globe over the past century as the Industrial Revolution ushered in the Information Age. Never before in human history has such a vast array of knowledge and information been so readily available to so many. The results have been remarkable; astonishing progress has been made in almost every sphere of human endeavour- we live longer and healthier; we can communicate to people in seconds that which previously might have taken days, months, even years; we are continuously expanding our knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the universe around us.   

And yet, with such unfettered access to so much information comes great challenges. In previous eras, we had people who acted as the gatekeepers of knowledge, people who sifted and analysed unrefined information and presented it to us for consumption- newspaper editors, politicians, scientists, teachers. Now, though, we each have to do our own sifting, our own analysing; we are confronted every day with conflicting narratives and conflicting truths and we have to decide every day which to accept and which to discard, which to trust and which to distrust.   

This task that confronts us is enormous, and, as ever more information is disseminated through 24-hour news channels or through Facebook, Instagram, and Google, it grows more formidable by the day, indeed by the hour. How can anyone person possibly hope to make sense of so many conflicting narratives, so many contradictory claims, so many divergent theories? How can anyone person possibly hope to sift the information from the misinformation?    

Theory of Knowledge (TOK) provides part of the solution. As an academic course, it is perhaps unique in that it doesn’t seek to provide answers. Rather, it seeks to help students better ask their own questions. It sets out to develop, hone, and refine the critical thinking skills which are so necessary to making sense of the competing knowledge claims of the modern world. It challenges students to “explore and reflect on the nature of knowledge and the process of knowing” (TOK Guide, p. 5), and, by doing so, to engage in a more active, critical manner with the world, to craft and create their own knowledge and understandings from the massive amounts of information they encounter every day.   

Through Theory of Knowledge, students come to appreciate that knowledge is not a static concept that exists in and of itself, but that it is constantly shaped and misshaped, created, manipulated, used, and misused. They come to understand that knowledge is not simply information, but something they forge themselves through critical interaction with and interpretation of the information. Through this process, they become more adept at and confident in not merely engaging critically with the claims to knowledge of others, but also, and crucially, interrogating their own assumptions and beliefs. In their classroom activities, students seek not only to prove the validity of their claims but also to examine and explore that which might invalidate their claims and opinions. In the assessment components they work towards and produce, the TOK Exhibition and the TOK Essay, their aim is not solely to present a position in response to a question or a prompt, but to deconstruct and examine the reasoning and knowledge they used to come to that position.

Theory of Knowledge is more about how and why you know than what you know. It facilitates an active, critical interaction with the world and helps provide and refine the skills needed to do so. It positions students to engage with and evaluate the myriad theories, ideas, and claims to knowledge that they are presented with every day. Through all of this, Theory of Knowledge promotes and shapes the active, open engagement with ideas, information, and knowledge that is so critical not merely for the 21st-century worker but for the 21st-century citizen of the world.    

SCIS. Knowledgeable Inquirers.