Before I started the IB, I thought that I would hate TOK. The lesson times irritated me. The fact that Theory of Knowledge was a necessary part of the IB irritated me. Most importantly, the thought of having to challenge my own beliefs and preconceptions irritated me. I have never really enjoyed thinking about such complex and unanswerable things before; I had decided that life was complicated enough, without actually having to consider things that weren’t explicitly clear. I guess you could describe me as being close-minded to the idea of open-mindedness. Also, all I had seen of TOK was a group of miserable looking students on laptops with hollow-eyed stares, silently begging me to save them from period 10. It didn’t really sell it very well, to be honest.
Close-mindedness had been ingrained in me, in all of us, from the day that we started school. We had to listen to what the teacher said, taking it as concrete, indisputable fact, even when we disagreed. We were all forced through the mundane, formulaic system of the dreaded GCSE’s, where answers that didn’t fit the fastidiously pedantic mark scheme were discarded as useless. We all learnt how to play the exam game, doing exactly what was asked of us, and nothing more, never questioning whether what we were doing was right at all. This has been shown in the worst kind of way: in many subjects (especially science); what we had previously learnt was completely wrong or at least simplified so much that it was virtually unrelated to the original (I’m looking at you ‘energy shells’). That means WE WERE LEARNING LIES. And not only were they lies, but they were boring as humanly possible too. Will this change with the IB and with TOK? I hope so. I’ve been told that we will learn how to critically assess knowledge and its formulation (whatever that means), but why should I believe that either?
TOK simultaneously angers me to the point where I want to throw my laptop against the wall, whilst also exciting and interesting me in a way that nothing else has so far.TOK is probably best described as Schrödinger’s Marmite (the strangest description, I know, but its the only way I can accurately convey how I feel about it): in a superposition of me loving and hating it, and I’ll have no idea which one is true until I check. I have no idea how to find out, so I suppose it will stay in this strange state of opposition until I know for sure. Then again, how do I know anything at all?
(PHOEBE’S EXISTENTIAL CRISIS TO BE CONTINUED…)
thephoebeofknowledge 