Document Type
Introduction
Abstract
[First paragraph]
This project has too many strands to even begin to suggest where it started. However, it really began to take shape during an afternoon spent scouring libraries and bookstores with a friend who teaches in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program at a local secondary school. He teaches physics and chemistry but had been given a new course, "Theory of Knowledge," or TOK as they call it in their shorthand. He asked what I thought of its title and aims and I had to be honest: "It is the most pretentious sounding thing I’ve heard in a while." He agreed. Where does one begin teaching Gr. 12 students, no matter how talented, the "theory of knowledge"? Yes, they meant one. Apparently, there is one theory of knowledge and in 375 minutes per week over the course of a twenty-week semester, it is to be delivered and faithfully so. Alternatively, one could endeavour to teach them all theories of knowledge in order to ensure that students would be able to question any knowledge claim they encounter. Who would undertake such a task? Who could? Small wonder, then, I was finding students who made flat statements like, "I know all about Northrop Frye. I read his essay in high school." I have never forgotten that one because one section of the second chapter of the Anatomy of Criticism was understood as being everything. Yet, it was not surprising. We had more to teach them and instead of increasing the time available to do so, the institutional structures were compressing schedules. Ontario even managed to eliminate a year of high school without finding a way -- even a money-making one -- to replace it with two-year schools or something like the CEGEPs in Québec. Eventually, we hit upon trying to teach critical thinking and the cogent expression of that thought as our two primary goals; neither of us trusting epistemologies nor being satisfied with ontologies. Admittedly, we both avoid defining a "theory of knowledge," let alone "the" theory of knowledge.
Repository Citation
Ouellette, Marc A.. "Editor's Introduction." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 10, no. 2, 2010, pp. 1–3. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol10/iss2/1