Some years ago I worked with a teacher who eked out his salary by growing
tomatoes on a commercial basis. He told me of his surprise on finding
that the European Community defined a grade 1 tomato purely in terms
of its size, colour and regularity of shape. The criteria made no reference
to one all-important point--its FLAVOUR.
Perhaps we are in danger of making a similar mistake with TOK essays.
We have criteria that refer to clarity, content and critical thought,
but do not specifically mention creativity. The danger, clearly, is
that teachers, more concerned with student grades than with fostering
a critical approach to knowledge, will teach an essay writing formula
that should produce high marks at the possible expense of creative thinking.
Getting high grades is no problem: take Reuben Abel's Man is the
Measure as your starting point, throw in a few references to the
canon of western philosophical thought (no matter if the student is
based in India or Africa), add a dash of counterclaims (usually in the
penultimate paragraph) and BINGO!--it's a certain B and a possible A,
especially if the teacher spends two years rehearsing the relevant techniques.
But if this is what it's all about, then why doesn't the IB just offer
Epistemology at Higher and Subsidiary level and let the rest of us forget
all about it? What justification can there be for TOK's central position
in the familiar hexagon, other than that it promotes a creative individual
response to the learning process?
The provision of exemplar essays and hints that teachers should restrict
themselves to setting past and present prescribed titles may be of some
help in avoiding major derailments, but they raise several questions,
namely:
1. What happens to the teacher's right to set her own titles? Surely
this must be retained, in the interest of a creative approach to the
subject.
2. What's wrong with students generating their own titles, provided
that they have an appropriate "problems of knowledge" orientation?
3. Must linguistically-limited students (a fair percentage of IB candidates)
be restricted to a prescribed list consisting almost exclusively of
titles of puzzling linguistic complexity? (I note that the latest batch
are even more complicated than previous ones.)
By all means let's have a measure of comparability between school and
school. But I do hate to see the baby disappearing down the plughole
along with the bathwater. And while I'm being metaphorical, shouldn't
we be helping our students to produce fruit with flavour, rather than
mere bland symmetry?
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