TOK which stands for Theory of Knowledge, is a new subject that Grade 11s take this year. This course mainly focuses on developing an understanding of how we gain our knowledge and how knowledge affects us. By doing this course, students should reflect on their own experiences of getting knowledge and have some thoughts about “How do we know what we know?”

In TOK class last week, I learned that people’s perspectives of viewing the world are varied, since our culture, race, gender and the knowledge we gained strongly affected our world views. We did an experiment to help us understand this better. Each one of us was told to draw a map from our memories. However, surprisingly, some of our maps looked completely different from other one’s. For example, I put China in the middle of the map and the US was on the right side of my map, because that was the map that I grew up with. When I was in Grade 8, in a Chinese public school, the geography teacher gave us the map that looked like mine, with China in the middle. By contrast, Erik had always been in an English-speaking school where teachers showed them a map, in which Europe was in the middle, and therefore, he drew a map that was very different from mine.

As you can see, the knowledge that we gained strongly affects on our thinking and acting. However, is there such thing as a correct drawing of the map of the world? My answer is NO, because everyone gets knowledge from different places and everybody’s knowledge is limited, and therefore no one can say that their map of the world is totally correct and others’ are not. However, our world views do expand as we grow up. In my opinion, it is completely right to place yourself in the middle of your own world. When we are young, we only see and know about the environment that we grow up in, and therefore it is acceptable to place ourselves in the middle of our own worlds. However, as we grow up, we see the world from more than one aspects, and therefore have a more comprehensive understanding of the world, which is definitely a good thing, because we become more aware of the differences between people and cultures, and hence can place ourselves in the world in a proper position.