The good news: TOK does not require you to learn a great deal of new material. Instead, it asks you to think about what you already know—or think you know—and reflect on it.
What DO you know, exactly? How do you know that you know it? What evidence or persuasion or feeling convinces you?
What’s the difference between knowledge and belief?
How does ‘knowing’ mean different things in different contexts?
These are the kinds of questions TOK requires you to think about, talk about, and write about.
Here’s an excerpt from the IB TOK Guide:
The TOK course, a flagship element in the Diploma Programme, encourages critical thinking about knowledge itself, to try to help young people make sense of what they encounter. Its core content is questions like these: What counts as knowledge? How does it grow? What are its limits? Who owns knowledge?
What is the value of knowledge? What are the implications of having, or not having, knowledge? What makes TOK unique, and distinctively different from standard academic disciplines, is its process. At the centre of the course is the student as knower. Students entering the Diploma Programme typically have 16 years of life experience and more than 10 years of formal education behind them. They have accumulated a vast amount of knowledge, beliefs and opinions from academic disciplines and their lives outside the classroom. In TOK they have the opportunity to step back from this relentless acquisition of new knowledge, in order to consider knowledge issues.
I hope you will enjoy the journey.
—Mr. MacKnight
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