I was part of an IB program in a rural Indiana high school. Our ToK course was primarily a sounding board for Christian fundamentalism. We learned “about” other philosophical theories of knowledge, but all under the obvious-but-not-overtly-stated pretense that the Bible dictates truth and anyone who doesn’t have faith that Bible is true will necessarily develop an evil/harmful, incorrect theory or worldview. The same general pattern dominated our sociology and history classes (all taught by the same person, who despite having more advanced degrees than many high school teachers and having been in the school system for something like 20 years as a teacher, basically treated public high school as if it was a religious school).
We gave an unfair amount of attention to Kierkegaard and C.S. Lewis whose works weren’t necessarily actually about ToK (the closest that Lewis comes is perhaps his book Miracles in which he tries to argue that irregularities are what allow us to detect regularities). I grew up, moved away from fundamentalist family and community, studied math and biology in college and eventually became a rationalist and an atheist. I think my same story is exceedingly common in the midwestern United States. The only ways to defeat fundamentalism from a young age are (a) having non-fundamentalist parents; in fact, not even religion-sympathizers will do; you probably actually need actively atheist parents to avoid it / possibly including homeschooling; (b) attend a non-religious private school or a magnet school near a large urban area.
If you attend school anywhere in the suburban-to-rural midwest, there is a very high probability that some school official will talk to you about creationism at some point, philosophy/sociology/psychology/evolution will be presented as weakly supported “theories” that are at least as flawed as religious reasoning, and you are generally discouraged from being smart in any dimension or capacity that causes you to disagree with established dogma. Frankly, I’m just so lucky that I went to an elite college that was small enough that I had close contact with the professors. That was the main thing that convinced me to stop being a religion sympathizer (otherwise, I probably would be one of these people who says, “well, you can’t disprove God, so anything goes.”)
At any rate, I support the aim of a program like IB and teaching ToK is a good idea. But the real problem is that no matter how good the ideas are, there are vast areas of the country in which they simply will not be implemented or will be intentionally misused to reward religious belief. I think that’s the part of the problem that is more discouraging. But I don’t think a singularity is necessarily required to fix the problem.
I was part of an IB program in a rural Indiana high school. Our ToK course was primarily a sounding board for Christian fundamentalism. We learned “about” other philosophical theories of knowledge, but all under the obvious-but-not-overtly-stated pretense that the Bible dictates truth and anyone who doesn’t have faith that Bible is true will necessarily develop an evil/harmful, incorrect theory or worldview. The same general pattern dominated our sociology and history classes (all taught by the same person, who despite having more advanced degrees than many high school teachers and having been in the school system for something like 20 years as a teacher, basically treated public high school as if it was a religious school).
We gave an unfair amount of attention to Kierkegaard and C.S. Lewis whose works weren’t necessarily actually about ToK (the closest that Lewis comes is perhaps his book Miracles in which he tries to argue that irregularities are what allow us to detect regularities). I grew up, moved away from fundamentalist family and community, studied math and biology in college and eventually became a rationalist and an atheist. I think my same story is exceedingly common in the midwestern United States. The only ways to defeat fundamentalism from a young age are (a) having non-fundamentalist parents; in fact, not even religion-sympathizers will do; you probably actually need actively atheist parents to avoid it / possibly including homeschooling; (b) attend a non-religious private school or a magnet school near a large urban area.
If you attend school anywhere in the suburban-to-rural midwest, there is a very high probability that some school official will talk to you about creationism at some point, philosophy/sociology/psychology/evolution will be presented as weakly supported “theories” that are at least as flawed as religious reasoning, and you are generally discouraged from being smart in any dimension or capacity that causes you to disagree with established dogma. Frankly, I’m just so lucky that I went to an elite college that was small enough that I had close contact with the professors. That was the main thing that convinced me to stop being a religion sympathizer (otherwise, I probably would be one of these people who says, “well, you can’t disprove God, so anything goes.”)
At any rate, I support the aim of a program like IB and teaching ToK is a good idea. But the real problem is that no matter how good the ideas are, there are vast areas of the country in which they simply will not be implemented or will be intentionally misused to reward religious belief. I think that’s the part of the problem that is more discouraging. But I don’t think a singularity is necessarily required to fix the problem.