At my school, we regularly have speakers come in and discuss various topics during ToK, mostly because the regular instructor doesn’t have any idea what to say.
This sounds really easy to fix. Most instructors are used to having a curriculum handed to them in textbook form. A list of good articles (whether from Less Wrong or elsewhere) would fill that role. Read a post as homework, discuss in class, repeat. Throw in an occasional writing assignment for writing practice and grading. This would be dramatically more valuable than most high school classes, and easy to run.
I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. You’d need in-class readings and lots of exercises to supplement discussion. You’d need to plan out what material the students should know by the end of each section and prepare section summaries for the teacher, maybe to lecture with. And so on and so forth.
Indeed, Kahneman himself tried to write a rationality textbook for high school. He failed because of the planning fallacy. The story is at the beginning of this course. Search for “planning fallacy”.
“Most instructors are used to having a curriculum handed to them in textbook form.” What evidence do you have to back up this assertion? This is most definitely not my (or my colleagues) experience over the last 15 years.
Limiting a ToK class to one source would be utterly disastrous and totally against the entire aims of the programme.
I didn’t mean to suggest that limiting a course to one source is a good idea or commonly practiced. Rather, what I meant was that a course needs at least one good source of relevant material that won’t run out, as a base to which other things are added. In my experience, almost all courses have something like that, and instructors supplement the main textbook to varying degrees.
This sounds really easy to fix. Most instructors are used to having a curriculum handed to them in textbook form. A list of good articles (whether from Less Wrong or elsewhere) would fill that role. Read a post as homework, discuss in class, repeat. Throw in an occasional writing assignment for writing practice and grading. This would be dramatically more valuable than most high school classes, and easy to run.
I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. You’d need in-class readings and lots of exercises to supplement discussion. You’d need to plan out what material the students should know by the end of each section and prepare section summaries for the teacher, maybe to lecture with. And so on and so forth.
Indeed, Kahneman himself tried to write a rationality textbook for high school. He failed because of the planning fallacy. The story is at the beginning of this course. Search for “planning fallacy”.
“Most instructors are used to having a curriculum handed to them in textbook form.” What evidence do you have to back up this assertion? This is most definitely not my (or my colleagues) experience over the last 15 years.
Limiting a ToK class to one source would be utterly disastrous and totally against the entire aims of the programme.
I didn’t mean to suggest that limiting a course to one source is a good idea or commonly practiced. Rather, what I meant was that a course needs at least one good source of relevant material that won’t run out, as a base to which other things are added. In my experience, almost all courses have something like that, and instructors supplement the main textbook to varying degrees.
I can’t think of a better way to take all the fun out of the Sequences.