While watching all of the political ads, commentary, and debates, it disturbs me how little people actually justify the knowledge they share with the public. I recently asked my TOK students to watch one of their teachers and consider how they justify the knowledge they are attempting to impart. The students then wrote thier own intepretations of what they witnessed (w/out using Teacher's names of course).
It was scary to see how many of them had teachers who seemed to only have Authority behind them as the reason for their students to trust and believe what they were "teaching". It either came from a book, college classes, etc.
This made we wonder why we accept this in education. Why do we teach with so little justification other than "well that's what I was taught"? I would love to say I never fall into this but that would be naive. Especially in teaching science, I have to trust the experts for much of what I "know".
I think this is a poor lesson for kids to learn yet we reinforce it everywhere in society. Why do we accept this as reasonable?
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