The Circulate newsletter from late February has an article on metaphors
"A circular economy requires us to fundamentally change our metaphors, our subconscious assumptions, about the way our economy works, the role banks and money play, how we think about the resources we use. It requires a systems thinking approach to the economy – focussing on the interdependencies and complex nature of our world; becoming acutely aware of the underlying assumptions and simplifications of our models, or – with Lakoff – metaphors."
This is part of what it said about a forthcoming conference:
In an attempt to strengthen these crucial critical faculties in its students, the International Baccalaurate (IB), an internationally recognised high-school diploma, includes a ‘Theory of Knowledge’ (TOK) course in its requirements since the mid-1990s. It is certainly an unusual course for most educational systems, a branch of epistemology, rather than a philosophical course. It encourages the questioning of the nature of knowledge itself. In our current approach to schooling, every academic subject requires assignments and a rigorous way to deal with its specific expectations. Students at the UWC Maastricht, one of 15 United World Colleges, wanted more than that and developed a student-led conference based on the academic subject TOK. This year, the conference runs for the 5th time with the title ‘Where do we draw the line?’ and also features a workshop on circular economy, exploring the lines between individual, society, production and consumption.
The aim of the conference is to take a giant step back from the knowledge the individual could gain personally through family, community or school to see it all more broadly; to gain the big picture of how knowledge is shared and how it all fits together. This systems thinking approach, examining our world through a macroscope, is an approach that generally gets sidelined in current formal education systems. There, the focus is often exclusively directed at understanding the smallest part of a system in detail, for example the process of photosynthesis in a leaf, without complementing this reductionist view with a whole-systems perspective zooming out to examine the tree, the forest, regional vegetation as systems. In order to address challenges in our ever more complex world, it is crucial for learners to gain agility in using both the microscope and the macroscope. To sharpen this agility is one of the objectives of the student-led TOK conference; to make links – trans disciplinary in nature, which are less likely to occur in single subject studies – is another.
Through workshops and diverse discussions prompted by the participants of the conference, individuals investigate ideas to articulate and stretch their current understanding of the world. They then place their own inquiry within the broader realm of shared knowledge. The conference aims to heighten the awareness of its participants about important issues, in several domains, from ethics to global politics. Developing the capacity of understanding different perspectives is certainly one of the priorities, enabling ‘critical objectivity’ or at least an awareness of the metaphors we live by.
It will be good to see the evaluation of all this, given that such metaphors are usually hidden, unconsidered, deeply within us.
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