First TOK Lesson

In our first TOK lesson we had a brief introduction to the subject and we discussed about the meanining some images of a world map had and about what did the different maps represent. These were the images:

There were several opinions regarding both questions. Some people said that all three world maps represented our home; as Earth is the only place in the Universe the great majority of humans has ever visited and it's the only known planet in which the human race can survive. Others said the change of orientation and content of the different maps represented the existence of different perspectives and points of view, or that the maps represented the cultural and ethnic diversity of our world. Someone also said that the upside down maps made him/her think of how would the world be if the southern part of the world was the northern and all the way round, as the north has always been the one containing the richest, most advanced and powerful countries, how it would be if, instead of the U.S. or Russia, South Africa had been a world power?

In my opinion all the world map images showed the same place, only from different perspectives. The images, specially the one showing the countries’ boundaries, made me think of how limited humans are. Our planet is less than a speck of dust compared to the immensity of the Universe, and still, most of us will never get out of it, nor visit more than a small part of it. We are limited, because we cannot travel freely across our small world and directly know all the existing cultures. Every time we want to visit another country, if we are lucky, we will only have to show our passports and maybe pay a small fortune for a plane ticket. But if we were born in a country like Colombia, we would probably have to pay for a visa and go through the long process of getting it, knowing that it could be given or not to us.

At the end of the class, we watched a video related to the idea of the world being flat as an intelligent one and we had a small reflection on the topic. One of the things told in the video that made me think the most, was what the author said about the fact that the cultures that reached the conclusion of the world being flat at least took the time to think about it, while other simply didn’t care. I think the reason those cultures didn’t care about the world being flat or not was that the just didn’t have time to sit down and think of something beyond their daily survival, while other cultures like the Greek one, had such good and stable economies they could take the time to think about this issues without having much else to worry about.

This first lesson was really interesting and it made me consider things I had never given a thought to before, I hope the next lessons are as good as this one.