Choices, Choices: Ethics

We have begun Ethics, the area of knowledge concerned with understanding the principles of right and wrong.  How do we really know what is right and wrong?   Is the ethical what we feel is right?  Is it following what everyone does?   Is Ethics the same as religion?   Is there an innate understanding of Ethics?  Do we learn a cultural code that is specific to our society?  If we just follow the law, are we being ethical?   Is authority always right?  Is there a universal system that all acknowledge and respect?  If not, how do we resolve conflicts between analyses of right and wrong?  What ethical issues will we confront in our daily life?

We will confront ethical issues daily.  For example, is it right for animals to suffer to improve human life?  Is capital punishment right?  What should we do if our government goes to war and we do not agree with the justification of the action?  Can a society justify the torture of individuals for the greater good?  What do we do if coworkers are maligning and mobbing a colleague? 

Our first section concerns Christian ethics and we have isolated issues that arise in using a religion as the basis of ethics.  Let us reflect on our own experience.  How has our religion taught us right and wrong?  Has it been effective on a daily basis?  Has it avoided issues that you confront in your life? Do you believe that religious people behave more ethically?  Can religion, in some issues, become a barrier to ethical behavior? 

If we are not religious or do not wish to be so confessional, what do we think about religion and ethics?

Address the questions to your own level of comfort!

Due: November 14 

Learning from which past?

For some students history is fascinating and enthralling, an essential key to the mystery of the present; for others it a dull subject filled with a confusing flurry of names, dates, battles, treaties. It's a tempest in a library.  Yet history is a hotly contested topic in many countries. All agree that history is a vitally important story for the identity of a nation--but whose point of view should be told? Which version should be communicated to the younger generations?

Early this year, for example, a group of conservative Italian parliamentarians loudly attacked the selection of history textbooks commonly used in Italy. They demanded scholastic texts that are impartial and objective in vision. They questioned whether public money should be spent on textbooks that are partisan and, in their view, are indoctrinating the young in leftist ideology. Among the passages reproached as biased are laudatory descriptions of Palmiro Togliatti, Enrico Berlinguer, and Alcide De Gasperi, each an undeniably important statesman in postwar Italy.  The members of parliament branded the textbooks as communist and requested the opening of a formal enquiry.

In the United States, similarly, history can be contested territory. The late Howard Zinn, a professor of political science at Boston University, wrote A People’s History of the United States to give an alternative version to the narrative found in most  American textbooks (you can find the entire work here). He viewed the story as dominated by the economic interests of the wealthy and wrote with consistent sympathy for those who suffered unjustly, the Native Americans, the African slaves, the impoverished immigrants, people in foreign countries (e.g., the Vietnamese), women, and laborers. For the political left, this is the unvarnished and unattractive truth of American history; for the political right, it is only a simple ideological fable pitting the rich against the poor. Who is right? Do you have to decide? Can you ignore the debate?

For one more example, let's look at the UK.  In recent years the United Kingdom has watched with concern a decline in the number of students taking the history GCSE exam.  The curriculum has been revamped, yet critics still think and feel the course is not challenging students and telling the right story.  Nial Ferguson, for instance, wants the narrative to focus on why Europe gains ascendancy after 1500.   The president of the Royal Society termed Ferguson's suggestions ideological; some liberal commentators more bluntly said they were rightwing.

Let's consider some questions.  Can a textbook treating national history avoid charges of patriotic propaganda?  Can history step out of politics and become objective? Can history remove itself from value judgements? If not, whose values should be promoted?  Is there a neutral language and manner for writing history? Are you conscious of your own political ideas? Do you think that you don't have any political ideas? Is it desirable for a student to be wholly apolitical? Have your history classes at Marymount clarified your own sense of cultural and political identity? 

Select a question or two, or formulate a related one of your own, and make a comment. Due: 4 November (coincidentally an important date in Italian history!) 

Education as a Human Science: Sir Ken Robinson

In TOK we are drawing near the end of our Human Science unit.  We have touched upon the Human Science that arguably influences us everyday most powerfully: Education.   How do we learn?  What are different theories of learning?  What are learning styles?  Are we really divided, for instance, into visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners?  Are these innate predispositions or acquired preferences?  What are other kinds of intelligence?  What is the best way to teach?  How do we best measure learning?  Is standardized testing useful or is it a reductive tool to channel students into narrow categories?  Is there a business of standardized testing seeking to objectify a process that is much more dynamic and multidirectional?  Can we, for example, really measure the fluid process of learning to read in tiny graduated steps?  Is homework necessary after seven hours of school?  Should staring into the pictures in a plastic box increasingly occupy the center of the educational process?  Is an authoritarian model of learning most effective?  Do we study too many subjects?  Should we emphasize competition or cooperation? Is religious formation effective in building character and values?

The questions go on and on and on.  Education is a complex human science, a crossroads of developmental psychology, sociology, economics, politics, and more.  Debates on these issues quickly become heated.  The brief RSA video of Sir Ken Robinson raised significant questions.   Urbane and charming, erudite without becoming pedantic, Sir Ken is an educational activist, a man who advocates diversity, creativity, and practicality.   In his talk, which we saw in an abbreviated format (see the entire talk here), he explains how the educational system we use is a child of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.   It was made for a former age, and the stimulating 21^st Century requires a different model that engages contemporary children and, instead of seeking to instill obedience and passivity, even through the use of drugs, prepares them for an ever shifting and dynamic present.

How does one do this?  How would you do this?  What would you change in the process of learning?  Do you know your own learning style or preference?  What would be your ideal learning experience?  More freedom?  More structure?  Fewer subjects?  Less homework?  More work in groups?  More individual work? More variety in assessment to measure learning?  Oral examinations?  More work connected with the world beyond the walls of school? Please do not be facetious in making a comment below. 

Human Science: Experimentation. The Stanford Prison Experiment

A Human Science, we have seen in class, is a strange hybrid beast. Social scientists are imbued with the Scientific Method and its elements of observation, hypothesis, experimentation, the collection of data, analysis of the data, and the formulation of a conclusion regarding the initial hypothesis. With this Method they attempt to study the behavior of human beings, but problems in application can quickly surface. How does one accurately measure human behavior? How can one predict an outcome without influencing it? How can one isolate exactly what causes complex human behavior? Are there ethical considerations that inhibit experimentation?

The problems are thorny. We see them in a famous (or infamous) experiment conducted at Stanford in 1971. Professor Philip Zimbardo created a prison simulation with undergraduate students, male, white middle-class students. He wished to determine whether a brutal and hostile environment determines behavior, or whether an individual's own personal characteristics determine it. Were prisons conditioning people to behave sadistically, or was this sadism an innate characteristic? Is it nature or is it nurture?

In class we watched a BBC documentary on the experiment (the link is also on Edline) and are familiar with its details. After six days Zimbardo shut down the experiment. Please respond to one of the statements below:

• The Stanford Prison Experiment was a daring and creative simulation that revealed that human behavior is substantially determined by environment. If one places several well-adjusted subjects into a degrading authoritarian environment, they quickly lose their sense of personal identity and become utterly submissive. The Scientific Method was well applied for the most part and, whatever the faults in application, these did not compromise the findings. Environment powerfully shapes behavior.  In retrospect we undertand more about the ethics of experimentation and, through subsequent reflection, can apply better guidelines to prevent duress in experiments. We saw the very same phenomenom with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal that erupted in 2004. If the military had been aware of the 1971 experiment, that scandal could have been prevented.


• The Stanford Prison Experiment was a poorly conceived work of improvised theater with unprofessional actors. The guards were told at the beginning to abuse the students psychologically, and true prison conditions were not replicated. One student guard admits to acting out a sadistic role seen in Cool Hand Luke. If students and the professor himself were merely playing roles learned from Hollywood movies, there was no true scientific study, it was improvised theater. Moreover, there was no neutral observer, no independent variable, nothing was measured, the results were impressionistic. The conclusions articulated in the documentary seem to manifest Confirmation Bias.  Does one really need to determine that studious well-behaved unconfrontational middle class young men will be submissive in prison? Can one generalize about human beings from such a small group? The naiveté of the study was extraordinary. 

New Year, New Challenges

In May, having received your high school diploma, you will stand on the lawn and toss your tasseled blue or white academic caps spinning into the air and you will rejoice that one long stretch of schooling has finished. Rowdy cheers, tears, laughter, hugs.

But there is still a lot of work for the next nine months.

In TOK this means finishing the curriculum (Social Sciences, History, Ethics), writing the TOK Essay (topics already posted on Edline), and giving the TOK Presentation. All of this we will introduce and begin to address in our first class. It also means giving as much as we can of ourselves in class discussions, listening actively, responding appropriately, weighing what we hear and say.

Before we begin, let's look again at the Mission Statement of the International Baccalaureate Organization:

The International Baccalaureate aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable, and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.
To this end the organization works with schools, governments, and international organizations to develop challenging programmes of international education and rigorous assessment.
These programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate, and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with all their differences, can also be right.

Let's take a look at the last paragraph. What does this paragraph mean to you? Please write a brief reflection of about 200 words.

Art: What has been the most powerful experience for me?

Art as a way of knowing is an enormous topic. Living in a city like Rome that teems with masterpieces can give another dimension to our classroom discussion. Whether we wish to look at a Neolithic fertility goddess, an Egyptian obelisk from the time of Ramses the Great, an Assyrian battle relief, a Hellenistic bronze of a beaten boxer, an Etruscan terracotta statue of a deity, a Roman imperial portrait, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, a medieval church and its mosaics, a graceful Renaissance masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, or Michelangelo, a haunting biblical scene by Caravaggio, an elegant and dynamic sculpture by Bernini, the cooler Neoclassical beauty of a Canova statue, the patriotic scenes of the painters of the Risorgimento, the abstractions of the Futurists or Rationalists, the thought-provoking contemporary architectural works of Zaha Hadid, Richard Meier, Renzo Piano, or Massimiliano Fuksas---Rome has these and much, much more. It's a tough act to beat.

And if we think of the poets and other writers who have lived or sojourned here, the list continues. Picking up the list from after 1800, we can mention Leopardi, Keats, Byron, Shelley, James Joyce, Hans Christian Andersen, Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dacia Maraini, and the list can go on and on.

And if we think of film, the list continues: Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Passolini, Fellini, Sergio Leone, Elio Petri...

But if we ask what work of art has been most important to you, how would you respond? Would it be a work from the past? Would it be a work of literature, a dance performance, a song, a film, a cartoon, a painting, a sculpture, a building? What makes it so powerful to you? Is it the emotion? Is it an insight into the human condition? Was it something else?

Please answer these last questions in an entry below of about 400 words. This is due at the beginning of class on May 20.

Math / Presentations

It has been a while since we have posted! In the intervening weeks--which encompassed the ten day hiatus of Easter vacation--we have done the Mathematics unit and again begun to work on presentations. In the Mathematics unit we examined the axiom-theorem structure which the Greeks invented and how logic operates in this system. We also made connections between math and the arts. For example, we looked at fractals and watched a brief video of Benoit Mandelbrot, their creator/discoverer. Students in groups also presented different math/art topics including the Golden Section, the art of M.C. Escher, Linear Perspective, and the relationship of math to music that in the West began with Pythagoras.
We looked at how math can be creative. Finally we spoke of how Kurt Goedel (a friend of Einstein) proved that not all mathematical truth can be proven, that is, that there are true theorems that cannot be proven from the given axioms, a curious situation for a discipline that is so rigorous and precise.
With all this done, it is time to turn our attention to presentations. Could someone from each group record the real-life situation and the knowledge issue that have been selected. What problems have you encountered? Sign with the initials of the people in the group.