# data[].attributes.headline
This History Today article features the opinions of four different historians, who offer their thoughts on whether social media helps or hinders the pursuit of history.

# data[].attributes.subject
This History Today article features the opinions of four different historians, who offer their thoughts on whether social media helps or hinders the pursuit of history.

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE Use the terms identified above to summarize the point of each of the historians. Process whether they are being positive or negative about the impact of social media - or both. Then come to a conclusion: does social media help or hinder us from understanding the past? What do we need to know about it in order to ensure that it provides us with valuable historical knowledge? To what extent does its impact depend on who we are?

KEY TERMS Tabloid headline quality, Patterns of control, Online bubble, Ease of access

LINKS TO History, Technology, Language

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms are widely used by historians. But does anyone benefit?

# data[].attributes.headline
An LA Times article, looking at how the LA Museum of the Holocaust is changing its name, and developing a clearer mission in order to fight hatred and intolerance.

# data[].attributes.subject
An LA Times article, looking at how the LA Museum of the Holocaust is changing its name, and developing a clearer mission in order to fight hatred and intolerance.

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is essentially a story about communication: the museum has changed its name, and its logo, and hopes that this will have a profound impact on the way it is viewed (compare this to what’s happening with the Hagia Sophia). How does the way ideas are communicated change our perception of them? What is more important: the message, or the way it is conveyed?

KEY TERMS Rebranding, Universal gesture of communication

LINKS TO History, Language

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is changing its name and logo. The new Holocaust Museum Los Angeles, it announced on Friday, aims to prioritize history and education centered on fighting hatred and intolerance toward all communities.

"We're a Holocaust museum and this puts the Holocaust name first,"museum Chief Executive Beth Keansaid.

The name change may seem subtle, but it has big ideas behind it, both ideological and practical.

"We feel like we're on the path to be a world leader on the Holocaust and relevant issues of inclusiveness and diversity," Kean said. "LAMOTH was a mouthful and led to this awful acronym, that stuck for so long, that was meaningless and confusing. Holocaust Museum Los Angeles is clear-cut. For us, it's a simple but powerful way of pivoting from being Los Angeles-centric to Holocaust education-centric for Los Angeles and the world."

The museum's new name is part of a broader rebranding that began in late 2018 and includes a new logo and website, both put into effect on Friday.

The old logo was an abstract architectural image incorporating the LAMOTH acronym. The new logo, by Colorado designer Brett Aronson, depicts a palm pressed against a barbed-wire fence. The open hand is meant to be a universal gesture of communication, Kean said, "a symbolic gesture in the fight for justice and overcoming adversity, which is more important in the country and the world than it's ever been. It also says [of hatred], 'Stop. Enough!'"

(Holocaust Museum Los Angeles)

The new website is more contemporary-looking and easier to navigate, with more gallery photos, richer exhibition presentations and added educational resources for teachers.

When the coronavirus crisis first hit and the museum closed in March, it paused the rebranding project. But as the pandemic went on, the museum felt the timing was more appropriate than ever to put forth a more clearly defined mission that prioritizes not only education but inclusiveness and taking action as well.

"We didn't want to wait because of what's happening right now in the Black Lives Matter movement and the rise in anti-Semitism," Kean said, adding that incidents of anti-Semitic assault rose 56% from 2018 to 2019, according to a 2019 Anti-Defamation League audit. "We thought: 'Why not get started now?"

After the death of George Floyd, and as part of its new mission "to inspire humanity through truth," the museum launched a monthly Zoom conversation series, "Building Bridges," in partnership with other local organizations that, collectively, represent the African American, Latin American, Asian American and Jewish communities. One ofthe first guests was LAPD Chief Michel Moore. "We asked him tough questions about policy changes," Kean said.

Another reason to rebrand? "To amplify our voice," Kean said, "because a post [Holocaust] survivor world is right in front of us. We need to do a better job, we need to amplify our impact and do better at educating."

In April, the museum hosted a virtual remembrance ceremony to mark the 75th anniversary of liberation and the end of the Holocaust.

On Oct. 21, the museum will mount a virtual gala, hosted by Melissa Rivers and featuring a slew of celebrities - Gal Gadot, Billy Crystal, Morgan Freeman, Jack Black, Sidney Poitier and Ben Stiller among them - each of whom will be seen in pre-recorded messages touching on the importance of combating hatred and bigotry. Proceeds from the event will go toward the museum's free, virtual educational programs.

"It's about 'how can we get our message across in these difficult times?' and this was a good opportunity," Kean said. "We're calling it '45 Minutes of Inspiration.'"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust changes its name, putting history first

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust changes its name and logo to put history first and take a stand against hatred and intolerance.

# data[].attributes.headline
A CNN article, looking at how a group of teachers from Texas considered reterming ‘slave trade’ as ‘involuntary relocation’.

# data[].attributes.subject
A CNN article, looking at how a group of teachers from Texas considered reterming ‘slave trade’ as ‘involuntary relocation’.

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why did the board decide to rethink the term ‘Enslaved Peoples’? How does it change our understanding by using the term 'involuntary relocation’ instead of the ‘slave trade’? How is this linked to political affiliations in the USA? Overall, how do language and politics influence the way we understand the past, and how can we ensure that they do not undermine our objectivity?

KEY TERMS Contentious debate, Age-appropriate, Truthful knowledge, Accurate descriptions

LINKS TO History, Language, Politics, Human sciences

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A group of Texas educators proposed using the term ‘involuntary relocation’ rather than slavery when teaching 2nd graders | CNN

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A workgroup developing a second-grade social studies curriculum for the Texas State Board of Education last month suggested using the term “involuntary relocation” to describe people who were sold into slavery, the board’s chair said, amid national debates on the role of critical race theory in clas…

# data[].attributes.headline
A National Geographic article, assessing whether the Indiana Jones movies have helped or harmed archaeology.

# data[].attributes.subject
A National Geographic article, assessing whether the Indiana Jones movies have helped or harmed archaeology.

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE What does the parallel example of Steven Spielberg’s film Jaws indicate about how a movie can negatively affect the way we view the (natural) world? How have the Indiana Jones movies had both negative and positive effects on the way we view and carry out archaeology? What point does Janina Ramirez make about the movies stimulating “imagination, storytelling, and world-building”? What does Albert Lin mean when he refers to these - and other - movies being different “tracks of reality”? To wrap up: Are movies and other works of art ‘imaginations’ designed to produce pleasure, or are they the means to help us better understand the world around us?

KEY TERMS Fiction-informed assumptions, Role model, Imaginations, Original cultures, Stories, Explorers, Tracks of reality

LINKS TO History, The arts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On June 30, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny will mark the final cinematic installment of the saga that began with 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark. Once again,the world's most famous archaeologist-real or otherwise-may have many of his authentic counterparts rolling their eyes. The question worth asking is how many of the rest will be first in line for tickets?

First, here's a parallel worth noting. Filmmaker Steven Spielberg has stated that he deeply regrets the demonisation of sharks following his 1975 movie Jaws. Many were hunted, and prejudices born. A 2015 study by academic Christopher Pepin-Neff described the public's tendency to make impactful, fiction-informed assumptions about that film's real-life counterpart as "The Jaws Effect." But it's a complex legacy: many shark scientists and conservationists credit the film with igniting a more benign fascination.

Spielberg may have more reasons to be sheepish. Thanks to the public response to his movies, geneticists have had to answer saucer-eyed questions about dinosaurs, DeLorean drivers all sit at the wheel of a time machine -and every archaeologist probably has a hat and a bullwhip tucked away somewhere.

'Obtainer of rare antiquities'

However reminiscent his style is of early 20 th century archaeologists such as Hiram Bingham, Henry Field, and Earl Halstead Morris, Indiana Jones doesn't hang his hat on one historical figure. Designed in homage to TV action serials beloved of creator George Lucas-and with a lead character named after his dog-the franchise's brand of roughshackle adventure won audience's hearts to the tune of almost a billion dollars worldwide. It just so happened that its protagonist was a part-time professor of archaeology with a sideline in chasing ancient artifacts drenched in mystique-often, against a backdrop of brewing war, pursued by others with less museum-centred intentions.
(Related: A look at explorer Hiram Bingham, a real-life Indiana Jones.)
Those artifacts-amongst them the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, 'good luck' rocks crafted by Shiva, crystal skulls and the mysterious Dial of Destiny-occupy a grey area where history, religious mystique and creative license meet. Nevertheless, Indiana Jones accidentally seduced moviegoers to archaeology-and made more than a few think "gee, I'd like to do that." Some are now all grown up and making discoveries around the world. But in a profession generally free of Nazis, booby traps and inter-dimensional civilizations, but newly awake to its colonial legacy -and with a lead character often likened to a profiteering grave-robber-is that a good thing?
Related: From royal rings to humble rocks, these mystical objects were believed to shape human history.
'You call this archaeology?'

Indiana Jones himself isn't convinced. "I... I don't know. I guess we made archaeology look like fun," Harrison Ford, 80, tells National Geographic down a bad phoneline when asked how he feels about his character inspiring a generation of archaeologists. "They're great romps. Great adventures. But-and I mean this in the nicest possible way-I don't take any personal [credit]. When I'm approached by someone who is an archaeologist, I'm always interested to hear what their experience was. I'm happy people have found work that fulfills them. But I think it's a little bizarre."

It's a sensible viewpoint; as an archaeologist "Dr. Jones" is a curious role model. He has questionable excavation methods. Turns up at digs packing a revolver and a whip. He rarely returns with the goods and is habitually caught up in all manner of chaos-from simple tank pileups to the detonation of nuclear weapons-despite his assertion that most archaeology is "done in a library."

And yet, as Ford well knows, the character he has brought to life onscreen for more than 40 years has become quite the mascot. In 2008, the actor was even honored by the venerable Archaeological Institute of America with the Bandelier Award-with then-president Brian Rose, a professor of archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, praising Ford's "significant role in stimulating the public's interest in archaeological exploration."

Despite Indiana Jones's evident real-word resonance, Ford is maybe a little reluctant to place any greater depth on his character than was ever intended. "I think in the original film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, we were working with the notion that we were making a B-movie. It was fun, it was bold. But there wasn't a terrible sophistication to it all," he says. "I've always said these films are more about movies than they are about anything else. These are adventures, they're imaginations. What I like most about him is the pleasure we're able to give the audience."

Ford admits he does personally "like antiquities, things that inform us of the past, things that are beautifully made." Of the conversation around artefact restitution, he says he's "aware of the issues... [that] there have been some inequities [around] how items are collected, and who they belong to. I'm pleased to see the movement now to return these artifacts to their original cultures."

When asked what the most precious thing he's ever held is, however, he says simply: "a newborn baby."

'X never, ever marks the spot'

As journalist Marilyn Johnson wrote in her book Lives in Ruins, "every archaeologist I interviewed worked Indiana Jones into the conversation, usually with affection, as if mentioning a daredevil older brother."

However, "there is a real distinction between the archaeologists' embrace of Indiana Jones's style-and all the priceless publicity that character gave the profession-and of his methodology," Johnson tells National Geographic in an email. "It's astonishing that a profession dedicated to mostly painstaking field and lab work has such a swashbuckling image."

Thanks to this, modern archaeologists often find themselves shoehorned into an Indiana Jones-shaped frame of reference. Johnson mentions classical archaeologist Joan Breton Connelly, known as 'Indiana Joan' at the Explorer's Club; biomolecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern is ubiquitously known as the 'Indiana Jones of ancient ales, wines, and extreme beverages.' There is also an Indiana Jones of the art world, of deep sea exploration, economics and photography -suggesting any occupation can have its "Indiana Jones Effect."

Plus, as with sharks and Jaws, before people saw a fictional archaeologist in action most didn't really have an opinion at all.

"When the films were first released there was a disconnect between what the public perceived as the work of archaeologists and the actual work they were undertaking," says Janina Ramirez, a Research Fellow in history of art at the University of Oxford and presenter of BBC series Raiders of the Lost Past. "I'm sure some students signed up to study the subject thinking it would involve glamorous travel, potential wealth and excitement."

Ramirez remembers after seeing the first Indiana Jones movie she "immediately tracked down my local archaeology club, and a lifelong obsession with the past was born," adding that the influence of the franchise on a generation cannot be underestimated. "The films tapped into the intrinsic thrill that discovery brings," she says. "I have been fortunate enough to be on digs where major finds are made. That these moments still grab headlines and generate fascination in the public is what underlines the success of Indiana Jones."
(Related: 13 pictures that capture the wonder and thrill of archaeology.)
But does the association do it any harm? As Ramirez says, "while archaeology attempts to be a scientific and fact-based discipline, it requires imagination, storytelling, and world-building. If a film character can bring the subject to life through similar techniques, then it can't be all bad."

'It belongs in a museum!'

That said, what we see of Jones's work isn't hugely successful. The idol of the Chachapoyan warriors is pilfered by a rival; the Holy Grail is swallowed by the Earth, the crystal skull disappears back 'into the space between spaces.' The Ark of the Covenant, meanwhile, is spirited away by the U.S. government-the ancient relic from a faraway land wheeled into a temple-sized warehouse stockpiled high with anonymous boxes of God-knows-what from who-knows-where. This, the sprawling final shot from 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark hits somewhat differently these days. But still, the colonial-smelling attitude hasn't aged well in today's climate of awareness concerning the provenance of antiquities. You could argue that's down to the period in which the films are set-Johnson says that "setting the [earlier] Indiana Jones movies in the 1930s gave Indy license to be bad." But as far as the character's personal fortune and glory goes the results rarely justify the means.

So, if it's not his methods, or his motivations, is the appeal of Indiana Jones something less obvious-and more portable through changing times?

"Stories through all cultures have profound impacts on how we see the world, and our possibilities," says Albert Lin, a scientist, explorer and presenter of National Geographic's Lost Cities with Albert Lin. "For me, growing up with stories like Indiana Jones, or Dances with Wolves, even reading National Geographic... those stories were a window into a bigger world. This belief in wonder, in adventure. That out there's some hidden city in the jungles, or some story of a mythical land. It wasn't until I got to my Ph.D and someone said to me 'hey-there actually is a lot of unknown.' Ever since then, my life has felt like it's a weird mirror to Indiana Jones."

Speaking to National Geographic over Zoom, Lin is covered with bites from his latest expedition to Guatemala, where he found himself climbing into the tomb of an ancient Mayan king and being confronted with ancient glyphs revealing clues to an origin city that has never been found. There were crocodiles and scorpions involved, along with local rumors of a massive anaconda. But his own parallels aside, Lin-whose work with technologies such as Lidar has earned him the moniker 'Indiana Jones 2.0'-is convinced the appeal resonates beyond the literal. "The fact that Indiana Jones makes anyone who watches it feels like there's wonder and adventure to be had out there is a very good thing. Because that's a deep part of who we are as humans. We are explorers. And there is a frontier of exploration that still exists. And as fantastical as those stories may be, there are realities-various tracks of reality-where they can become real."

Harrison Ford and the climate crusade

For Ford, who in The Dial of Destiny is rounding off one of the longest tenures one actor has played a character on the big screen, becoming Dr. Jones isn't hard. "I put on the clothes. The character just comes with it," he says. "It's an easy fit for me. I understand him, his relationship to the stories that we tell. And I like those stories."The treasure at the end of Ford's own adventure story isn't in doubt. "I found it. It's nature. With all its mystery and complexity. That's the thing we should be protecting. Healthy nature is the greatest treasure of all and the one we're most in danger of losing."

It's a sentiment he can back up. Ford has held the position of Vice Chair of Conservation International since 1991-and contributed to the documentary series Years of Living Dangerously, which saw the actor harangue Indonesia's Minister for Forestry after witnessing illegal palm oil operations. The 'confrontation' became a diplomatic incident and the actor was threatened with deportation. In 2018, his thunderous speech at the UN Global Climate Action summit -in which he pleaded the assembled changemakers to 'stop, for God's sake, the denigration of science'-practically shook the floor.

"I suppose I did get wound up. I'm passionate about it," Ford says. Predictably, many articles concerning Ford's philanthropy on the global stage namechecked a certain unconventional archaeologist-though none took the bait to suggest that the 'Indiana Jones of conservation' may actually be Indiana Jones.

"I think there's a lot of me in every character I play," Ford says, on whether he feels any kinship with his fictional alter ego. "We have some things in common, Indy and I. An interest in how the world works. A love of puzzles and mysteries. A belief in the goodness of humankind."

The Walt Disney Company is majority owner of National Geographic Media.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Did Indiana Jones help or hurt archaeology?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Harrison Ford and archaeologists weigh in on the impact Dr. Jones has had on the discipline for more than 40 years.

# data[].attributes.headline
A History Today article, looking at the impact on how we view the past of the invention of the timeline.

# data[].attributes.subject
A History Today article, looking at the impact on how we view the past of the invention of the timeline.

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE Who was Joseph Priestley, and what motivated him to design the timeline? How did it reflect his beliefs about human society? What were the underlying principles of the timeline? Why do you think it made such an impact on the world? To wrap up: How important are imaginative leaps in helping us to visualize and understand the world?

KEY TERMS Revolutionised, Chronologies, Abstract ideas, Visualise, Improving, Progress

LINKS TO History, Human sciences

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Folded up, the heavy paper of Joseph Priestley's 1785 timeline forms a cardboard-like wafer. It seems too slim to contain so much. The copy I studied was sewn into a book, sandwiched between a genealogy and some illustrations. Once unfolded, the timeline confronted me with a jumble of horizontal lines, chased by minuscule lettering. Gradually, the lines resolved into a chart. Time marches from left to right, and the lines represent lives, painstakingly plotted and labelled. The ambition of the Chart of Biography is breathtaking. On a single sheet of paper, Priestley systematically displayed over 2,000 figures, from 1200 bc to the present. In the mid-18th century, that meant almost all of history. Priestley's Chart thrived, swiftly spawning dozens of imitations. Today, timelines are so widely used it is hard to imagine a time when we were without them. What led Priestley to this invention? The answer partly lies in his views on time.

Priestley (1733-1804) is best known for his scientific work, especially the co-discovery of oxygen. Yet he was also a teacher and a philosopher. As a teacher, Priestley sought to better communicate history to his students. He was fascinated by chronologies, texts ordering events. Since ancient Greece and Rome, chronologers used 'time tables' or grids to depict the order of events in time. An obvious problem with these chronologies, though, is that only so many events can fit on each page.

The mid-18th century saw many experiments in representing history, including Thomas Jefferys' 1753 A Chart of Universal History. Jefferys was a mapmaker and his chart depicts empires almost as though they are countries on a map, allowing you to scan them all at once. Impressed, Priestley determined to create a chart of his own that readers could scan 'at one view'. He made several innovations but one proved key: lines, inspired by his philosophy of time.

For this, Priestley drew on a seemingly unconnected topic: John Locke's 1690 account of abstract ideas. For Locke, abstract ideas include 'redness', 'triangle', or 'animal'. They are general ideas, produced when our minds consider particular things. Take a pint of milk, a stick of chalk and a lump of snow. I can consider these things while leaving out their particular features, 'abstracting' what is common to them: their whiteness. Many philosophers accepted some version of Locke's account of abstraction, but puzzled over how to mentally visualise them. Locke writes that our abstract idea of a triangle 'must be neither Oblique, nor Rectangle, neither Equilateral, Equicrural, nor Scalenon; but all and none of these at once'. Clearly we cannot picture such a thing. Priestley makes an alternative suggestion: represent abstract ideas using a variable particular. A child, he writes, has an idea of 'what a triangle in general is', even though all the ideas of triangles he 'contemplates' are 'particular'. In other wrds, our picture of the abstract idea of a triangle can change: from equilateral to, say, scalene. In the same essay, Priestley argued that time is an abstract idea. And this view feeds into his timeline.

Priestley's timeline was so new that he published a small book alongside it, explaining its underlying principles. A Description of a Chart of Biography sought to justify representing times using lines:

As no image can be formed of abstract ideas, they are, of necessity, represented in our minds by particular, but variable ideas ... THUS the abstract idea of TIME ... admits of a natural and easy representation in our minds by the idea of a measurable space, and particularly that of a line; which, like time, may be extended in length, without giving any idea of breadth or thickness.

We often speak of shorter and longer times, and times can be measured - just like space. If we are seeking an image to represent the abstract idea of time, a line drawn through space is a natural fit.

Priestley invented his timeline to better teach history, yet the Chart is also entangled with his belief that humanity is improving: it depicts the number of great figures increasing over time. Indeed, there is such a dearth in early history that Priestley fills the blank space with an ornate crest. He is glad that the last two centuries are 'full' with people of merit, for this gives us 'security' that 'no more great chasms' of greatness will disfigure the future.

The Chart reveals progress in another way, too. For Priestley, creating abstract ideas is difficult, requiring thought and intelligence. Only higher animals and humans can manage it. Priestley attaches a high value to such ideas, describing them as evincing 'advancement in intellectual excellence'. His timeline - representing the abstract idea of time - is further proof of human progress.

Not only does his Chart confirm human progress by Priestley's lights, it furthers it. Priestley argued that comprehending a broad swathe of time allows us to understand relationships between events and see that seemingly evil events are subsumed within a common good. Taking a God's-eye view on world history allows us to perceive, and advance, the divine plan. In 1769, Priestley produced another timeline, A New Chart of History, and wrote of it:

It is even easy to show ... that wars, revolutions of empire, and the necessary consequences of them, have been, upon the whole, extremely favourable to the progress of knowledge, virtue, and happiness.

The impact of Priestley's charts was immense. A Chart of Biography ran to at least 19 editions, including American, Dutch and Italian issues. A New Chart of History ran to at least 20. Both were among the first acquisitions ordered by the new United States Library of Congress. According to Cambridge Magazine, they were 'an essential part of a gentleman's library'. Novelist Maria Edgeworth and physician Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) recommended their use in women's education. Within a few years, variations on Priestley's charts were everywhere. By the 19th century envisioning history using timelines had become commonplace.

Today, it is difficult to imagine how innovative Priestley's Chart was. That is because timelines now abound. This slim, folded sheet of paper changed how humans picture history.

Emily Thomas is the author of The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad (Oxford University Press, 2020).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A now commonplace device, Joseph Priestley's Chart of Biography timeline revolutionised how we view history.

# data[].attributes.headline
A New Humanist article, which considers the importance of remembering historical injustices, as a way of guarding against the misuse of power in the present.

# data[].attributes.subject
A New Humanist article, which considers the importance of remembering historical injustices, as a way of guarding against the misuse of power in the present.

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE The adage about those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it is, perhaps, overly simplistic. But this article offers a more nuanced version: forgetting the past (or mis-remembering it) prevents us from holding those in power to account. Do students agree with this? Does this provide us with a clearer idea of the purpose of history? And, building on what we saw in the first story this month, what further insights does this article give us into ‘power’?

KEY TERMS Power, Historical commemoration, Social construction of history, Collective past

LINKS TO History, Human sciences, politics

# data[].attributes.headline
A Guardian article, looking at a recent study that concluded The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas could fuel dangerous holocaust fallacies.

# data[].attributes.subject
A Guardian article, looking at a recent study that concluded The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas could fuel dangerous holocaust fallacies.

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE Given the popularity of the book and film in schools, it’s probably worth asking students whether they have read/seen The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and what their impressions were of it. Then read the article: what are the ‘inaccuracies and fallacies’ that researchers have pinpointed? How did John Boyne (the author) justify his work - and does this seem valid? Overall, does this story indicate that fictional accounts of the past should always be avoided when seeking to understand history, or can they be used as part of the source material we use to explore major events?

KEY TERMS Inaccuracies and fallacies, Contested, Truthful, Misconceptions

LINKS TO History, The arts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas ‘may fuel dangerous Holocaust fallacies’

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
John Boyne’s story is used by more than a third of teachers in England in lessons on the Nazi genocide, a study found

# data[].attributes.headline
A History Today article, taking a broad look at the debate surrounding statues that celebrate controversial characters from the past.

# data[].attributes.subject
A History Today article, taking a broad look at the debate surrounding statues that celebrate controversial characters from the past.

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE This article is useful in helping us to arrive at a position on the recent controversies surrounding statues in the US, UK, and many other countries around the world. It also helps us to understand the importance of exploring issues via the consideration of the right questions. First of these is, ‘What purpose do statues serve?’ Going on from here, how has this purpose changed over time? For an answer to this, focus on the quote in the last paragraph: “On the one hand are those who regard them as embodying some essential and imperishable historical certainty. On the other are observers who are able – and willing – to look beyond a particular statue to a more complex and contestable past reality.” Which camp do the students fall into? You can also check out this Aeon article for further reference!

KEY TERMS Purpose, Controversial, Statuomania, Political values

LINKS TO History, Politics, the arts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What purpose do statues serve? This question came to the fore when former prime minister Theresa May announced plans in June 2019 for a memorial in London's Waterloo station commemorating the arrival to Britain in 1948 of the first of the Windrush generation.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Guardian article, which asserts that without considering climate, you cannot properly understand the past.

# data[].attributes.subject
A Guardian article, which asserts that without considering climate, you cannot properly understand the past.

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE In what way has history changed, in terms of the types of evidence we now draw on to explore the past? How are ‘climate archives’ now playing such an important part in the way we explain events - and what examples does the article give of these? Why are historians now paying much more attention to the role of climate change in shaping past events? Overall, how does investigating past events within the context of climate change encourage us to address existential questions in the present? What does this reveal about the nature of historical enquiry?

KEY TERMS Transforming ideas, Accuracy, New tools and methods, New evidence, Existential questions

LINKS TO History, Natural sciences

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The big idea: why you can’t leave climate out of history

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Environmental changes have had far greater impact than kings and battles

# data[].attributes.headline
A History Today article, looking at how much we can learn about the past from people’s clothing.

# data[].attributes.subject
A History Today article, looking at how much we can learn about the past from people’s clothing.

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE Divide up into groups, and focus on one of the historians - Maria Hayward, Christine Checinska, Andrew Brooks, Haley Schroer. Think about: what type of clothing do they discuss? What does it tell us about society at that time? What insights does it provide us with that other evidence can’t give us? To wrap up: How important is it to use historical evidence other than formal documentation when we investigate the past?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Can Historical Clothing Reveal That Other Sources Cannot?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From Elizabeth I's intimate attire to fabrics that threatened social hierarchies, clothes tell us about more than just their wearers.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Guardian article, exploring the way Portugal is ‘grappling with the legacy of its colonial past’ - specifically, their role in the slave trade.

# data[].attributes.subject
A Guardian article, exploring the way Portugal is ‘grappling with the legacy of its colonial past’ - specifically, their role in the slave trade.

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE How should countries approach the more morally repugnant episodes of their past?

KEY TERMS  Confronting, Responsibility, Structural racism, Words vs. action, Denial, Incomplete image, Sanitised interpretation, Nationalistic perspective

LINKS TO History, Natural sciences

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
One morning towards the end of June, the monolithic hulk of the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, which has loomed over the Tagus River for six decades, its stony prow forever poised to cast off from the Lisbon quayside in search of power, glory and riches, woke, once again, to find itself altered.

"The nation that killed Africa," read the graffiti scrawled on the monument to Portugal's pioneering role in the age of discovery. Then came a contemporary afterthought: "Wakanda forever."

A similar, if more poetic, sentiment was expressed in the blue and red spray-paint applied to the side of the landmark two years ago. "Blindly sailing for money, humanity is drowning in a scarlet sea," it said.

The terseness of the latest message reflects the anger and frustration many people feel as Portugal considers the difficult task of confronting its colonial and slave-trading past.

Evalina Dias says people find it hard to admit that the racism fostered by slavery and colonialism still exists. Photograph: Gonçalo Fonseca/The Guardian

Almost six months ago, Portugal's president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, suggested the time had come for the country to "assume responsibility" for its past and apologise for its actions.

If Rebelo de Sousa's words were tentative, they nonetheless appeared to represent a shift from the views he expressed six years ago during a visit to the island of Gorée off Senegal, which was, for centuries, one of the key slave-trading centres on the African coast.

When he visited in 1992, Pope John Paul II implored "forgiveness from heaven" for what he termed "this African sanctuary of black pain". In a speech on the island in 2005 Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, apologised for what his country "did to black people".

In 2017, though, the Portuguese president chose to focus on the fact that his country had set about abolishing slavery in the 1760s after recognising its "injustice". He did not mention that Portugal was the European country with the longest historical involvement in the slave trade, kidnapping and forcibly transporting about 6 million African men, women and children across the Atlantic between the 15th and 19th centuries. Nor did he mention that his country had only abolished slavery to the Portuguese mainland in 1761 - the trade to Brazil continued and slavery was not completely abolished across all the territories Portugal controlled until 1869.

"[What the president said in 2017] was a lie - and he knew it was a lie," says Evalina Dias, a project manager at Djass, Portugal's Association of African Descendants. "He's a very intelligent man but he still said it because it was a way not to acknowledge what happened. He was saying: 'Yes, we did it, but we were the first to abolish it.' I think they didn't want to talk about it back then."

Dias says people find it hard to admit that the racism fostered by slavery and colonialism still exists - let alone acknowledge how thoroughly it has come to permeate Portuguese society.

"The problem here is the structural racism that doesn't allow black people or Africans to do a lot of things like having the same rights as other people," she says. "Even if it's written [in law], they try to avoid it. If you go to a health centre and you're not legalised, you're still entitled to be treated. But when you get there, they'll tell you that you're not - even if you have documents. I've lived here all my life and it's happened to me. It's a way of frustrating people every day when it comes to employment and health and education and housing."

What does she think may have changed Rebelo de Sousa's mind? "I don't know - that was the first time he'd talked about confronting the past," says Dias. "But it's just been words; there's been no action."

For Djass and for many others, there are few better examples of that inaction than the delays in creating a memorial intended to stand in stark contrast to the Padrão dos Descobrimentos.

Plantação (Plantation), a permanent piece conceived by the Angolan conceptual artist Kiluanji Kia Henda, should long since have appeared on the quayside a few miles from the discovery monument. But bureaucratic delays, feasibility studies and arguments over where it should be located have dogged the project's progress since it began in 2017.

According to Kia Henda, its 540 blackened metal sugarcanes are intended to evoke a burned plantation as a way of honouring enslaved people while also reminding visitors that the system that relied on slavery is still ubiquitous and all powerful.

While remembering the millions of victims, he adds, it is also important to recall those who rose up, set fire to the plantations and established the quilombos - the settlements where escaped enslaved people lived.

Kia Henda says: "Sugarcane plantations are the matrix of the capitalist system, the main economic pillar that has sustained transatlantic trafficking since its beginnings, so this act of rebellion not only takes us back to the past, but also speaks of the need to fight against it and the various types of oppression that still exist today."

Plantação, a permanent piece conceived by the Angolan conceptual artist Kiluanji Kia Henda, should long since have appeared on the Lisbon quayside. Photograph: Kiluanji Kia Henda

Lisbon city council says the €185,000 (£159,000) work is intended to help ensure the tragedy of the slave trade never fades from memory, buts adds that the project has been "a lengthy, demanding, and intensive process, which has been a highly challenging endeavour for the municipality" - not least because of the Covid pandemic.

Kia Henda is not the only one struggling to get Portugal thinking about its past. In May, two Brazilian artists had their work removed from the Porto Photography Biennial because it highlighted the slave-trading past of the philanthropist whose money funded the exhibition space.

A room displaying the installation Adoçar a Alma para o Inferno III ("Sweeten the Soul for Hell III") by Dori Nigro and Paulo Pinto was closed off on its opening night on 19 May by administrators of Porto's Conde de Ferreira hospital centre, a psychiatric unit whose disused 19th-century panopticon hosted an exhibition at this year's photography biennial in Portugal's second city.

The room had contained a table carrying a small sugar bowl bearing the image of Joaquim Ferreira dos Santos, 1st Count de Ferreira, a 19th-century Portuguese slave trader who bequeathed his fortune to the religious charity that built the hospital, as well as several primary schools.

Writing on two mirrors in the room spelled out previously known facts about Ferreira's life, including his role in trafficking about 10,000 slaves from Luanda and Mozambique to Brazil. A third mirror was inscribed with three questions: "How many enslaved people does it take to build a psychiatric hospital? How many enslaved people does it take to build 120 primary schools? How many enslaved people does it take to gain the titles 'noble' and 'benefactor'?"

The hospital reopened the room a week later - after removing the three inscribed mirrors that directly referenced its founding patron.

In a statement, the hospital's administrative board said it had censored the artwork because it had caused discomfort to its patients and health workers through "offensive references to [Ferreira's] memory", while insisting it remained committed to engaging its history "in an adequate way."

Nigro and Pinto are both from the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, one of the centres of the trade in enslaved people used by Ferreira. Nigro says that while the count's philanthropy is amply commemorated in Portugal through statues, street names, squares, schools and hospitals, the sources of his wealth are altogether less celebrated.

"It would be fair if Portugal changed the name of the statues, the streets, the squares, the schools, and hospitals to pay homage to the 10,000 people dehumanised and commercialised by Count Ferreira to build the country," he says.

His partner points out that their work has been informed by their own experiences as Portugal-based Brazilians.

"When we arrived in Porto for our studies in 2012, we discovered a denial of Portugal's colonial past everywhere we looked," says Pinto. "Even today there is still a widespread assumption that the slave trade was an exclusively Brazilian problem, a legacy that modern-day Brazilians have overcome. But colonial Portugal exploited the slave trade for almost 400 years. The consequences of slavery and racism in Brazil is a Portuguese legacy."

Kia Henda believes much of Portugal's inability to face the past lies in the incomplete image it presents to the world - and to itself. Just as the UK thrives on its castles, kings and queens, he says, "Portugal today lives essentially from tourism" and on a "romanticised" and sanitised interpretation of its past.

Isabel Almeida Rodrigues, secretary of state for equality and migration in Portugal's socialist government, argues that the Salazar dictatorship of 1933-74 - during which the Padrão dos Descobrimentos was built - had a profound and enduring effect on the country's self-image.

"To understand our role and our past, we must first understand that we lived in a nationalistic-conservative dictatorship for around 40 years," she says.

"Abolishing the dictatorship meant throwing off the yoke of colonialism, which is why the revolution can be seen as a movement against racism. However, throughout that 40-year period, not only did our education system unfortunately transmit an excessively nationalistic perspective regarding our history but the dictatorship, as a whole, also instilled several prejudices in people regarding our former dependencies."

Almeida Rodrigues insists education is now at the forefront of the government's efforts to tackle racism and combat the colonial myths that help underpin it.

"The curriculum nowadays includes works by authors not only from Portugal but from the wider Portuguese-speaking world and, since 2017, pupils from the age of 10 have been learning about colonialism, slavery, historical memory and the importance of interculturality," she says.

She also points to the national plan to combat racism, approved in 2021, which "fully recognises that there is systemic and structural racism in Portugal, which is a legacy of colonialism and slavery". As well as setting up an official observatory on racism and xenophobia to improve the collection and analysis of data and help develop anti-discrimination policies, the government has invested in diversity and awareness training for police officers and regulated the use of bodycams to bring more scrutiny and transparency to law enforcement.

"I think there's a direct link between education and tackling not only present-day racism, but also future-day racism - in Portugal and everywhere in the world," says Almeida Rodrigues.

The sentiment is shared by Dino D'Santiago, one of Portugal's best-known musicians. D'Santiago, who is of Cape Verdean descent and who sings in Creole and Portuguese, says education, a proper explanation of the past, and a full and meaningful apology from Rebelo de Sousa are all desperately needed.

"A real sorry from the president of the country for what we did would be the first affirmation and a way of humanising the victims," he says. "People don't know what was done. Instead of talking about the discovery of Brazil, we need to talk about the genocide of millions of people ... They weren't clapping us when we arrived. But if you look at the drawing in the books, people are smiling. We need to tell people everything about what we did; about how many people died in the boats."

Dino D'Santiago: 'Instead of talking about the discovery of Brazil, we need to talk about the genocide of millions of people.' Photograph: Gonçalo Fonseca/The Guardian

Such efforts are not always easy - as D'Santiago discovered for himself in January when he suggested that Portugal could rethink the words of its national anthem, arguing that all the talk of cannons in verses written during a 19th-century colonial showdown in Africa between Portugal and the UK may not be wholly relevant to the country today.

"When I said that, the reaction was: 'Go and do the Cape Verdean anthem,' or :'Go do the Guinean or Mozambican anthem, because you don't have the right to touch our history.' And I was like: 'I was born here in Portugal and I feel 100% Portuguese and 100% Cape Verdean. I'm 200% of a person.'"

Although the backlash and threats led the singer to head to Brazil for a while - "even on the way to the airport, I was wondering whether someone would try to do something" - he views the episode as further proof of the need to confront the past. But he also takes heart in Portugal's postcolonial diversity and in the open minds of its young people.

"All my investment is in the new generation and not in trying to change the minds of older people," he says. "Children are so fertile when it comes to knowledge and we now have something that we never had in the past: pride. My niece, who's 10 years old, wants to be the president of Portugal. There's a big difference between her ambitions and mine. She sees her uncle on TV and getting prizes, which is now normal for her. That wasn't normal for me when I was her age."

The question now is what form an apology could take - and where it could lead.

Paul Gardullo, a historian and curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, was part of a delegation that travelled to Lisbon at the beginning of the year to take part in an international symposium on slavery, museums and racism. He says that while each country's approach to its own history is different, there are some similarities between Portugal's situation and that of the Netherlands.

"I think the way the broader official memory in Portugal operates is similar to the way memory around 'the golden age' existed, until pretty recently, in the Netherlands - this sense of an era that was a golden age of discovery," he says. "In Portugal, it's the 'age of discovery'; in the Netherlands, it has a different terminology but there's such a longstanding and fierce desire to protect that - without fully understanding it and without acknowledging the pain that comes along with that for a lot of people. Why? Because it's caught up in national identity."

At the end of last year, the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, offered a formal apology for the Netherlands' historical role in the slave trade, saying that while the past "cannot be erased, only faced up to", he firmly acknowledged that his country had "enabled, encouraged and profited from slavery". Rutte's remarks followed Denmark's 2018 apology to Ghana, which it colonised from the mid-17th to the mid-19th century, and King Philippe of Belgium's "deepest regrets" for abuses in Congo, expressed in June last year.

In April, the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, refused to apologise for the UK's role in the slave trade or to countenance reparations, saying: "Trying to unpick our history is not the right way forward, and it's not something that we will focus our energies on."

Gardullo says he was disturbed to hear that some people of African descent who were born in Portugal feel they are not recognised as Portuguese. Such feelings, he adds, show work needs to be done to embrace a more complex understanding of Portugal's history and of how the African presence has contributed to the country's identity.

"Portugal should not be narrowly and falsely focused on looking toward a mythical past from 500 years ago as some golden age," says Gardullo. "It should be thinking about itself now and about its role in the world and how a more full past, inclusive of slavery and colonialism, has made it what it is today. How do you make it a place that is reflective of its full history but which also embraces all the people who live there and are citizens?"

But first, inevitably, there needs to be an apology that acknowledges a wound that is old and deep. A few genuine and well-chosen words, says D'Santiago, could provide a vital first step.

"Pain follows you," says the singer. "If you're hurt as a child and you don't get that damage repaired, it will be with you until you die ... If you say sorry about the millions of people who died, you're showing respect for their memories and for the people who are the descendants of that tragedy. I'm one of those descendants, but I'm a descendant with a lot of hope."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'We need to tell people everything': Portugal grapples with legacy of colonial past

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
European country with longest involvement in the slave trade is coming under pressure to give 'a real sorry' for its role

# data[].attributes.headline
The May 2024 TOK Essay Prescribed Titles

# data[].attributes.subject
The May 2024 TOK Essay Prescribed Titles

# data[].attributes.body
1. Is subjectivity overly celebrated in the arts but unfairly condemned in history? Discuss with reference to the arts and history.

2. How can we reconcile the opposing demands for specialization and generalization in the production of knowledge? Discuss with reference to mathematics and one other area of knowledge.

3. Nothing is more exciting than fresh ideas, so why are areas of knowledge often so slow to adopt them? Discuss with reference to the human sciences and one other area of knowledge.

4. Do we underestimate the challenges of taking knowledge out of its original context and transferring it to a different context? Discuss with reference to two areas of knowledge.

5. Do we need custodians of knowledge? Discuss with reference to two areas of knowledge.

6. Are we too quick to assume that the most recent evidence is inevitably the strongest? Discuss with reference to the natural sciences and one other area of knowledge.

# data[].attributes.headline
Theory of knowledge teacher support material

# data[].attributes.subject
Theory of knowledge teacher support material

# data[].attributes.body
2023

# data[].attributes.headline
A Profanity Filter Banned the Word 'Bone' at a Paleontology Conference

# data[].attributes.subject
A Profanity Filter Banned the Word 'Bone' at a Paleontology Conference

# data[].attributes.body
“Words like ‘bone,’ ‘pubic,’ and ‘stream’ are frankly ridiculous to ban in a field where we regularly find pubic bones in streams,” one participant said of the filter, which organizers had to thwart.

By Becky Ferreira

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Profanity Filter Banned the Word 'Bone' at a Paleontology Conference

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Words like 'bone,' 'pubic,' and 'stream' are frankly ridiculous to ban in a field where we regularly find pubic bones in streams," one participant said of the filter, which organizers had to thwart.

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

For the "mathematically-minded", but very rich website, especially on the border of math and other subjects.

Recommendation:

Check out the Myths of Math, or the many posts on math and art, such as "How many melodies are there?", or "Digital art", or "Why is the violin so hard to play?". The puzzles and brain teasers raise inevitably the question why they are so hard to solve when we pride ourselves of our power of reasoning (see for instance their tackling of the famous Monty Hall Problem). Source : https://plus.maths.org/content/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Don't like plant-based meat alternatives, but want to spare animals and the environment? There's hope on the horizon, aided by a good helping of maths.

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

One of 14 issues of "History in Focus".

Recommendation:

The website could be particularly useful to history teachers, but non-historians may find here plenty to digest. The page celebrates the 40th anniversary of the publication of the landmark "What is History" by E.H. Carr, and has articles, websites and book reviews on the topic. Extremely reliable. Some of the material may be put in the students' hands. Source : https://archives.history.ac.uk/history-in-focus/Whatishistory/index.html

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Introduction

This issue of History in Focus marks the 40th anniversary of E.H. Carr's, What is History? This book 'for many today ... is the most influential book on history thinking published in Britain this century' ( Reappraisal of What is History?, Professor Alun Munslow).

In this issue:

articles: four articles on the philosophy and practice of history

websites: websites that look at theories of history, reviewed by the In Focus editorial team.

book reviews: reviews of major books on the practice of history. See below for review tasters.

bibliography: key books on historiography and the practice of history.

research: details of PhD theses about the nature of history, and university teachers who specialise in this area.

Review tasters

'In Defence of History' and Postmodernism

Professor Richard Evans mounts a robust defence of his book, In Defence of History (1997), which 'inevitably ... aroused a good deal of controversy'. He answers criticisms ranging from the straightforward belief that history, and particularly academic and scholarly history, does not need defending to the apparently contradictory assertions that the book is both unfairly critical of conservative historians and at the same time defends a conservative approach to history.

Professor Evans's critics are represented here by, among others, Professor Anthony Easthope and Dr. Diane Purkiss.

Professor Anthony Easthope's review (1999) suggests that 'Though his name is on the cover Richard J. Evans did not really write In Defence of History - rather, the dominant paradigm of the English empiricist tradition wrote it for him, because he made no critical attempt to interfere with its passage through him onto the page', and takes issue with the view 'that all history-writing faces is the regrettable little difficulty that the past is not actually "felt and experienced by our senses" in the present'.

Dr. Purkiss admits that 'Throughout In Defence of History, Evans is eager to seem genial, pleading for mutual tolerance between literary and historical branches of study, and urging cease-fires in various long-fought battles', but is keen to respond to 'one of his chief complaints ... that his book has not provoked the kind of debate for which he hoped'. She also passionately defends her own The Witch in History, with 'a plea for attentive reading not of intentions, but of meanings'.

History and its Postmodern Critics

In his article, 'An Engagement with Postmodern Foes, Literary Theorists and Friends on the Borders with History', Professor Patrick K. O'Brien suggests that 'a majority of professional historians will, I predict, obdurately refuse to incur the costs of engagement at a philosophical level with the postmodern challenge to the very foundations of their craft as practised in Britain, Europe and Japan'. He nevertheless asserts that 'many will react with undisguised irritation to Keith Jenkins and others who are intolerant of those who wish to 'study the past for its own sake' and purport to recognise that not uncommon and respectable justification as ideology propagated by historians who are complacent about the present'.

In his reply, Professor Alun Munslow welcomes the 'generous and open-minded note' struck by Professor O'Brien, but acknowledges 'some basic doubts about the assumed connections made by Professor O'Brien between evidence, concept, interpretation, and meaning'. He argues 'my history is historicist in that I want to see history as a contemporary and emancipatory cultural practice, and I do not think a narrow concentration on finding out the empirical reality is the only thing required in order to do that - you can use moral argument and non-empiricist positions just as well to know something about the past.'

The Fundamentals of History

In this original article Professor Arthur Marwick discusses 'The Fundamentals of History', defining history as 'The bodies of knowledge about the past produced by historians, together with everything that is involved in the production, communication of, and teaching about that knowledge'.

Professor Marwick argues for the necessity of history, on the grounds that 'knowledge of the past is essential to society ...Without knowledge of the past we would be without identity, we would be lost on an endless sea of time'.

Arthur Marwick's The New Nature of History: Knowledge, Evidence, Language was published by Palgrave July 2001. Addressing the key questions of what history is, and why and how one studies it, the book is a positive affirmation of the vital importance to society of the study of the past, and of the many crucial learning outcomes which accrue from historical study.

Read PDF sample chapter

The New Nature of History is reviewed by Professor Alun Munslow, who reflects upon ' the three fundamentals of doing history as seen from the Marwickian perspective', that is Knowledge, Evidence and Language. He concludes: ' All that historians can be happy with, I think, is a narrative truth. To argue otherwise, as Marwick does in this book is, paradoxically, to be unrealistic and misleading'.

In his combative response, Professor Marwick argues that his book is 'a joyous celebration of the immense achievements of professional history'.

Historians' biographies

Dr. Helen Mellor reviews Maxine Berg, A Woman in History: Eileen Power, 1889-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 'a wonderful book [which] invites a range of responses: from engaged discussion, heated argument to personal reminiscences ... it is charged with emotion: but the emotion is mostly a fine anger at the way a professional woman historian, who made a considerable contribution to the development of her discipline has been forgotten or, at best, patronised by male historians who have dominated the discipline since the Second World War'. Dr. Maxine Berg is grateful to Dr. Mellor 'for her careful reading and enthusiastic response to my book', but admits to surprise 'that she finds this an angry book'.

Dr. Paul Addison reviews Professor Kathleen Burk's biography of A.J.P. Taylor, Troublemaker: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor (Yale University Press, 2000). Professor Burk was the last of Taylor's postgraduate students, and 'In a departure from her more familiar role as an economic historian, she has written an excellent study of his life and work that restores him to his rightful place in the history of History'. Dr. Addison (also one of Taylor's postgraduate students) concludes that the book has successfully 'rescued a great scholar from the shadow of his alter ego, the wizard of the television studios'. In Professor Burk's response to this 'generous' review she reveals that 'Because I wrote as an historian, I was driven to crawl into every nook and cranny to locate material ... I am a proud, defiant empiricist, and I am undoubtedly happier with a document to dissect rather than with a mind to fathom. Nevertheless, I tried to do both, but it may be that I missed my century, and that my biography properly belongs in the section of the library devoted to nineteenth century life-and-times'.

E.H. Carr

Professor Alun Munslow reviews E.H. Carr: A Critical Reappraisal, ed. Michael Cox (Palgrave, 2000), and also picks up on Carr's multi-facted nature - 'Carr had several careers pursued in parallel: journalist, Civil Servant Mandarin, biographer, historian, and historiographer/philosopher of history'.

Professor Munslow contends that 'Carr's insistence that history should be politically relevant was an inspiration in the heady days of 1968. But it also brought problems, especially in its linkage with the idea that the vast majority of human beings in the past were of no interest to the historian because they had made no contribution to political change. It was precisely this idea that the social historians of the 1960s set out to challenge'. He concludes that 'In some respects ... What is History? was outdated even when it first appeared. And yet in others it has never been superseded'.

Alun Munslow also writes a reappraisal of E.H. Carr's work and 'his contribution to the analytical philosophy of history' in particular. He suggests that while 'For many years ... the methodologically foundationalist wing of the history profession regarded the book as espousing a dangerous relativism ... [t]his has now all changed. Arguably the central ideas in the book constitute today's mainstream thinking on British historical practice'.

See also the articles section for Professor Richard Evans's article, 'The Two Faces of E.H. Carr', an overview of E.H. Carr's influence.

Ernest Gellner

Professor Alan Macfarlane assesses the work of Ernest Gellner, specifically Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals (Penguin, 1996) and Anthropology and Politics: Revolutions in the Sacred Grove (Blackwell, 1995). Gellner's 'own life, poised between thought systems and cultures, had put him in an unique position to appreciate the 'great transformation' of modernity'. While 'Many of his twenty books were concerned with philosophy, sociology and anthropology', this was the historical question at the core of his work.

The Logic of the History of Ideas

Professor Alun Munslow reviews Mark Bevir's The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Munslow believes that 'the questions [this] book addresses are important to historians in their everyday work' and suggests that 'explorations are useful reminders of the complex nature of agent intentionality, objectivity and belief.'

Dr. Mark Bevir responds to the criticism that 'the flaw in my argument [is] the account of meaning as intention'.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This issue of History in Focus marks the 40th anniversary of E.H. Carr's, What is History? This book 'for many today ... is the most influential book on history thinking published in Britain this century' ( Reappraisal of What is History? , Professor Alun Munslow).

# data[].attributes.headline
Smithsonian: Ten Museums you can Virtually Visit

# data[].attributes.subject
Smithsonian: Ten Museums you can Virtually Visit

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

A "go to" portal, during confinement ... and beyond. All of art at the fingertips.

Recommendation:

Literally an infinity of artworks scattered around the world and available for view. Multiple possible entry points and diverse uses: specific artists, art movements, periods, geographical locations, themes ... Teachers may allow free roaming, or constitute a virtual collection for their students with a specific purpose in mind. Visiting "on the fly" a few museums is also the opportunity to reflect on the institutional function of museums, and inquire into the often tortuous journey of artworks into the collections. Source : https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ten-museums-you-can-virtually-visit-180974443/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, museums and cultural institutions across the globe are closing their doors to the public. But while visitors can no longer roam the halls of these institutions, virtual tools and online experiences mean anyone with an internet connection can browse world-class collections from home.

The Smithsonian Institution, of course, has its own array of virtual tours, experiences and educational resources. Among the other experiences on offer: Scroll through an extensive trove of 3-D photographs from the Minneapolis Institute of Art, explore online exhibits from the National Women's History Museum in Virginia, or admire artistic masterpieces from the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Spain. Additionally, around 2,500 museums and galleries, including the Uffizi Galleries in Florence and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, are offering virtual tours and presenting online collections via the Google Arts and Culture portal.

For those in search of armchair travel inspiration, Smithsonian magazine has compiled a list of ten museums that have found new ways to fulfill their critical mission of cultivating creativity and spreading knowledge.

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza

ORIGINAL

Home to the world's second largest private collection of art, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza owns masterpieces by giants of virtually every art movement-to name just a few, Jan van Eyck, Titian, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Picasso and Dalí. To spotlight these artistic treasures, the Madrid museum offers an array of multimedia resources. Users can take a virtual tour of the entire building (or a thematic tour covering such topics as food, sustainability, fashion and even "inclusive love"); browse current and closed exhibits; and watch behind-the-scenes videos featuring interviews, lectures and technical studies.

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea

ORIGINAL

Committed to offering a culturally rewarding experience since opening its doors in 2013, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul (MMCA) has established itself as a prominent cultural platform and leader in Korean art. In collaboration with Google Arts and Culture, the MMCA is now offering a virtual tour of its collections. This experience takes visitors through six floors of modern and contemporary art from Korea and around the world. Those seeking an educational walkthrough can follow along by tuning into curator-led recorded tours.

The Anne Frank House

ORIGINAL

The Anne Frank House, established in cooperation with the famed diarist's father, Otto, in 1957, strives to inform the public through educational programs and tours of the building where the teenager and her family hid during World War II. To delve deeper into the story detailed in Frank's diary, online visitors can watch videos about her life; virtually explore the Secret Annex; look around the house where she lived before going into hiding; and view the Google Arts and Culture exhibition " Anne Frank: Her Life, Her Diary, Her Legacy."

The Vatican Museums

ORIGINAL

Home to some 70,000 artworks and artifacts spanning centuries, continents and mediums, the 5.5-hectare Vatican Museums are among Italy's finest cultural institutions. Virtual visitors can tour seven different sections of the sprawling complex, enjoying 360-degree views of the Sistine Chapel, perhaps best known for Michelangelo's ceiling and Last Judgment fresco; Raphael's Rooms, where the Renaissance artist's School of Athens resides; and lesser-known but equally sumptuous locations such as the Pio Clementino Museum, the Niccoline Chapel and the Room of the Chiaroscuri.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

ORIGINAL

"Since its founding, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has maintained a belief in the transformative powers of art," reads the Manhattan museum's website. "In uncertain times such as these, art can provide both solace and inspiration."

In a nod to this mission, the Guggenheim, a cultural center and educational institution devoted to modern and contemporary art, has opened up its collections to online visitors. The building itself, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, is an architectural masterpiece; audiences can listen to an audio guide of its history or journey up its spiral halls via a Google Arts and Culture virtual tour. For those who want to take a deeper dive into the museum's collections, the Guggenheim's online database features some 1,700 artworks by more than 625 artists.

The London National Gallery

ORIGINAL

Take a virtual tour of 18 gallery rooms, enjoy a panoramic view of the museum's halls and click through a wide collection of artistic masterpieces using the National Gallery's virtual tools. Based in London, this museum houses more than 2,300 works reflecting the Western European tradition between the 13th and 19th centuries. Collection highlights include Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers and J.M.W Turner's The Fighting Temeraire.

NASA Research Centers

ORIGINAL

For those fascinated by space exploration, NASA offers online visitors the chance to take a behind-the-scenes look inside its facilities. Visitors can take virtual tours of the organization's research centers, where aeronautic technology is developed and tested, and learn more about the functions of different facilities. The online tour of Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, covers 16 locations, including the Flight Research Hangar and the Katherine Johnson Computational Research Facility. The virtual tour of the Glenn Research Center in Ohio, meanwhile, takes visitors inside facilities such as the Supersonic Wind Tunnel, where high speed flight is researched, and the Zero Gravity Research Facility, where microgravity research is conducted.

The National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City

ORIGINAL

Home to the world's largest ancient Mexican art collection, in addition to an extensive collection of ethnographic objects, the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City preserves the country's indigenous legacy and celebrates its cultural heritage. In collaboration with Google Arts and Culture, the museum has made some 140 items available for online visitors to explore from their homes. Among the objects available for viewing are the famous Aztec calendar sun stone and the striking jade death mask of ancient Mayan king Pakal the Great.

San Francisco's De Young Museum

ORIGINAL

One of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the de Young Museum's new copper-clad building in Golden Gate Park combines art with architecture. The collection features a priceless array of American art dating from the 17th to the 21st centuries, as well as artifacts from Africa and Oceania, modern and contemporary art, costumes, and textiles. Through Google Arts and Culture, the de Young offers 11 exhibits, including " Cult of the Machine" and " Ruth Asawa: A Working Life."

The Louvre

ORIGINAL

Housed in a large fortress along the banks of Paris' Seine River, the Louvre regularly tops rankings of the most-visited museums in the world, with millions of visitors flocking to its halls in search of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and other instantly recognizable artworks. Virtual tours offered by the Louvre include a walkthrough of the Egyptian antiquities wing and a view of the museum's moat, which was built in 1190 to protect Paris from invaders.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, museums and cultural institutions across the globe are closing their doors to the public. But while visitors can no longer roam the halls of these institutions, virtual tools and online experiences mean anyone with an internet connection can browse world-class collections from home.

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

The Next Rembrandt collaboration between ING, Microsoft, TU Delft, Mauritshuis and Rembrandt aims to create the next REmbrant using computer technology.

Recommendation:

Can be used in the art section as well as when dealing with AI, or with algorithms in math. What is the difference between a painting by a computer who as acquired the "Rembrandt brushstroke", and an authentic Rembrandt (is there a difference)? What does such a case tell us about our humanity, and about the possibilities (and limits) of algorithmic "deep learning"? Source : https://www.nextrembrandt.com/

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

20 questions about the various aspects of art appreciation.

Recommendation:

"Art as an Area of Knowledge both conveys knowledge and also requires knowledge to be fully understood and appreciated. This lesson-plan refers to the second aspect. Students may be assigned (individually or in small groups) to answer one or more questions on the same artwork. Answers are then pooled for a general debate on the pertinence of the questions and on the difference of reaction to the artwork before and after the information is provided." Source : http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/art-evaluation.htm

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Knowing the date of the work helps us to gauge how it was made, and the degree of difficulty involved. For instance, landscapes produced before the popularity of photography (c.1860), or the appearance of collapsible tin paint tubes (1841), had a greater level of difficulty. Oil painting produced before the Renaissance, or after the Renaissance by artists of modest means, will not contain the fabulous but astronomically expensive natural blue pigment Ultramarine, made from ground up mineral Lapis Lazuli.

A painting can be wholly abstract (meaning, it has no resemblance to any natural shapes: a form known as non-objective art), or organically abstract (some resemblance to natural organic forms), or semi-abstract (figures and other objects are discernible to an extent), or representational (its figurative and other content is instantly recognizable). Obviously an abstract work has quite different aims to that of a representational work, and must be judged according to different criteria. For example, a wholly abstract picture makes no attempt to divert the viewer with any naturalism and thus depends entirely for its effect on its formal qualities (line, shape, colour and so on).

Paintings come in different types or categories (known as painting genres). The established genres are: Landscape, Portraiture, Genre-Paintings (everyday scenes), History, and Still Life. During the 17th century, the great European Academies, such as the Academy of Art in Rome, the Academy of Art in Florence, the Parisian Academie des Beaux-Arts, and the Royal Academy in London followed the rule laid down in 1669, by Professor Andre Felibien, Secretary to the French Academy, who ranked the genres as follows: (1) History Painting - with religious paintings being perhaps an independent category; (2) Portraiture; (3) Genre Painting; (4) Landscape Painting; (5) Still Life. This hierarchy reflected the moral impact of each genre. Experts believed that a moral message could be conveyed much more clearly through a history picture, a portrait or a genre painting, rather than a landscape or still life.

Other types of painting, in addition to the above five, include: cityscapes, marine paintings, icons, altarpieces, miniatures, murals, illuminations, illustrations, caricatures, cartoons, poster art, graffiti, animal pictures, and so on.

A number of these painting-types have traditional rules concerning composition, subject matter and so on. This applies especially to religious art. Christian themes, for instance, which appear many times in Renaissance and Baroque paintings, are obliged to contain certain Holy figures, and must conform to certain compositional rules. In addition, painters often hark back to earlier pictures within the same genre (Francis Bacon's Screaming Pope was modelled on one of the greatest portrait paintings - the Portrait of Innocent X by Velazquez). Because of all this, paintings are best evaluated against other works of the same type. For more tips, see: How to Appreciate Paintings.

A "School" can be a national group of artists (eg. the Ancient Egyptian School, the Spanish School, German Expressionism) or a local group (eg. Delft School of Dutch Realism, New York Ashcan School, Ecole de Paris), or a general aesthetic movement (eg. Baroque, Neoclassicism, Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Pop Art), a local or an artist group (eg. Der Blaue Reiter, New York School of abstract expressionism, Cobra Group, Fluxus, St Ives School), or even a general tendency (realism, expressionism). Alternatively, the School may concern itself with a particular genre (eg. Barbizon School and Newlyn School, both landscape groups; Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, historical or literary-themed pictures), or painting method (eg. Neo-Impressionism, based on Pointillism - a variant of the colour theory of Divisionism), or aspect of the natural world (eg. Constructivism, devoted to reflecting the modern industrial world), or politics, or mathematical symbols (eg. the austere Neo-Plasticism).

Knowing which of many art movements the painting belongs to can give us a greater understanding of its composition and meaning. In the school of Egyptian art, for instance, painters had to adhere to specific rules of painting concerning composition and colour. Thus figures were sized according to their social status, rather than by reference to linear perspective. Head and legs were always shown in profile, while eyes and upper body were viewed from the front. Egyptian painters used no more than six colours: red, green, blue, yellow, white and black - each of which symbolized different aspects of life or death. Other cultures and cultural schools have their own specific guidelines. Dutch Realist artists valued exact, true-to-life replication of interiors and surroundings - except in portraiture, where the aim was to flatter the subject: cf. The Night Watch, by Rembrandt. Impressionist painters typically valued loose brushwork in order to capture fleeting impressions of light. Cubists spurned the normal rules of linear perspective and, instead, disassembled their subject into a series of flat transparent geometric plates that overlapped and intersected at different angles. De Stijl artists like Piet Mondrian only used geometrical forms in their pictures, while lines were always horizontal or vertical - never diagonal. And so on.

Note that Occidental art is very different from Oriental art. Chinese Painting, for instance, focuses on the spiritual inner essence of things rather than exterior appearance.

Knowing where and under what circumstances a painting is created can often improve our appreciation and understanding of the work concerned. Here are some examples.

Balancing dangerously on top of rickety scaffolding, Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (a gigantic area of 12,000 square feet) virtually unaided, during the course of 4 years between 1508 to 1512. Knowing that this masterpiece of Christian art was created in situ, rather than in a nice warm studio, helps us to appreciate the enormity of the task.

Monet, the leader of French Impressionism, devoted his life to plein-air painting. In his later years, he had a Japanese water garden with lily ponds laid out next to his house, and it was here that he produced his huge series of water-lily paintings. Pissarro also painted mostly outdoors and therefore always had a large number of unfinished paintings, because the light often faded before his work was done. This explains why he painted the same scene or motif (to capture the different light) and why his brushwork was so rapid and loose. On the other hand, Manet and Degas were both city folk and worked exclusively in their studio, where they could polish and perfect their work. Other exceptional plein-air painters included the Scandinavians Kroyer and Hammershoi (known as 'the painters of light'), who produced a number of exceptional landscapes at Skagen in Denmark.

Surroundings can have a major impact on an artist's mood, and therefore on his painting. Van Gogh and Gauguin are cases in point. In his 10 years of painting, Van Gogh relied on dark colours while he was painting during the difficult days in Holland (eg. The Potato Eaters, 1885); switched to lighter, brighter colours in Paris as he came under the influence of Impressionism; turned to vivid yellows when he was painting in Arles, near the Riviera ( Cafe Terrasse by Night, 1888); before reverting to darker pigments in his final period (The Olive Pickers, 1889, and the ominous Wheat Field with Crows, 1890). In 1891, one year after Van Gogh's death, the French artist Paul Gauguin set sail for Tahiti and the Pacific Islands, where he spent most of the last 10 years of his life in acute poverty. Nevertheless, his return to nature infused his paintings with enormous life and colour, as well as a Primitivism which found echoes in Picasso and others.

A particularly interesting artist is the French Intimist Edouard Vuillard, who lived for 60 years with his mother, a dressmaker, in a series of apartments in Paris. His mother ran her corsetiere from home, giving Vuillard plenty of opportunity to observe the patterns, materials, colours and shapes of her dresses. All this was carefully reflected in the patternwork of his paintings.

Once, during his artistic youth, the pioneer Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg was (allegedly) so poor that he stayed in his apartment and painted the quilt on his own bed, decorating it with toothpaste and fingernail polish. The iconic work was entitled Bed (1955).

Knowing whether a painting was created early or late in a painter's life can often assist our appreciation of the work.

Artists typically improve their painting technique with time, achieve a high point sometime in mid-career, and then fade in later years. Some artists, however, have died at the height of their powers. Such artists include: Raphael (1483-1520), Caravaggio (1571-1610), Jan Vermeer (1632-75), Thomas Girtin (1775-1802), Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-28), Van Gogh (1853-90), Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98), Isaac Levitan (1860-1900), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), Nicolas de Stael (1914-1955) and Jackson Pollock (1912-56), to name but a few. On the other hand, some artists blossom early and, while they might continue painting for decades, fail to repeat their early success. In this category we might find modern artists like Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, Oskar Kokoschka, Andre Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Kees Van Dongen - even, arguably, Picasso. Only a relatively small proportion maintain their creativity into extreme old age, in the manner of Tintoretto, Monet, Renoir, Joan Miro and Lucian Freud.

Understanding the background of the artist can also explain a huge amount about his/her painting.

The Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch reportedly never recovered from a number of early deaths in the family. His consequent neurotic, morbid nature can be seen in many of his works. The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo never fully recovered the use of her right leg after contracting polio at age 6, and at 18 suffered serious injuries after a bus accident. This helps to explain her endless series of self-portraits, capturing her lack of mobility.

Paul Cezanne ( Mont St Victoire landscapes, Bathers, and still-lifes) and Edgar Degas (ballet dancers) painted endless painstaking versions of certain subjects. One probable reason for this, is that neither depended on their art for their living. Certainly neither attempted much portraiture, which was the most financially rewarding of the genres. On the other hand, both men were more classicist in their outlook than their Impressionist colleagues, which helps to explain their precise and meticulous methods of working.

Obviously a painting designed to occupy a large space on the wall of a 16th century Spanish monastery dining hall (monumental, inspirational religious picture) is going to be radically different from one intended for the study of a prosperous textile merchant in 17th century Amsterdam (small-scale, polished portrait, interior or still life). Likewise, a painting designed for the reception area of a hi-tech software in California (large modern abstract picture, possibly geometric or expressionist) is likely to be different from one installed in the boardroom of a private bank in the City of London (traditional 19th century landscape). Of course, these suggestions are no more than stereotypical possibilities, but they serve to illustrate the role and characteristics of site-specific works of art.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Art Evaluation: How to Appreciate Art, Judge a Painting

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Knowing the date of the work helps us to gauge how it was made, and the degree of difficulty involved. For instance, landscapes produced before the popularity of photography (c.1860), or the appearance of collapsible tin paint tubes (1841), had a greater level of difficulty.

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

Panoramic and concise overview of the nature of art and its definition.

Recommendation:

Although it can be used by students, this page is mainly useful to the teacher, providing a wealth of questions that can be pursued with the students. Especially hilarious are the examples of "meaningless" art reviews. Source : http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/art-definition.htm

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
MOST VALUABLE ARTWORKS
For information about the world's
most highly priced pictures
and record auction prices, see:
Top 10 Most Expensive Paintings.

The emergence of the great European academies of art reflected the gradual upgrading of the subject. New and enlightened branches of philosophy also contributed to this change of image. By the mid-18th century, the mere demonstration of technical skills was insufficient to qualify as art - it now needed an "aesthetic" component - it had to be seen as something "beautiful."

At the same time, the concept of "utilitarianism" (functionality or usefulness) was used to distinguish the more noble "fine arts" (art for art's sake), like painting and sculpture, from the lesser forms of "applied art", such as crafts and commercial design work, and the ornamental "decorative arts", like textile design and interior design.

Thus, by the end of the 19th century, art was separated into at least two broad categories: namely, fine art and the rest - a situation that reflected the cultural snobbery and moral standards of the European establishment. Furthermore, despite some erosion of faith in the aesthetic standards of Renaissance ideology - which remained a powerful influence throughout the world of fine art - even painting and sculpture had to conform to certain aesthetic rules in order to be considered "true art".

Then came Cubism (1907-14), which rocked the fine arts establishment to its foundations. Not simply because Picasso introduced a non-naturalistic branch of painting and sculpture, but because it shattered the monotheistic Renaissance approach to how art related to the world around it. Thus, Cubism's main contribution was to act as a sort of catalyst for a host of new movements which greatly expanded the theory and practice of art, such as: Suprematism, Constructivism, Dada, Neo-Plasticism, Surrealism and Conceptualism, as well as various realist styles, such as Social and Socialist Realism. In practice, this proliferation of new styles and artistic techniques led to a new broadening of the meaning and definition of art. In its escape from its "Renaissance straitjacket", and all the associated rules concerning "objectivity" (eg. on perspective, useable materials, content, composition, and so on), fine art now boasted a significant element of "subjectivity". Artists suddenly found themselves with far greater freedom to create paintings and sculpture according to their own subjective values. In fact, one might say that from this point "art" started to become "indefinable".

The decorative and applied arts underwent a similar transformation due to the availability of a vastly increased range of commercial products. However, the resultant increase in the number of associated design and crafts disciplines did not have any significant impact on the definition and meaning of art as a whole.

The cataclysm of WWII led to the demise of Paris as the capital of world art, and its replacement by New York. This new American orientation encouraged art to become more of a commercial product, and loosen its connection with existing traditions of aestheticism - a trend furthered by the emergence of Abstract Expressionism, Pop-Art, and the activities of the new breed of celebrity artists like Andy Warhol. All of a sudden, even the most mundane items and concepts became elevated to the status of "art". Under the influence of this populist approach, conceptualists introduced new artforms, like assemblage, installation, video and performance. In due course, graffiti added its own mark, as did numerous styles of reinterpretation, like Neo-Dada, Neo-Expressionism, and Neo-Pop, to name but three. Schools and colleges of art throughout the world dutifully preached the new polytheism, adding further fuel to the bonfire of Renaissance art traditions.

The redefinition of art during the last three decades of the 20th century has been lent added intellectual weight by theorists of the postmodernist movement. According to the postmoderns, the focus has shifted from artistic skill to the "meaning" of the work produced. In addition, "how" a work is "experienced" by spectators has become a critical component in its aesthetic value. The phenomenal success of contemporary artists like Damien Hirst, as well as Gilbert and George, is clear evidence in support of this view. For more about experimental artists, see: avant-garde art.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Art Definition: Meaning, Classification of Visual Arts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
MOST VALUABLE ARTWORKS For information about the world's most highly priced pictures and record auction prices, see: Top 10 Most Expensive Paintings. The emergence of the great European academies of art reflected the gradual upgrading of the subject. New and enlightened branches of philosophy also contributed to this change of image.

# data[].attributes.headline
Limelight Magazine: The Ten Greatest Pianists of All time

# data[].attributes.subject
Limelight Magazine: The Ten Greatest Pianists of All time

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

Close to a hundred recordings of pieces of classical music, played by ten master pianists.

Recommendation:

This is an opportunity to move off the focus from paintings to music. Some of the questions asked in the context of paintings can be asked again regarding music, to check to what extent answers may vary depending on the medium. As an area of knowledge, art both conveys knowledge and requires knowledge to be fully appreciated. Both aspects can be examined here: can it be said that a musical piece "conveys knowledge" (and is it then describable or ineffable?); and how does knowledge about music in general and about this piece and this musician in particular, contribute to our enjoyment? Source : https://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/features/the-10-greatest-pianists-of-all-time/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This issue includes features on Lang Lang, Whiteley: The Opera, Gondwana Choirs, Notre Dame, Jayson Gillham, Sweeney Todd, and much more.

Ahead of an ANAM concert featuring piano works for four hands, the renowned pianist shares his thoughts on the musical form.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The 10 Greatest Pianists Of All Time - Limelight Magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This issue includes features on Lang Lang, Whiteley: The Opera, Gondwana Choirs, Notre Dame, Jayson Gillham, Sweeney Todd, and much more. Ahead of an ANAM concert featuring piano works for four hands, the renowned pianist shares his thoughts on the musical form.

# data[].attributes.headline
Limelight Magazine: The Ten Greatest Pianists of All time

# data[].attributes.subject
Limelight Magazine: The Ten Greatest Pianists of All time

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

Close to a hundred recordings of pieces of classical music, played by ten master pianists.

Recommendation:

This is an opportunity to move off the focus from paintings to music. Some of the questions asked in the context of paintings can be asked again regarding music, to check to what extent answers may vary depending on the medium. As an area of knowledge, art both conveys knowledge and requires knowledge to be fully appreciated. Both aspects can be examined here: can it be said that a musical piece "conveys knowledge" (and is it then describable or ineffable?); and how does knowledge about music in general and about this piece and this musician in particular, contribute to our enjoyment? Source : https://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/features/the-10-greatest-pianists-of-all-time/

Visit Website

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This issue includes features on Lang Lang, Whiteley: The Opera, Gondwana Choirs, Notre Dame, Jayson Gillham, Sweeney Todd, and much more.

Ahead of an ANAM concert featuring piano works for four hands, the renowned pianist shares his thoughts on the musical form.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The 10 Greatest Pianists Of All Time - Limelight Magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This issue includes features on Lang Lang, Whiteley: The Opera, Gondwana Choirs, Notre Dame, Jayson Gillham, Sweeney Todd, and much more. Ahead of an ANAM concert featuring piano works for four hands, the renowned pianist shares his thoughts on the musical form.

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

Everything you need to know about religions, a treasure trove worth exploring.

Recommendation:

From the three monotheistic religions to the less well-known Sikhism, Baha'i, or Rastafari, this website provides information about the beliefs and practices of various faiths. Searchable by themes, worldviews and types of resources, there are activities and lesson plans immediately usable. Source : https://www.reonline.org.uk/teaching-resources/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Search our free, quality assured teaching resources on religion and worldviews. Foundation through KS5.

# data[].attributes.headline
Religious Education Council of England and Wales: Teaching and Learning Resources

# data[].attributes.subject
Religious Education Council of England and Wales: Teaching and Learning Resources

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

Reliable resource portal from the Religious Education Council of England and Wales.

Recommendation:

This portal is for teachers to explore. Rich resources and lesson plans on varied aspects of religion and on different religious faiths. Source : https://www.religiouseducationcouncil.org.uk/news/religious-education-teaching-learning-resources/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
The Religious Education Council of England and Wales

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
One of the Religious Education Council's main audiences are educators looking for teaching and learning resources on religious education. Here we have compiled a list of resources that may be useful. You can find more on our Resources page.

Please note that this article is intended merely to signpost readers to external resources produced by RE Council member organisations or former members. The RE Council is not able to endorse the content of these resources, and teachers will therefore need to check for suitability beforehand.

Understanding Christianity

The Understanding Christianity materials are intended to support teachers in all schools (including Church of England schools, community schools, other denominational schools, academies and free schools) in teaching about Christianity in Religious Education. The Understanding Christianity Resource Pack includes units of work from EYFS to Key Stage 3, with a wide range of teaching and learning ideas to support the approach and enable pupils to develop the knowledge, skills and understanding required.

3FF - Three Faiths Forum

3FF, the Three Faiths Forum, has worked to build good relations between people of different faiths, beliefs and identities for over twenty years. 3FF creates spaces in schools, universities, and the wider community where people can engage with questions of belief and identity and meet people different from themselves. Their programmes enable people from different backgrounds - both religious and non-religious - to learn from each other and work together.

3FF's resources enable teachers and their students to approach topics of different faiths and diverse ways of life in a nuanced way, without shying away from difficult or controversial questions. They give guidelines on how to talk about sometimes sensitive issues respectfully while encouraging people to ask questions and be open and curious.

Jewish Living Exhibition and Tours

The Jewish Living Experience is a mobile travelling exhibition. Aimed primarily at school groups, it enables visitors to gain an insight into Judaism as a living faith with a lifestyle that has been sustained for over 5,000 years. Designed by education experts, the Jewish Living Experience Exhibition supports the teaching of Judaism in line with all agreed Religious Education and Citizenship curriculums. The Jewish Living Experience Exhibition supports community cohesion, interfaith dialogue and Prevent agendas. Pupils and teachers alike can experience Judaism through beautifully illustrated display panels, authentic artefacts that can be handled and educational activities which promote experiential learning. It is an educational experience for all Key Stages, but is especially suitable for Key Stages 2, 3 and 4.

Jewish Living Tours are a unique way of learning about Judaism as it is lived today The Board of Deputies of British Jews organises tours of Jewish London, providing students with a close-up experience of Jewish life. Teachers who would like to inspire their students with an insight into our vibrant community are invited to bring their pupils on these tours, we are also happy to organise teacher training days. Each bespoke tour is tailored to suit the visiting group, in line with their Religious Education syllabus and required outcomes. This is an exciting opportunity for teachers and students to experience an educational visit to a contemporary Jewish community.

Find out more from this online leaflet.

Jewish Museum Teachers' Portal

The Jewish Museum London has recently launched a new Learning Portal website. The Portal is designed to help teachers and students explore the diversity of Judaism and the cultural heritage of Jewish people in Britain. You can plan your visit, sign up for our School's Newsletter, and Ask a Question to the Learning Team. You can also browse our extensive video, audio, and object resources by delving into our In the Classroom section.

Teachers' Portal: https://teachersportal.org.uk/schools
In the Classroom: https://teachersportal.org.uk/schools/in-the-classroom

ISKCON Educational Services' Heart of Hinduism Teacher Resources Pack

In helping learn and teach about Hinduism, ISKCON Educational Services strives to publish and present educational material that:

1. Is accurate, authentic and accessible

2. Recognizes diversity

3. Carefully classifies complex material

4. Promotes academic and moral discernment

5. Values individual agency

6. Promotes the well-being of all

The Heart of Hinduism Teacher Resources Pack is an extensive exploration of the above. An online version of the Heart of Hinduism pack is available here.

ISKCON also offers learning resources for students and school visits and in-school presentations on Hinduism.

JAINpedia

The JAINpedia website, founded by the Institute of Jainology, contains a wealth of information about Jainism.

Clearvision resources on Buddhism

The Clearvision website offers a wide range of teaching and learning resources on Buddhism for all key stages. There are interactive learning resources, videos and resources available for purchase. All materials have been produced by qualified teachers and practising Buddhists.

Bahá'í RE

On this website, you will find a wealth of materials to enhance your teaching on the Bahá'í faith. All materials may be downloaded and freely copied, with acknowledgements as appropriate. There are also links to inexpensive books and other printed materials, which may be purchased.

Members of local Bahá'í communities are often happy to be invited to come into a school to assist you in any way that you, as a teacher, consider beneficial, for example by talking to pupils, leading an assembly or taking a lesson. If you do not already know any local Bahá'ís, please use the contact form on the School Visitors page so that we can put you in touch.

Understanding Humanism

The Understanding Humanism website from Humanists UK has information about Humanism, teaching resources, online courses and information about booking school speakers on Humanism. Their resources include lesson plans, classroom activities, presentations and films.

Quakers teaching resources

Download or order teaching resources from the Quakers in Britain, including the Budget for a Safer World lesson, 'Conscience' and 'Conviction': World War I learning resources, and resources on teaching peace.

RE Online

Find practical inspiration for excellent learning in RE at all stages, with thousands of resources to search through.
Please let us know about any other religious education teaching and learning resources that you've found useful. Contact us here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Religious Education Teaching and Learning Resources

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
One of the Religious Education Council's main audiences are educators looking for teaching and learning resources on religious education. Here we have compiled a list of resources that may be useful. You can find more on our Resources page.

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

Rewarding portal directing to resources and lesson plans about religion and religious tolerance.

Recommendation:

Requires some digging and surfing, but yields plenty of lesson plans and teaching resources. Source : http://www.worldvieweducation.org/teachingmaterials.html

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
concept lessons and story lessons specifically acknowledge nonconformist
thinking on important matters (science, politics, religion) and can aid public
hold unfamiliar or dissimilar religious and philosophical beliefs.
- To increase students' awareness of the great diversity of human thought.
materials that relate to the goals of teaching about religion with a view to
diversity ar
- To foster students' commitment to safeguarding within society personal
independence of thought and freedom for both religious and naturalistic
convictions.
support, in one way or another, this site's educational commitment to
national pluralism and to appropriate civic acknowledgement of worldview
Developed by two expert teachers from Riverside-Brookfield Public High
School, Riverside, Illinois, the materials are perhaps a little rough from the
Very brief quoted matter is useful as raw material for certain themes and for
guiding or enriching students' learning experiences.

- Religion and Public Education
- Religious Liberty and Nonreligion
- Religious Pluralism and a Civil Society

viewpoint of professional design; nevertheless they have abundant good
ideas with a critical thinking bent. On site, go to the "The Content" page and
review the topics, especially "Thinking Logically," "Thinking about Religion
(from a Global Perspective)," "Prejudice in Group Relations," "The
Decalogue: Bible Scholarship for Use Today, and "Thinking about the
Mysterious."

diversity.

school teachers to achieve greater objectivity and balance in their teaching
about diverse worldviews. The module focuses on unconventional and
unorthodox thinking in general, with special emphasis on nonconformity
regarding religion [nonreligion]. The lessons and activities (for grades 6-12)
were teacher-reviewed and pilot tested in social studies classrooms.

The stated goals of the materials are:
e many h ighly relevant free Lesson plans available free on the Web. Assorted teaching materials for sale, although there are free items, too An extensive set of short quotations relating to three major categories.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Teaching About Religion: Teaching Materials

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
concept lessons and story lessons specifically acknowledge nonconformist thinking on important matters (science, politics, religion) and can aid public hold unfamiliar or dissimilar religious and philosophical beliefs. - To increase students' awareness of the great diversity of human thought.

# data[].attributes.body
Council on Foreign Relations
Summary:

Superb portal on some thirty crisis which might impact the United States

Recommendation:

Crisis are classified as either critical, significant, or limited, to US interests. Most of them -except the Israeli-Arab conflict, are not within the purview of IBDP TOK or History, but the website is worth knowing and should be available to any teacher interested in current international affairs. Priceless for the background provided on the conflicts, it may also raise the question: What do actors need to know before making decisions? How much detailed and academic knowledge is (or should) available to decision makers? Source : https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/?category=us

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Global Conflict Tracker l Council on Foreign Relations

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn about the world's top hotspots with this interactive Global Conflict Tracker from the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations.

# data[].attributes.body
The Political Classroom

Summary:

The page accompanies the publication of The Political Classroom by Routledge.

Recommendation:

The page requires some browsing, but if at a loss where to start, it might be one of the best entry-points. Some recommended websites need no introduction and are well-known, but plenty of unknowns to discover. Top notch resource. Source : http://thepoliticalclassroom.com/resources.php

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Creating a political classroom requires high quality materials. Below is a list of websites and organizations that teachers might draw upon to prepare students for discussion and to find activities that get students talking about political issues.

The Educator's Reference Desk: The Educator's Reference Desk is a collection of lesson plans organized according to discipline.

Edsitement: Edsitement is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This website offers history and social studies lesson plans as well as links to other useful social studies content.

Hotchalk Lesson Plans Page: This website offers lesson plans accompanied by handouts and readings, organized by content area.

Lesson Plans and Resources for Social Studies Teachers: Lesson plans and other resources collected Dr. Marty Levine, a professor of secondary education. The site has not been updated for some time, but it still has useful resources. Be sure to look at "Lesson plans and teaching resources" link.

Thinkfinity: Thinkfinity is Verizon foundation's Verizon Mobile Learning Academy, a virtual, moderated professional development course offered to teams of educators for free.

CNN Student News: This is a 10-minute commercial-free show about current events produced by CNN. The site includes archived news reports and articles, discussion topics, and printable .pdf maps relevant to stories in the news.

Discovery Education: Created by the Discovery Channel, this site provides a wide array of resources, though not all are related directly to social studies. Look for links to lesson plans, video clips, worksheets, and more.

FreeDocumentaries.org: Appropriately named, this site offers scores of free streamed documentaries, though the quality is not always the best.

History Classroom: Part of the History Channel, this site contains streaming videos, background information, and other useful resources to engage students in history.

National Geographic: The site offers lessons and activities about geography and cultures. Also, it links to a variety of National Geographic resources that will enhance a lesson and engage students, from world music to video clips to interactive maps.

New York Times Learning Network: The Network has lesson plans and materials based on articles from the New York Times.

PBS Learning Media: PBS Learning Media allows you to sort through articles, lesson plans, and activities by grade level, topic, and/or PBS program. PBS NewsHourExtra has particularly strong resources.

Annenberg Classrooms: Annenberg Classrooms offers a collection of lesson plans, resources, videos, and games about the U.S. government.

Center for Civic Education: The Center's website offers numerous podcasts, such as a monthy Education for Democracy podcast, in addition to curriculum, information about civics education programs, and other multimedia resources appropriate for middle and high school students.

Choices Program: The program brings to life current and historical public policy issues for high school students. Some resources include, workshops, classroom materials, and a mailing list.

CIA World Factbook: Information about the government, economy, geography, history, and people for every country in the world.

CongressLink: CongressLink provides information about the U.S. Congress – how it works, its members and leader, and the public policies it produces. It is directed toward teachers of American Government and civics. Resources include original content, such as lesson plans and historical materials, and up-to-the-minute information about Congress.

Constitutional Rights Foundation: CRF is a non-profit, non-partisan, communitybased organization dedicated to educating America's young people about the importance of civic participation in a democratic society. CRF develops and distributes programs and materials to teachers, students, and public-minded citizens across the nation, inlcuding lessons and activities about democracy with specific attention on deliberation.

Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago: CRFC is based in Chicago. It focuses on designing and implementing rights, law, and policy related education programs and resources for students and teachers.

Deliberating in a Democracy: DID is conducted by the Constitutional Right Foundation Chicago and StreetLaw, Inc. The program's aim is to promote the learning of democratic principles by teaching students how to deliberate controversial public issues. An array of issue-specific, democracy, and deliberation lesson plans are located under the "Lessons" tab.

Games for Change (G4C): G4C provides support, visibility, and shared resources to individuals and organizations using and designing digital games for social change. Its website offers free game channels and online series on numerous social issues. G4C also provides an opportunity for educators to connect with one another and an annual festival.

History Matters: History Matters designed a comprehensive site for U.S. History teachers. Find primary documents, read about how experts approach history, and search hundreds of the best websites about U.S. History.

iCivics: Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was the driving force behind this web-based civics education project featuring curriculum units, lesson plans, and highly interactive games.

iDebate.org: Hosted by the International Debate Association, this site contains pro-con arguments and resources for 100 public issues. Contains discussion forums and data generated by participants around the world.

iSideWith.com: This site quizzes the user about their views on a variety of political issues and uses that information to identify the candidate most in-line with the user's views and ideology.

LandmarkCases.org: This site was developed by Street Law, Inc. and the Supreme Court Historical Society to provide teachers with resources and activities that help students explore the key issues of landmark Supreme Court cases. The resources feature basic building blocks, such as background summaries and excerpts of opinions geared for the classroom. The activities include both short and in-depth lessons.

Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility: Teachable Moment offers lesson plans for k-12 that promote critical thinking on both domestic and international current issues.

National Constitution Center: The education blog offers lesson plans, professional dvelopment resources, and educational content related to the U.S. Constitution.

ProCon.org: The teacher's corner of this site containes resources for critical thinking and educating without bias. The available materials prsent controversial issues in a direct, nonpartisan, and primarily pro-con format.

Rethinking Schools: Rethinking Schools is an independent publisher of educational materials and professional development resources, many of which focus on controversial issues.

Street Law, Inc.: Street Law has more than 40 years of experience developing programs and materials that educate young people about law and government and designing professional development opportunities for social studies teachers. The resource library on StreetLaw.org contains hundreds of free teaching activities and methods, case summaries, mock trials, and articles.

TakingITGlobal: Through a safe, interactive, and virtual classroom, TIG offers the opportunity to participate in a community of global educators and access online learning resources and learning activities.

Choices Program Be The Change Video Contest: The Choices Program invites students in grades 9-12 to create a two minute video detailing a global issue that matters to them and what they are doing to create change in their school, neighborhood, or beyond.

ePals Global Community: ePals connects users from around the globe, providing the tools and meeting places to create a worldwide community of learners.

Flat Classroom Project: Award-winning education wikis have come from this. These wikis can be used to collaborate around issues among classrooms around the globe.

Global Classrooms: Although specific targeted to schools with the Global Classrooms program, this website contains useful lesson plans for leading country specific discussions and classroom activities on international issues. United Nations information targeted for teachers with students in mind, makes learning about international bodies easier for students.

Global Nomads Group: GNG is an international NGO that creates interactive educational programs for students about global issues. GNG's educational programs include videos on a variety of international issues and videoconferences, where students learn about and discuss topics with their peers from around the world in live, facilitated sessions.

iEARN (International Education and Research Network): iEARN is the world's largest non-profit global network that enables teachers and youth to use the Internet and other technologies to collaborate on projects that enhance learning and make a difference in the world.

National Issues Forum: The National Issues Forum brings people together to talk about important issues. Issues range from small study circles held in people's homes to large community gatherings modeled on New England town meetings. Each forum focuses on a specific issue, such as illegal drucks, Social Security, and juvenile crime.

UNICEF Voices of Youth: Voices of Youth offers all children and adolescents, including the hard-to-reach, a safe and supportive global cyberspace within which they can explore, discuss and partner on issues related to human rights and social change, as well as develop their awareness, leadership, community building, and critical thinking skills through active and substantive participation with their peers and with decision makers globally.

Youth Media Exchange: Youth Media Exchange is a social networking site where youth from around the world can share a variety of forms of digital media on a range of issues.

British Museum: Look at the "Resources" section of this site for for downloadable resources by age group, culture, and subject. They have posted various curriculum resources and an extensive digital collection of cultural artifacts from around the world. The terms KS3 and KS 4 are roughly the equivalent to the U.S. designation of "secondary."

Library of Congress: Primary source materials, data sets, presentations, and other classroom materials are available here. This is a very dense site and may take a while to find specific resources, but they come from an official source.

National Archives: A content-rich site with links to lesson plans, primary sources, and professional development opportunities. Plan on spending some time exploring this site.

Smithsonian Education: Search for curricular material by subject or by state standards. A gigantic collection of resources to teach about cultures from all over the world.

Vanderbilt University Public Policy Issues and Groups: This site contains content and resources about a wide range of public policy issues. It is updated frequently to include up-to-date information about each topic.

Wisconsin Historical Society: Access to lesson plans and online collections of primary source material.

American Bar Association (ABA): With more than 400,000 members, the ABA is the largest voluntary professional association in the world. Among the many services it provides, the website contains a number of resources, including lesson plans, about the role and rights of citizens in a democracy.

American Psychological Association (APA): Lesson plans and ideas for those teaching high school psychology

Council for Economic Education: With the lessons and resources available on this site, it will be much easier to teach students of all grade levels about economics.

National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS): NCSS is an association aimed at supporting social studies teachers. Look under the "resources" link on the top bar of the homepage to find k-12 lessons and other helpful information.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Creating a political classroom requires high quality materials. Below is a list of websites and organizations that teachers might draw upon to prepare students for discussion and to find activities that get students talking about political issues. The Educator's Reference Desk: The Educator's Reference Desk is a collection of lesson plans organized according to discipline.

# data[].attributes.headline
Political Lies: altering facts and rewriting historyHACPolitical Lies: altering facts and rewriting history.                                   HAC 

# data[].attributes.subject
Political Lies: altering facts and rewriting historyHACPolitical Lies: altering facts and rewriting history.                                   HAC 

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

Article from the Hannah Arendt Center for politics and the humanities at Bard College.

Recommendation:

This is an article worth a close reading with the students. It should trigger lively discussions. The distinction between facts, which cannot be changed or subverted and their re-arrangement in a novel interpretation raises the question how we can safely distinguish between the two, which is a valuable knowledge question in its own right. Source : https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/political-lies-altering-facts-and-rewriting-history-2015-02-09

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
02-09-2015

By Richard A. Barrett

"Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute. In other words, factual truth informs political thought just as rational truth informs philosophical speculation."

-Hannah Arendt, Truth and Politics

Arendt tells us that factual truth is at once crucial for political life and more vulnerable to manipulation than we typically consider it. A reminder of the fragility of facts is timely in light of Russian attempts to alter both recent and historical fact, as well as China's formidable ability to control its people's access to information on the Internet.

Arendt recounts Clemenceau's response when he was asked what historians will say on the issue of guilt for the outbreak of World War One: "This I don't know. But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany." Yet Arendt was aware of facts-at least as certain-that world powers went to considerable lengths to alter. Her personal library at Bard College houses her copy of William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which recounts Hitler's shocking attempt to cast the German invasion of Poland as a defensive action.

[caption id="attachment_15364" align="alignleft" width="301"] Shown from left to right in this 1939 photograph are: Franz Josef Huber, Arthur Nebe, and the three men responsible for planning of most of Operation Himmler: Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Müller. (Source: Wikipedia)[/caption]

In "Operation Himmler," the Gestapo-S.S. staged an attack on a German radio station near the Polish border. Germans wearing Polish Army uniforms attacked the station, broadcast a short "Polish" speech, and left behind condemned criminals who had been dressed in Polish uniforms and killed to appear as causalties of the invasion. The New York Times and other newspapers reported this Polish "attack" on Germany, and Hitler used it in his speech to the Reichstag, justifying aggression against Poland.

Arendt states that the "chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed; it is always in danger of being maneuvered out of the world not only for a time but, potentially, forever." One such instance she saw was Trotsky's role in Soviet history. He was a founder of the Soviet state, the first commander of the Red Army, playing a major role in the Russian Civil War, and he was a long-standing member of the Politburo. Despite all this, after he lost a power struggle with Stalin, not only was Trotsky removed from power and expelled from the Communist Party, but, as Arendt points out, he was also erased from Soviet history: ceasing to appear-at all-in Russian history books.

Rewriting of history is not the exclusive work of totalitarian regimes. We must remember that the United States has also tried to take advantage of the vulnerability of factual truth. In 1846, President Polk claimed that Mexico invaded U.S. territory and "shed American blood upon American soil." Abraham Lincoln, a relatively unknown representative in his only term in the U.S. House, disputed this fact at length in a speech on the House floor, comparing the president to a lawyer "struggling for his client's neck in a desperate case, employing every artifice to work round, befog, and cover up with many words some point arising in the case, which he dared not admit, and yet could not deny." And attempts to rewrite history for political ends are not merely a product of the last couple of centuries. The Donation of Constantine, now recognized as a forgery, was widely used in Medieval times to support papal claims of political authority. As far back as ancient Egypt, the pharaohs were careful to make records only of their military 'victories,' thus leaving historians to infer their defeats from reading about a series of victories that started at the outskirts of Egypt and moved successively closer to the ruler's capital.

[caption id="attachment_15366" align="aligncenter" width="551"] Truth and lies (Source: Quintessential Ruminations)[/caption]

We might be tempted to think that facts are safer in a world with modern technology; after all, cameras now reside in nearly everyone's pocket. However, Arendt explains that "modern political lies deal efficiently with things that are not secrets at all but are known to practically everybody," that it is possible to engage in "rewriting contemporary history under the eyes of those who witnessed it." Rather than putting an end to the political lie, modern techniques and mass media can increase the success of those attempting to rewrite history because their lies, which act as a substitute for reality, are "much more in the public eye than the original ever was."

A recent example of such an attempt comes from the Malaysia Airlines Flight (MH17) shot down over eastern Ukraine. While a preliminary investigation implicated pro-Russian forces, a Russian government funded media organization suggested that the plane had been shot down by Ukraine in a failed attempt to assassinate Vladimir Putin. A poll conducted a week after the event found that 80 percent of Russians believed the crash was indeed caused by the Ukrainian military, and only three percent blamed pro-Russian forces. Just before Putin was to attend a G20 summit in Austrailia, Russian state television broadcast a purportedly leaked, spy-satellite image of a Ukrainian fighter jet firing a missle at a passenger plane over Donetsk, though the photo was later revealed to be a poorly doctored image from Google Earth.

Less than a month later in an annual address to Russian Parliament, Putin claimed Crimea, recently annexed by Russia against the wishes of Ukraine, holds the status of a Russian Holy Land, comparing it to the sacredness the Temple Mount in Jerusalem holds for Muslims and Jews. Putin bases his claim on a legend that Grand Prince Vladmir was baptised in Crimea during the 10th century. However, this legend is not supported by historical evidence, which instead indicates Vladmir was baptized before he captured Crimea. Moreover, the Grand Prince's capital was Kiev-presently Ukraine's capital-so it is doubtful how much such a claim would support the notion that Crimea is more Russian than Ukrainian, even if it were true.

[caption id="attachment_15368" align="alignright" width="301"] The front page of the New York Times, July 1, 1971, announcing the Supreme Court's decision on the Pentagon Papers. (Source: Journalism Professor)[/caption]

Such attempts by states to alter history are not the only danger of political lies. Arendt warns that "self-deception is the danger par excellence; the self-deceived deceiver loses all contact with not only his audience, but also the real world, which still will catch up with him, because he can remove his mind from it but not his body" ( Lying in Politics). In her commentary on the Pentagon Papers, Arendt details how little the Administration managed to deceive others about the reality of the Vietnam War but nevertheless managed to deceive itself into believing and basing policy on information it knew was not true. In the end, the free press, which Arendt refers to as the "fourth branch of government," performed its crucial check on government-not by alerting the public to facts hidden from it, most of which were already known but-by forcing the executive to confront those facts, facts it had previously been so successful in deceiving itself about.

Thus Arendt informs us, "Even if we admit that every generation has the right to write its own history, we admit no more than that it has the right to rearrange the facts in accordance with its own perspective; we don't admit the right to touch the factual matter itself."

(Featured Image: Earliest Cave Drawings - This undated handout photo shows a stencil of a hand in a cave; Source: )

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Political Lies: Altering Facts and Rewriting History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
02-09-2015 By Richard A. Barrett "Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute. In other words, factual truth informs political thought just as rational truth informs philosophical speculation."

# data[].attributes.headline
Lesson Plans                        New York Times 

# data[].attributes.subject
Lesson Plans                        New York Times 

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

Lesson plans on current and historical events.

Recommendation:

Invaluable resource, ready to use. Browse the Social Studies section before accessing also math and science or English. Mostly aimed at teaching directly the various topics, it would therefore require slight tweaks to be more fully TOK-friendly, but has enormous potential. Source : https://www.nytimes.com/section/learning/lesson-plans

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Resources, strategies and ideas for teaching with The New York Times.

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

Very rich and useful store of lesson plans from the Media Literacy Clearinghouse.

Recommendation:

Maybe the best and most comprehensible resource for exploring the connections between politics and the media. Immediately useful if in a pinch. Pages on media literacy and on critical inquiry are also worth a visit. Source : https://frankwbaker.com/mlc/media-politics-lesson-plans/

# data[].attributes.headline
Lesson plans and teachers' guidesNEH: Edsitement

# data[].attributes.subject
Lesson plans and teachers' guidesNEH: Edsitement

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

Edsitement declares itself to be "the best of the humanities on the web".

Recommendation:

The left-hand side menu allows you to narrow down your search. Both the Guides and the Lesson plans are pertinent and give access to material that can be used as suggested, or as the teacher sees fit. Source : https://edsitement.neh.gov/

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

This Lesson includes a PowerPoint and an exercise regarding the different probabilities you can obtain from a venn diagram

Recommendation:

I would recommend extracting the cards from this resource and making it a matching exercise Source : https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/venn-diagram-lesson-6429842

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Really a Sixth Form S1 lesson on Venn Diagrams with supporting questions and note sheet but the basic principle of Venn Diagrams and the lesson could be wa...

# data[].attributes.headline
PBS: Book Traces History and Decline of Political Power as Power of ‘No’ Rises

# data[].attributes.subject
PBS: Book Traces History and Decline of Political Power as Power of ‘No’ Rises

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

Why power is decaying: harder to use and harder to keep.

Recommendation:

Instead of reading the whole book, this interview gives the gist of it. This (short - 8 minutes) resource can initiate a reflection on the concept of power, and launch the "knowledge and politics" optional theme. Source : https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/book-traces-history-and-decline-of-political-power

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the 21st century, is the power that comes with running things, governments, armies, religions, all that it used to be?

In "The End of Power," Moises Naim of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argues that power as we have understood it for a long time is both harder to use and to keep.

He joins me now.

Moises, governments are bigger than they have ever been, armies more powerful and about to project power more than they have ever been, banks also big enough to take down whole continents, much less countries. How could power be harder to use?

MOISES NAIM, Author, "The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be": In each of those examples, you have situations where - that shows that size no longer matters as much.

Think about the Taliban and the army. They are facing the coalition army of some of the most modern, sophisticated military ever assembled. Well, they're not winning, but they're denying victory to this very large coalition. Think about the large companies that you mentioned, especially in the financial sector. Of course, they now concentrate a lot of assets, but many of them are under attack.

Many of them have been - some of the CEOs have been fired. All of them are under regulatory attack that is going to constrain even more what they can do. So for each one of the examples, and even the governments - think about the big governments that - of course they're larger, but they're also more constrained.

They have a long list of actors. They are like Gullivers, just tied down by the Lilliputians.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Book Traces History and Decline of Political Power as Power of 'No' Rises

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the 21st century, is the power that comes with running things, governments, armies, religions, all that it used to be? In "The End of Power," Moises Naim of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argues that power as we have understood it for a long time is both harder to use and to keep.

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

UNESCO Portal on Endangered Languages, with useful comments

Recommendation:

The portal is an utterly reliable treasure trove, maintained and updated by UNESCO, on indigenous and endangered languages, with useful details on each website. It is easy to "get lost" surfing, but also rewarding. Source : http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/linguistic-diversity-and-multilingualism-on-internet/atlas-of-languages-in-danger/websites-and-online-resources/

Visit Website

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Websites and online resources

Academic programmes in the area of sociolinguistics, language description and documentation

A list of academic institutions that offer degrees and courses relevant to the safeguarding of endangered and indigenous languages is provided in the pdf document (last updated in July 2011).
Document: English

Grants for the Safeguarding of Endangered Languages

Grants for the documentation and revitalization of endangered and indigenous languages are available from the following organizations (last updated in January 2011).

Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (SOAS) National Science Foundation Foundation for Endangered Languages The Endangered Languages Fund Gesellschaft für bedrohte Sprachen Volkswagen Stiftung Australian Government, Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, Maintenance of Indigenous Languages and Records Sacred Earth Network Endangered Languages Program

Please click on the pdf document for more information and links.
Document: English

ACALAN

The African Academy of Languages founded in 2001.
http://www.acalan.org/
Advocacy toolkit for Multilingual Education

Produced by UNESCO/Bangkok, this kit is designed to raise awareness on the importance of mother tongue-based multilingual education (MLE). It presents key arguments and facts about MLE and provides important insights about the value and benefits of providing education in learners' mother tongue. The kit also presents ideas, research findings and concrete examples that you can use to think about your own situation and suggests steps for taking actions to make your school system more responsive to linguistic diversity.
The kit will be especially valuable for policy makers, education practitioners and specialists who want to improve access to and quality of education for those excluded by language. It will also be helpful for speakers of ethnic minority languages who want to improve the education situation in their own communities.
Document: English

Aménagement linguistique dans le monde (Linguistic planning in the world)

This French language website presents linguistic situations in 354 states and autonomous territories in 194 officially recognized countries. The website is browsable by countries or regions, by language, by people or by type of linguistic policy.
http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/axl/index.shtml
American Indian Language Links

This website, hosted by the Jatibonicu Taino Tribal Nation of Boriken (Puerto Rico), provides links to information on Native American Indian languages.
http://www.taino-tribe.org/langlinks.htm
Comprehensive bibliography on language endangerment by Professor Tasaku Tsunoda

This bibliography was compiled and is regularly updated by Tasaku Tsunoda, Professor at the Department of Asian and Pacific Linguistics at Tokyo University. He is specialized in language endangerment, language typology and australian Aboriginal linguistics.
http://tooyoo.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/BibLE/
Department of the North and Siberia, IEA RAS (Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences)

Information and resources on the endangered languages of indigenous peoples of Siberia, Russian Federation.
http://lingsib.iea.ras.ru/en/languages/
DOBES database of Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics

The database DOBES, hosted by the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (Netherlands), one of the research institutes of the german Max Planck Society, consists of a data archive covering sound material, video recordings, photos, and various textual annotations. The framework for this project was originally proposed to the Volkswagen-Stiftung by members of the Committee on Endangered Languages of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft. The work of this committee is nowadays continued by the Gesellschaft für bedrohte Sprachen (GBS).

Endangered Languages Fund

The Endangered Language Fund is devoted to the scientific study of endangered languages, the support of native efforts in maintaining endangered languages, and the dissemination, to both the native communities and the scholarly world, of the fruits of these efforts.
http://www.endangeredlanguagefund.org/
Ethnologue database

The Ethnologue database has been an active research project for more than fifty years and is a comprehensive listing of information about the currently-known languages of the world. It is sponsored and provided by Summer Insitute of Linguistics (SIL), a non-governmental institution based in Dallas (Texas, U.S.A.).

EUROLANG

Contains detailed information and bibliographies on endangered languages in Europe.

European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages (EBLUL)

The European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages (EBLUL) provides a database of regional and minority languages of the European Union.

Foundation Chirac - Sorosoro, so the languages of the world may prosper!

The SOROSORO program aims at defending the cultural diversity and participating in the race to safeguard endangered languages, making use of digital technologies now available in collaboration with international researchers who are already engaged in the effort.
http://www.fondationchirac.eu/
Foundation for Endangered Languages

The aims of the Foundation are:

to raise awareness of endangered languages,

to support the use of endangered languages in all contexts

to monitor linguistic policies and practices, and to seek to influence the appropriate authorities where necessary;

to support the documentation of endangered languages,

to collect together and make available information of use in the preservation of endangered languages;

Gesellschaft für Bedrohte Sprachen

The goal of the German Association for Endangered Languages (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Sprachen - GBS) is to further the use, preservation and documentation of endangered languages and dialects.
http://www.uni-koeln.de/gbs/e_index.html
Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, London)

HRELP is a project set up with a donation of £20 million from Arcadia (formerly the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund) to support the documentation of endangered languages. Some of HRELP's objectives include: providing grants to document the world's most endangered languages, training language documenters and preserving and distributing endangered language documentation.

LACITO Archive (Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale, CNRS, France)

LACITO Archive contains over 200 documents in 44 languages, annotated by some twenty specialists.

http://lacito.vjf.cnrs.fr/archivage/

Language Maps Collection

The collection of language maps (by continents, regions, countries, languages) has been compiled by Ljuba Veselinova, researcher at the Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University.
http://www.ling.su.se/staff/ljuba/maps.html
Language Museum

The Language Museum is a linguistic website which offers the samples of 2000 languages in the world. Every sample includes 4 parts: a sample image, an English translation, the speaking countries and populations and the language's family and branch. The Language Museum is constructed and maintained by Zhang Hong, an internet consultant and amateur linguist in Beijing, China.

Linguapax Institute

Promotion of policies that protect language diversity and that foster the learning of several languages constitutes the basic orientation of the Linguapax Institute.
Linguapax was born as a UNESCO initiative stemming from an experts meeting in Kiev (1987) and it soon turned into a philosophy that inspires the activities of several institutions in the fields of sociolinguistics and language education

Linguist List

The LINGUIST List is dedicated to providing information on language and language analysis, and to providing the discipline of linguistics with the infrastructure necessary to function in the digital world. LINGUIST maintains a web-site with over 2000 pages and runs a mailing list with over 17,500 subscribers worldwide. LINGUIST also hosts searchable archives of over 100 other linguistic mailing lists and runs research projects which develop tools for the field and recommendations of best practice for digitizing endangered languages data. LINGUIST is a free resource, run by linguistics professors and graduate students.
http://www.linguistlist.org/sitemap.html
LSA/CELP Database of Endangered Languages

This database is provided by the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) and their Committee on Endangered Languages & Their Preservation (CELP). The summary report includes 109 language researchers reporting on 151 languages/dialects.

MERCATOR: Linguistic Rights and Legislation

The main objective of the Mercator network is to make available for students, researchers, scholars and opinion and policy makers, a specialized resource centre and an information service devoted to European minoritized languages. Accordingly, it also intends to create a space aimed at interchanging experiences and documentation between the different European language communities.
http://www.ciemen.org/mercator/Menu_nou/index.cfm?lg=gb
Network to Promote Linguistic Diversity

The Network to Promote Linguistic Diversity is a pan-European network which encompasses constitutional, regional and smaller-state languages to promote linguistic diversity in the context of a multilingual Europe. The Network's aim is to facilitate the sharing of existing best practice and the development of new and innovative ideas across the field of language planning in education, the home, the workplace, legislation and the media in the contexts of constitutional, regional and smaller state languages (CRSS).

Oral Tradition Journal

This free, open-access electronic journal edited by the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri is devoted to oral traditions and expressions, including an archive of 10,000 pages of back issues (since 1986).
http://journal.oraltradition.org
Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)

PARADISEC (Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) offers a facility for digital conservation and access for endangered materials from the Pacific region, defined broadly to include Oceania and East and Southeast Asia (Universities of Sydney, Melbourne and Australian National University, Australia).
At March 2008 PARADISEC's collection contains 1926 hours of digital audio and video files on 3.45 TB of disk space. A catalogue of this material is available at the link given in the right hand frame of this page.

Rosetta Stone Endangered Language Programme

A programme working closely with endangered language communities engaged in language revitalisation to produce Rosetta Stone software in their language for their use only.
http://www.rosettastone.com/global/endangered
Script Encoding Initiative

The Script Encoding Initiative was set up at the Department of Linguistics of the University of California at Berkeley to fund proposals for those scripts currently missing in Unicode (and its ISO counterpart, 10646), the universal character encoding standard. It was officially established in April 2002.
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~dwanders/
Task Force on Aboriginal Languages and Cultures

A Foundational Report for a Strategy to Revitalize First Nation, Inuit and Métis Languages and Culture
http://aboriginallanguagestaskforce.ca/rpt/rpt_toc_e.html
Teaching Indigenous Languages (University of Arizona)

This web site is an outgrowth of a series of annual conferences started in 1994 at Northern Arizona University (U.S.A.) focusing on the linguistic, educational, social, and political issues related to the survival of the endangered Indigenous languages of the world. It contains papers from the 1997 through 2003 conferences on indigenous language teaching, revitalizing and preserving and lots of additional information and links.
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/TIL.html
Terralingua

Terralingua supports the integrated protection, maintenance and restoration of the biocultural diversity of life - the world's biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity - through an innovative program of research, education, policy and on-the-ground action.

http://www.terralingua.org

Typological tools for fieldworkers

This website, hosted by the Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig), contains tools for use in field linguistics and language description. These tools include questionnaires and elicitation kits, which are designed to assist a field worker in data collection.
http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/tools-at-lingboard/tools.php
UNESCO Red Book on Endangered Languages

The UNESCO Red Book of Endangered Languages is hosted by the Department of Dynamic Linguistics at Tokyo University. It provides information on endangered languages listed by continents.
http://www.tooyoo.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/Redbook/index.html
Virtual Linguistics Campus

The VLC Language Index allows users to examine more than 450 languages (most of them with standardized audio support) in several ways: via interactive maps with various search parameters (typology, cognates, language families) or via a pull-down list. Furthermore, users can add information or even create new language entries.
To access the Index, users have to register (for free). As soon as they login, they will see "My VLC". Clicking on the "VLC Toolbox" link will enable the user to reach the VLC Language Index.
http://www.linguistics-online.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Websites and online resources | United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Academic programmes in the area of sociolinguistics, language description and documentation A list of academic institutions that offer degrees and courses relevant to the safeguarding of endangered and indigenous languages is provided in the pdf document (last updated in July 2011).

# data[].attributes.headline
Who Am I? A philosophical inquiry - Amy Adkins

# data[].attributes.subject
Who Am I? A philosophical inquiry - Amy Adkins

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

This resource gives a general overview of the questions students will be asking when learning about this subject. It introduces a question many historic figures have asked and can help get into the mindset of tackling the TOK Essay.

Recommendation:

As a recommended watch before deciding which question to answer in the essay. Source : https://ed.ted.com/lessons/who-am-i-a-philosophical-inquiry-amy-adkins

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Need more about The Ship of Theseus? Find this concept interesting? Confusing? Visit the Khan Academy and watch this lesson from Jennifer Wang a Professor of Philosophy! Did this further clarify this concept? For even more, watch: The Paradox of Theseus's Ship from 90 second Philosophy!

Are you now wondering, " What is personal identity?" What makes you, YOU? That certainly is a question worth pondering! What if a person has an organ transplant? What if you uploaded your brain to a computer? Would you still be you? Would the computer be you? Read this article and get more to think about! Work your way through this series of notes on The Puzzle of Persisting Personal Identity and maybe you will come to a better understanding!

John Locke also addresses personal identity. Watch this video and get some insight into his ideas too! Follow it up with Part Two and Part Three: Philosophy: John Locke on Personal Identity.

TED Ed also addresses some questions about how you know you actually exist and who "you" really are. Watch the lesson: How do you know you're real? Find paradox's thought provoking? Then watch: What is Zeno's Dichotomy Paradox and The Infinite Hotel Paradox.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Who am I? A philosophical inquiry - Amy Adkins

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Throughout the history of mankind, the subject of identity has sent poets to the blank page, philosophers to the agora and seekers to the oracles. These murky waters of abstract thinking are tricky to navigate, so it's probably fitting that to demonstrate the complexity, the Greek historian Plutarch used the story of a ship.

# data[].attributes.body
Recommendation:

Instead of reading a whole epistemology book, a very handy summary. For teachers newly assigned to teach TOK. The section on Further Reading is also worth exploring at the end of the page. Source : https://www.philosophynews.com/post/2011/09/22/What-is-Knowledge.aspx

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Knowledge Problem

Studying knowledge is one of those perennial topics-like the nature of matter in the hard sciences-that philosophy has been refining since before the time of Plato. The discipline, epistemology, comes from two Greek words episteme (επιστημη) which means knowledge and logos (λογος) which means a word or reason. Epistemology literally means to reason about knowledge. Epistemologists study what makes up knowledge, what kinds of things can we know, what are the limits to what we can know, and even if it's possible to actually know anything at all.

Coming up with a definition of knowledge has proven difficult but we'll take a look at a few attempts and examine the challenges we face in doing so. We'll look at how prominent philosophers have wrestled with the topic and how postmodernists provide a different viewpoint on the problem of knowledge. We'll also survey some modern work being done in psychology and philosophy that can help us understand the practical problems with navigating the enormous amounts of information we have at our disposal and how we can avoid problems in the way we come to know things.

Do We Know Stuff?

In order to answer that question, you probably have to have some idea what the term "know" means. If I asked, "Have you seen the flibbertijibbet at the fair today?" I'd guess you wouldn't know how to answer. You'd probably start by asking me what a flibbertijibbet is. But most adults tend not to ask what knowledge is before they can evaluate whether they have it or not. We just claim to know stuff and most of us, I suspect, are pretty comfortable with that. There are lots of reasons for this but the most likely is that we have picked up a definition over time and have a general sense of what the term means. Many of us would probably say knowledge that something is true involves:

1. Certainty - it's hard if not impossible to deny

2. Evidence - it has to based on something

3. Practicality - it has to actually work in the real world

4. Broad agreement - lots of people have to agree it's true

But if you think about it, each of these has problems. For example, what would you claim to know that you would also say you are certain of? Let's suppose you're not intoxicated, high, or in some other way in your "right" mind and conclude that you know you're reading an article on the internet. You might go further and claim that denying it would be crazy. Isn't it at least possible that you're dreaming or that you're in something like the Matrix and everything you see is an illusion? Before you say such a thing is absurd and only those who were unable to make the varsity football team would even consider such questions, can you be sure you're not being tricked? After all, if you are in the Matrix, the robots that created the Matrix would making be making you believe you are not in the Matrix and that you're certain you aren't.

What about the "broad agreement" criterion? The problem with this one is that many things we might claim to know are not, and could not be, broadly agreed upon. Suppose you are experiencing a pain in your arm. The pain is very strong and intense. You might tell your doctor that you know you're in pain. Unfortunately though, only you can claim to know that (and as an added problem, you don't appear to have any evidence for it either-you just feel the pain). So at least on the surface, it seems you know things that don't have broad agreement by others.

These problems and many others are what intrigue philosophers and are what make coming up with a definition of knowledge challenging. Since it's hard to nail down a definition, it also makes it hard to answer the question "what do you know?"

What is Knowledge?

As with many topics in philosophy, a broadly-agreed-upon definition is difficult. But philosophers have been attempting to construct one for centuries. Over the years, a trend has developed in the philosophical literature and a definition has emerged that has such wide agreement it has come to be known as the "standard definition." While agreement with the definition isn't universal, it can serve as a solid starting point for studying knowledge.

The definition involves three conditions and philosophers say that when a person meets these three conditions, she can say she knows something to be true. Take a statement of fact: The Seattle Mariners have never won a world series.&#160; On the standard definition, a person knows this fact if:

1. The person believes the statement to be true

2. The statement is in fact true

3. The person is justified in believing the statement to be true

The bolded terms earmark the three conditions that must be met and because of those terms, the definition is also called the "tripartite" (three part) definition or "JTB" for short. Many many books have been written on each of the three terms so I can only briefly summarize here what is going on in each. I will say up front though that epistemologists spend most of their time on the third condition.

Belief

First, beliefs are things people have. Beliefs aren't like rocks or rowboats where you come across them while strolling along the beach. They're in your head and generally are viewed as just the way you hold the world (or some aspect of the world) to be. If you believe that the Mariners never won a world series, you just accept it is as true that the Mariners really never won a world series. Notice that accepting that something is true implies that what you accept could be wrong. In other words, it implies that what you think about the world may not match up with the way the world really is. This implies that there is a distinction between belief and truth. There are some philosophers-notably postmodernists and existentialists-who think such a distinction can't be made which we'll examine more below. But in general, philosophers claim that belief is in our heads and truth is about the way the world is. In practical terms, you can generally figure out what you or someone else believes by examining behavior. People will generally act according to what they really believe rather than what they say they believe-despite what Dylan says.

Truth

Something is true if the world really is that way. Truth is not in your head but is "out there." The statement, "The Mariners have never won a world series" is true if the Mariners have never won a world series. The first part of that sentence is in quotes on purpose. The phrase in quotes signifies a statement we might make about the world and the second, unquoted phrase is supposed to describe the way the world actually is. The reason philosophers write truth statements this way is to give sense to the idea that a statement about the world could be wrong or, more accurately, false (philosophers refer to the part in quotes as a statement or proposition). Perhaps you can now see why beliefs are different than truth statements. When you believe something, you hold that or accept that a statement or proposition is true. It could be false that's why your belief may not "match up" with the way the world really is. For more on what truth is, see the Philosophy News article, " What is Truth? "

Justification

If the seed of knowledge is belief, what turns belief into knowledge? This is where justification (sometimes called 'warrant') comes in. A person knows something if they're justified in believing it to be true (and, of course, it actually is true). There are dozens of competing theories of justification. It's sometimes easier to describe when a belief isn't justified than when it is. In general, philosophers agree that a person isn't justified if their belief is:

1. a product of wishful thinking (I really wish you would love me so I believe you love me)

2. a product of fear or guilt (you're terrified of death and so form the belief in an afterlife)

3. formed in the wrong way (you travel to an area you know nothing about, see a white spot 500 yards away and conclude it's a sheep)

4. a product of dumb luck or guesswork (you randomly form the belief that the next person you meet will have hazel eyes and it turns out that the next person you meet has hazel eyes)

Because beliefs come in all shapes and sizes and it's hard to find a single theory of justification that can account for everything we would want to claim to know. You might be justified in believing that the sun is roughly 93 million miles from the earth much differently than you would be justified in believing God exists or that you have a minor back pain. Even so, justification is a critical element in any theory of knowledge and is the focus of many a philosophical thought.

[Incidentally: while JTB is generally considered a starting point for a definition, it by no means is the final word. Many philosophers reject the JTB formulation altogether and others think that, at the very least, JTB needs to be "fixed up" somehow. Regarding this latter category, a small paper written by a philosopher named Edmund Gettier really kicked off a brouhaha that made philosophers doubt that JTB was sufficient for knowledge. Gettier's paper was roughly two and a half pages long (almost unheard of in philosophy) but has become so important that the issues he raised are known as The Gettier Problem.]

People-centered Knowledge

You might notice that the description above puts the focus of knowing on the individual. Philosophers talk of individual persons being justified and not the ideas or concepts themselves being justified. This means that what may count as knowledge for you may not count as knowledge for me. Suppose you study economics and you learn principles in the field to some depth. Based on what you learn, you come to believe that psychological attitudes have just as much of a role to play in economic flourishing or deprivation as the political environment that creates economic policy. Suppose also that I have not studied economics all that much but I do know that I'd like more money in my pocket. You and I may have very different beliefs about economics and our beliefs might be justified in very different ways. What you know may not be something I know even though we have the same evidence and arguments in front of us.

So the subjective nature of knowledge partly is based on the idea that beliefs are things that individuals have and those beliefs are justified or not justified. When you think about it, that makes sense. You may have more evidence or different experiences than I have and so you may believe things I don't or may have evidence for something that I don't have. The bottom line is that "universal knowledge" - something everybody knows-may be very hard to come by. Truth, if it exists, isn't like this. Truth is universal. It's our access to it that may differ widely.

Rene Descartes and the Search for Universal Knowledge

A lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea that there isn't universal knowledge. Philosopher Rene Descartes (pronounced day-cart) was one of them. When he was a young man, he was taught a bunch of stuff by his parents, teachers, priests and other authorities. As he came of age, he, like many of us, started to discover that much of what he was taught either was false or was highly questionable. At the very least, he found he couldn't have the certainty that many of his educators had. While many of us get that, deal with it, and move on, Descartes was deeply troubled by this.

One day, he decided to tackle the problem. He hid himself away in a cabin and attempted to doubt everything of which he could not be certain. Since it wasn't practical to doubt every belief he had, Descartes decided that it would be sufficient to subject the foundations of his belief system to doubt and the rest of the structure will "crumble of its own accord." He first considers the things he came to believe by way of the five senses. For most of us these are pretty stable items but Descartes found that it was rather easy to doubt their truth. The biggest problem is that sometimes the senses can be deceptive. And after all, could he be certain he wasn't insane or dreaming when he saw that book or tasted that honey? So while they might be fairly reliable, the senses don't provide us with certainty-which is what Descartes was after.

Next he looked at mathematics. If certainly is to be found, it must be here. He reasoned that the outcome of mathematical formulas and theorems hold both in dreams and in waking so at the very least, it fares better than the senses. But he developed an argument from which he could not spare math. Suppose there is an evil genius, he thought, that is "supremely powerful and clever" and was bent upon deceiving Descartes and developed mathematics as a device to carry out his evil deceptions ( The Matrix should be coming to mind about now). Descartes found there was no way to rule out this possibility. Whether it's highly unlikely or not isn't the point. Descartes was looking for certainty and if there is even a slim possibility that he's being deceived, he had to throw out mathematics too.

Unfortunately, this left Descartes with no where to turn. He found that he could be skeptical about everything and was unable to find a certain foundation for knowledge. But then he hit upon something that changed modern epistemology. He discovered that there was one thing he couldn't doubt: the fact that he was a thinking thing. In order to doubt it, he would have to think. He reasoned that it's not possible to doubt something without thinking about the fact that you're doubting. If he was thinking then he must be a thinking thing and so he found that it was impossible to doubt that he was a thinking being.

This seemingly small but significant truth led to his most famous contribution to Western thought: cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). Some mistakenly think that Descartes was implying with this idea that he thinks himself into existence. But that wasn't his point at all. He was making a claim about knowledge. Really what Descartes was saying is: I think, therefore I know that I am.

The story doesn't end here for Descartes but for the rest of it, I refer you to the reading list below to dig deeper. The story of Descartes is meant to illustrate the depth of the problems of epistemology and how difficult and rare certainty is, if certainty is possible-there are plenty of philosophers who think either that Descartes' project failed or that he created a whole new set of problems that are even more intractable than the one he set out to solve.

Postmodernism and Knowledge

Postmodern epistemology is a growing area of study and is relatively new on the scene compared with definitions that have come out of the analytic tradition in philosophy. Generally, though, it means taking a specific, skeptical attitude towards certainty, and a subjective view of belief and knowledge. Postmodernists see truth as much more fluid than classical (or modernist) epistemologists. Using the terms we learned above, they reject the idea that we can ever be fully justified in holding that our beliefs line up with the way the world actually is. We can't know that we know.

Perspective at the Center

In order to have certainty, postmodernists claim, we would need to be able to "stand outside" our own beliefs and look at our beliefs and the world without any mental lenses or perspective. It's similar to wondering what it would be like to watch ourselves meeting someone for the first time? We can't do it. We can watch the event of the meeting on a video but the experience of meeting can only be had by us. We have that experience only from "inside" our minds and bodies. Since its not possible to stand outside our minds, all the parts that make up our minds influence our view on what is true. Our intellectual and social background, our biases, our moods, our genetics, other beliefs we have, our likes and dislikes, our passions (we can put all these under the label of our "cognitive structure") all influence how we perceive what is true about the world. Further, say the postmodernists, it's not possible to set aside these influences or lenses. We can reduce the intensity here and there and come to recognize biases and adjust for them for sure. But it's not possible to completely shed all our lenses which color our view of things and so it's not possible to be certain that we're getting at some truth "out there."

Many have called out what seems to be a problem with the postmodernist approach. Notice that as soon as a postmodernist makes a claim about the truth and knowledge they seem to be making a truth statement! If all beliefs are seen through a lens, how do we know the postmodernists beliefs are "correct?" That's a good question and the postmodernist might respond by saying, "We don't!" But then, why believe it? Because of this obvious problem, many postmodernists attempt to simply live with postmodernist "attitudes" towards epistemology and avoid saying that they're making claims that would fit into traditional categories. We have to change our perspective to understand the claims.

Community Agreement

To be sure, Postmodernists do tend to act like the rest of us when it comes to interacting with the world. They drive cars, fly in airplanes, make computer programs, and write books. But how is this possible if they take such a fluid view of knowledge? Postmodernists don't eschew truth in general. They reject the idea that any one person's beliefs about it can be certain. Rather, they claim that truth emerges through community agreement. Suppose scientists are attempting to determine whether the planet is warming and that humans are the cause. This is a complex question and a postmodernist might say that if the majority of scientists agree that the earth is warming and that humans are the cause, then that's true. Notice that the criteria for "truth" is that scientists agree. To use the taxonomy above, this would be the "justification condition." So we might say that postmodernists accept the first and third conditions of the tripartite view but reject the second condition: the idea that there is a truth that beliefs need to align to a truth outside our minds.&#160;

When you think about it, a lot of what we would call "facts" are determined in just this way. For many years, scientists believed in a substance called "phlogiston." Phlogiston was stuff that existed in certain substances (like wood and metal) and when those substances were burned, more phlogiston was added to the substance. Phlogiston was believed to have negative weight, that's why things got lighter when they burned. That theory has since been rejected and replace by more sophisticated views involving oxygen and oxidation.

So, was the phlogiston theory true? The modernist would claim it wasn't because it has since been shown to be false. It's false now and was false then even though scientists believed it was true. Beliefs about phlogiston didn't line up with the way the world really is, so it was false. But the postmodernist might say that phlogiston theory was true for the scientists that believed it. We now have other theories that are true. But phlogiston theory was no less true then than oxygen theory is now. Further, they might add, how do we know that oxygen theory is really the truth? Oxygen theory might be supplanted some day as well but that doesn't make it any less true today.

Knowledge and the Mental Life

As you might expect, philosophers are not the only ones interested in how knowledge works. Psychologists, social scientists, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists have been interested in this topic as well and, with the growth of the field of artificial intelligence, even computer scientists have gotten into the game. In this section, we'll look at how work being done in psychology and behavioral science can inform our understanding of how human knowing works.

Thus far, we've looked at the structure of knowledge once beliefs are formed. Many thinkers are interested how belief formation itself is involved our perception of what we think we know. Put another way, we may form a belief that something is true but the way our minds formed that belief has a big impact on why we think we know it. The science is uncovering that, in many cases, the process of forming the belief went wrong somewhere and our minds have actually tricked us into believing its true. These mental tricks may be based on good evolutionary principles: they are (or at least were at some point in our past) conducive to survival. But we may not be aware of this trickery and be entirely convinced that we formed the belief in the right way and so have knowledge. The broad term used for this phenomenon is "cognitive bias" and mental biases have a significant influence over how we form beliefs and our perception of the beliefs we form.

Wired for Bias

A cognitive bias is a typically unconscious "mental trick" our minds play that lead us to form beliefs that may be false or that are directed towards some facts and leaving out others such that these beliefs align to other things we believe, promote mental safety, or provide grounds for justifying sticking to to a set of goals that we want to achieve. Put more simply, mental biases cause us to form false beliefs about ourselves and the world. The fact that our minds do this is not necessarily intentional or malevolent and, in many cases, the outcomes of these false beliefs can be positive for the person that holds them. But epistemologists (and ethicists) argue that ends don't always justify the means when it comes to belief formation. As a general rule, we want to form true beliefs in the "right" way.

Ernest Becker in his important Pulitzer Prize winning book The Denial of Death attempts to get at the psychology behind why we form the beliefs we do. He also explores why we may be closed off to alternative viewpoints and why we tend to become apologists (defenders) of the viewpoints we hold. One of his arguments is that we as humans build an ego ( in the Freudian sense; what he calls "character armor") out of the beliefs we hold and those beliefs tend to give us meaning and they are strengthened when more people hold the same viewpoint. In a particularly searing passage, he writes:

Each person thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life's limitations and knows with authority what it means to be a man [N.B. by 'man' Becker means 'human' and uses masculine pronouns as that was common practice when he wrote the book], and he usually tries to win a following for his particular patent. Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula. . . in matters of immortality everyone has the same self-righteous conviction. The thing seems perverse because each diametrically opposed view is put forth with the same maddening certainty; and authorities who are equally unimpeachable hold opposite views! (Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death, pp. 255-256. Free Press.)

In other words, being convinced that our viewpoint is correct and winning converts to that viewpoint is how we establish ourselves as persons of meaning and significance and this inclination is deeply engrained in our psychological equipment. This not only is why biases are so prevalent but why they're difficult to detect. We are, argues Becker and others, wired towards bias. Jonathan Haidt agrees and go so far as to say that reason and logic is not only the cure but a core part of the wiring that causes the phenomenon.

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. We all need to take a cold hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is. The French cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber recently reviewed the vast research literature on motivated reasoning (in social psychology) and on the biases and errors of reasoning (in cognitive psychology). They concluded that most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people. (Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (p. 104). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.)

Biases and Belief Formation

Research in social science and psychology are uncovering myriad ways in which our minds play these mental tricks. For example, Daniel Kahneman discusses the impact emotional priming has on the formation of a subsequent idea. In one study, when participants were asked about happiness as it related to their romantic experiences, those that had a lot of dates in the past would report that they were happy about their life while those that had no dates reported being lonely, isolated, and rejected. But then when they subsequently were asked about their happiness in general, they imposed the context of their dating happiness to their happiness in general regardless of how good or bad the rest of their lives seemed to be going. If a person would have rated their overall happiness as "very happy" when asked questions about general happiness only, they might rate their overall happiness as "somewhat happy" if they were asked questions about their romantic happiness just prior and their romantic happiness was more negative than positive.

This type of priming can significantly impact how we view what is true. Being asked if we need more gun control or whether we should regulate fatty foods will change right after a local shooting right or after someone suffers a heart scare. The same situation will have two different responses by the same person depending on whether he or she was primed or not. Jonathan Haidt relates similar examples.

Psychologists now have file cabinets full of findings on 'motivated reasoning,' showing the many tricks people use to reach the conclusions they want to reach. When subjects are told that an intelligence test gave them a low score, they choose to read articles criticizing (rather than supporting) the validity of IQ tests. When people read a (fictitious) scientific study that reports a link between caffeine consumption and breast cancer, women who are heavy coffee drinkers find more flaws in the study than do men and less caffeinated women. (Haidt, p. 98)

There are many other biases that influence our thinking. When we ask the question, "what is knowledge?" this research has to be a part of how we answer the question. Biases and their influence would fall under the broad category of the justification condition we looked at earlier and the research should inform how we view how beliefs are justified. Justification is not merely the application of a philosophical formula. There are a host of psychological and social influences that are play when we seek to justify a belief and turn it into knowledge. We can also see how this research lends credence to the philosophical position of postmodernists. At the very least, even if we hold that we can get past our biases and get "more nearer to the truth," we at least have good reason to be careful about the things we assert as true and adopt a tentative stance towards the truth of our beliefs.

In a day when "fake news" is a big concern and the amount of information for which we're responsible grows each day, how we justify the beliefs we hold becomes a even more important enterprise. I'll use a final quote from Haidt to conclude this section:

And now that we all have access to search engines on our cell phones, we can call up a team of supportive scientists for almost any conclusion twenty-four hours a day. Whatever you want to believe about the causes of global warming or whether a fetus can feel pain, just Google your belief. You'll find partisan websites summarizing and sometimes distorting relevant scientific studies. Science is a smorgasbord, and Google will guide you to the study that's right for you. (Haidt, pp. 99-100)

Making Knowledge Practical

Well most of us aren't like Descartes. We actually have lives and don't want to spend time trying to figure out if we're the cruel joke of some clandestine mad scientist. But we actually do actually care about this topic whether we "know" it or not. A bit of reflection exposes just how important having a solid view of knowledge actually is and spending some focused time thinking more deeply about knowledge can actually help us get better at knowing.

Really, knowledge is a the root of many (dare I say most) challenges we face in a given day. Once you get past basic survival (though even things as basic as finding enough food and shelter involves challenges related to knowledge), we're confronted with knowledge issues on almost every front. Knowledge questions range from larger, more weighty questions like figuring out who our real friends are, what to do with our career, or how to spend our time, what politician to vote for, how to spend or invest our money, or should we be religious or not, to more mundane ones like which gear to buy for our hobby, how to solve a dispute between the kids, where to go for dinner, or which book to read in your free time. We make knowledge decisions all day, every day and some of those decisions deeply impact our lives and the lives of those around us.

So all these decisions we make about factors that effect the way we and others live are grounded in our view of knowledge-our epistemology. Unfortunately few spend enough time thinking about the root of their decisions and many make knowledge choices based on how they were raised (my mom always voted Republican so I will), what's easiest (if I don't believe in God, I'll be shunned by my friends and family), or just good, old fashioned laziness. But of all the things to spend time on, it seems thinking about how we come to know things should be at the top of the list given the central role it plays in just about everything we do.

Updated January, 2018: Removed dated material and general clean up; added section on cognitive biases.
Updated March, 2014: Removed reference to dated events; removed section on thought experiment; added section on Postmodernism; minor formatting changes

1. While many thinkers have written on cognitive biases in one form or another, Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind and Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow have done seminal work to systemize and provide hard data around how the mind operates when it comes to belief formation and biases. There is much more work to be done for sure but these books, part philosophy, part psychology, part social science, provide the foundation for further study in this area. The field of study already is large and growing so I can only provide a thumbnail sketch of the influence of how belief formation is influenced by our mind and other factors. I refer the reader to the source material on this topic for further study (see reading list below).

2. For a strategy on how we can adjust for these natural biases that our minds seem wired to create, see the Philosophy News article, "How to Argue With People". I also recommend Carol Dweck's excellent book Mindset.

For Further Reading

Epistemology: Classic Problems and Contemporary Responses (Elements of Philosophy) by Laurence BonJour. One of the better introductions to the theory of knowledge. Written at the college level, this book should be accessible for most readers but have a good philosophical dictionary on hand.

Belief, Justification, and Knowledge: An Introduction to Epistemology (Wadsworth Basic Issues in Philosophy Series) by Robert Audi. This book has been used as a text book in college courses on epistemology so may be a bit out of range for the general reader. However, it gives a good overview of many of the issues in the theory of knowledge and is a fine primer for anyone interested in the subject.

The Theory of Knowledge: Classic and Contemporary Readings by Louis Pojman. Still one of the best books for primary source material. The edited articles have helpful introductions and Pojman covers a range of sources so the reader will get a good overview from many sides of the question. Written mainly as a textbook.

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature&#160; by Steven Pinker. While not strictly a book about knowledge per se, Pinker's book is fun, accessible, and a good resource for getting an overview of some contemporary work being done mainly in the hard sciences.

The Selections From the Principles of Philosophy by René Descartes. A good place to start to hear from Descartes himself.

Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason by Russell Shorto. This book is written as a history so it's not strictly a philosophy tome. However, it gives the general reader some insight into what Descartes and his contemporaries were dealing with and is a fun read.

On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt. One get's the sense that Frankfurt was being a bit tongue-in-cheek with the small, engaging tract. It's more of a commentary on the social aspect of epistemology and worth reading for that reason alone. Makes a great gift!

On Truth by Harry Frankfurt. Like On Bullshit but on truth.

A Rulebook for Arguments by Anthony Weston. A handy reference for constructing logical arguments. This is a fine little book to have on your shelf regardless of what you do for a living.

Warrant: The Current Debate&#160; by Alvin Plantinga. Now over 25 years old, "current" in the title may seem anachronistic. Still, many of the issues Plantinga deals with are with us today and his narrative is sure to enlighten and prime the pump for further study.

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. The book to begin a study on cognitive biases.

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. A solid book that dabbles in cognitive biases but also in why people form and hold beliefs and how to start a conversation about them.

The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. A neo (or is it post?) Freudian analysis of why we do what we do. Essential reading for better understanding why we form the beliefs we do.

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck. The title reads like a self-help book but the content is actually solid and helpful for developing an approach to forming and sharing ideas.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Analyzes the question "what is knowledge" discussing how knowledge relates to belief. Explores traditional theories and cognitive biases.

# data[].attributes.headline
Pew Research Center: Religion and Public Life

# data[].attributes.subject
Pew Research Center: Religion and Public Life

# data[].attributes.body
Summary:

What Americans know about religion.

Recommendation:

Students may take the Quiz to test their religious knowledge, and read some informative articles. The whole website of the Pew Center is worth extensive exploration. Source : https://www.pewforum.org/2019/07/23/factors-linked-with-religious-knowledge/

Visit Website

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Religious affiliation is just one of several factors linked with religious knowledge. The survey shows, for example, that religious knowledge is also very closely linked with how many years of schooling a person has received. In addition, a variety of other educational traits - such as making efforts to learn about one's own religion or other religions, or taking a class about world religions - help to explain differences in religious knowledge.

Another key factor linked to religious knowledge is knowing people who belong to different religious groups: Americans with more religiously diverse social circles tend to know more about religion.

Demographic characteristics also are associated with religious knowledge. Men perform better on the survey than women, whites do better than blacks and Hispanics, and older people score higher than younger people.

This chapter examines differences in knowledge about religion first by education and then by other demographic traits and social connectedness.

More education is linked with more religious knowledge

People with higher levels of education tend to be more knowledgeable about religion. College graduates get an average of 18.2 out of 32 religious knowledge questions right, including 18% who answer 25 or more correctly. Within this group, people who have a postgraduate degree do especially well, averaging 19.3 out of 32 questions correct, including one-quarter who answer at least 25 questions right (24%).

Scores are lower among respondents with less education. Among people who have some college experience, the average number of correct answers is 14.0. Those who have a high school diploma or less education get 11.0 questions right, on average.

Americans who have taken a class about world religions (in high school or college, for example) answer 17.3 questions right, on average, compared with 12.5 among those who have not taken such a class. Most people who have taken a world religions class (57%) correctly answer more than half of the religious knowledge questions, while just 28% of those who have not taken a world religions class do as well.

The survey included several other questions that explore how Americans may have learned what they know about religion. Christians who say they regularly engage with material about their own faith - be it scripture, websites, podcasts, books, magazines or television - correctly answer more questions about the Bible and Christianity than those who do this less often (9.4 out of 14, on average, vs. 6.8). Similarly, evangelical Protestants who do things to learn about their religion at least once a month give right answers to roughly three more questions about the Bible and Christianity, on average, than other evangelical Protestants do (10.2 vs. 6.9).

And Christians who spend time learning about religions besides their own at least once a month tend to know more about world religions than do Christians who engage with material about other religions less often.

The survey also asked respondents what kind of schools they attended during their childhood. Christians who went to religious private schools tend to get more questions right about the Bible and Christianity than do those who went to either public schools or nonreligious private schools (9.4 vs. 8.0). Additionally, Christians who attended more years of Sunday school, CCD or some other form of religious education generally answer more questions about the Bible and Christianity correctly. For example, Christians who attended Sunday school or a similar program for at least seven years correctly answer an average of 9.0 of the 14 questions about Christianity and the Bible, while those who attended for three or fewer years get 7.3 questions right, on average.

Those who say they know 'a lot' about many religions answer more knowledge questions correctly

The survey sought to explore whether respondents who say they know a lot about religion actually get more religious knowledge questions right. It included a battery of questions asking respondents how much they personally know about evangelical Christianity, Catholicism, Mormonism, Judaism, Islam, atheism, Buddhism, Hinduism and mainline Protestantism - "a lot," "some," "not much" or "nothing at all." The survey shows that knowing "a lot" about many religions is associated with answering more questions right about the Bible and Christianity and world religions, as well as getting more religious knowledge questions right overall - even after religious affiliation and other demographic characteristics are taken into account.

For example, those who say they know a lot about evangelical Christianity, mainline Protestantism, Catholicism and Mormonism correctly answer more questions about the Bible and Christianity than those who do not know a lot about these religions. Those who say they know a lot about at least three of these religions correctly answer an average of 11.1 out of 14 questions about the Bible and Christianity. By comparison, those who do not know "a lot" about any of these four religions get 5.8 of the 14 questions right, on average.

The same is true for those who say they know a lot about Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. Those who say they know a lot about three or more of these groups correctly answer 8.3 out of 13 questions about world religions. However, those who do not know "a lot" about Judaism, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism answer 3.7 questions right, on average.

Overall, those who say they know a lot about at least seven of the groups correctly answer 23.0 of the 32 religious knowledge questions, on average. By comparison, those who say they know "a lot" about three or fewer groups get an average of 13.2 questions right.

Young adults display lower levels of religious knowledge

Gender, race and ethnicity, age, and marital status also are associated with differing levels of religious knowledge. For instance, Americans ages 65 and older correctly answer 16.0 questions, on average, while adults under 30 get fewer questions right (11.9). And whites get an average of 15.4 questions right, compared with 10.5 among black adults and 11.7 among Hispanics.

In addition, men get more questions right, on average, than women (15.5 vs. 13.0). And married people perform better than unmarried people (15.3 vs. 13.1).

Politically, Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican Party (14.8 questions right, on average) score slightly higher than Democrats and Democratic leaners (14.1). This is mainly because Republicans do slightly better than Democrats on the survey's questions about Christianity and the Bible (8.3 right, on average, among Republicans vs. 7.4 among Democrats). However, differences in levels of religious knowledge by party identification disappear after controlling for other factors more closely associated with religious knowledge ( see Chapter 3).

Similarly, while people living in the West (14.8) and Northeast (14.7) score higher, on average, than those who live in the South (13.6), these differences also disappear after controlling for other factors.

Americans with religiously diverse social networks answer more religious knowledge questions correctly

The survey included a set of questions that asked respondents whether they personally know someone who is an evangelical Christian, Catholic, Mormon, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, Buddhist, Hindu or mainline Protestant. Across the board, knowing someone who identifies with one of these religions is correlated with knowing more about that religion.

For instance, Americans who say they know a Jewish person are at least twice as likely as those who do not know anyone who is Jewish to answer the survey's questions about Judaism correctly. For example, more than one-third of those who know someone who is Jewish correctly answer that the Jewish Sabbath begins on Friday (36%), while only 14% of those who do not know someone who is Jewish get this question right.

Similarly, three-quarters of people who know a Muslim correctly identify Mecca as the holy city to which Muslims make a required pilgrimage (76%), and a similar share know that Ramadan is an Islamic holy month (76%). Fewer people who do not know someone who is Muslim know that Mecca is Islam's holiest city (50%) or that Ramadan is an Islamic holy month (46%).

Similar patterns exist when it comes to knowing someone who is Hindu, Buddhist or atheist, and correctly answering questions about these topics.

Overall, people who have the most religiously diverse social networks tend to answer more religious knowledge questions correctly. For instance, those who say they know people from at least seven of the nine religious groups asked about in the survey answer 19.0 questions right, on average. By comparison, those who know someone from four to six of the religious groups get 14.5 right, and respondents who know someone from three or fewer religious groups answer an average of 8.6 questions correctly.

Churchgoing Christians tend to have more knowledge of the Bible and Christianity

Does being highly engaged in one's own religion increase overall levels of religious knowledge? For Christians, the answer appears to be yes.

The survey asked respondents several questions about religious commitment, including how often they attend religious services, how important religion is in their lives, and how often they pray. Christians who are religiously observant (that is, those who attend religious services at least weekly, pray daily, or say religion is very important in their lives) earn higher scores on the survey's questions about the Bible and Christianity than Christians who do these things less often.

But on questions related to other world religions, the relationship between religious commitment and religious knowledge is less clear. For example, Christians who say religion was very important to them when they were growing up correctly answer more questions about world religions (Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism) than Christians who say religion was not too or not at all important to them as children (4.2 vs. 3.5, on average). And Christians who attend religious services most regularly correctly answer slightly more questions about world religions, on average, than do Christians who seldom or never attend religious services (4.1 and 3.8, respectively). But Christians who say religion is "very important" in their lives correctly answer fewer questions about world religions than Christians who say religion is "not too" or "not at all" important to them.

The survey included too few interviews with members of non-Christian faiths (Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and others) to permit analysis of whether their levels of involvement with their respective faiths are correlated with religious knowledge.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Religious affiliation is just one of several factors linked with religious knowledge. The survey shows, for example, that religious knowledge is also very closely linked with how many years of schooling a person has received.

# data[].attributes.body
You can drop in suggestions and feedback TO THE LIBRARIAN address in the below web link or  Email me: titiksha.goswami@dpsiedge.edu.in

# data[].attributes.body
"From Nazi to Chocolate, words play a vital role in our lives.
And each word has its own story.
But where do they come from? What do they mean? How do they change?
Some of these questions will be answered by "Words of the World" - a series of short videos presented by experts from the University of Nottingham's School of Modern Languages and Cultures."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the USA and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Words with Friends is a trademark of Zynga With Friends.

# data[].attributes.headline
A worldwide collaboration tostrengthen endangered languages

# data[].attributes.subject
A worldwide collaboration tostrengthen endangered languages

# data[].attributes.body
Use the category buttons below to easily search our resources on information, academic publications, and research concerning the world’s endangered languages! Our resources include information on anthropology, sociology, education, cognitive science, environmental science, public policy, and more and have been uploaded by users and researchers alike.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Endangered Languages Project is a collaborative online platform for sharing knowledge and resources for endangered languages. Join this global effort to conserve linguistic diversity.

# data[].attributes.headline
Language In Usehear it, speak it,understand it & use it

# data[].attributes.subject
Language In Usehear it, speak it,understand it & use it

# data[].attributes.body
This site aims to help students learn about - and teachers teach - the English language.
See The Site Map for a full list of pages and themes.
There are tasks to help work through the material, expert advice and strategies for identifying unknown texts..

# data[].attributes.body
The power of the spoken word is a concept shared by many cultures and its roots go deep into pre-literate history.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The power of the spoken word is a concept shared by many cultures. Can a word create a world?

# data[].attributes.headline
How authors from Dickens to Dr Seuss invented the words we use every day

# data[].attributes.subject
How authors from Dickens to Dr Seuss invented the words we use every day

# data[].attributes.body
The English language didn't just spring from nowhere. So who introduced such gems as 🤬, meme, nerd and butterfingers?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Charles Dickens used the term in his 1836 The Pickwick Papers (more properly called The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club): "At every bad attempt at a catch, and every failure to stop the ball, he launched his personal displeasure at the head of the devoted individual in such denunciations as 'Ah, ah!-stupid'-'Now, butter-fingers'-'Muff'- 'Humbug'-and so forth."

Originally this word meant to be decorated or covered with chintz, a calico print from India, or suggestive of a pattern in chintz. It was extended to mean unfashionable, cheap or stingy, coming from none other than Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen name George Eliot, who wrote in a letter in 1851: "The effect is chintzy and would be unbecoming."

Blend of "chuckle" and "snort", created by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass: "'O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!' He chortled in his joy." Carroll also coined the term "portmanteau word", for merging two existing words into one new word. In such blending, parts of two familiar words are yoked together (usually the first part of one word and the second part of the other) to produce a word that conveys the meanings and sound of the old ones - smog from "smoke" + "fog", and brunch from "breakfast" + "lunch". Portmanteau itself is a quaint word for suitcase, originally combining the French porter (to carry) and manteau (cloak) to make a name for a cloak-transporting suitcase designed for carrying on horseback. Lexicographer Ben Zimmer has noted that the portmanteau "remains perhaps the most popular method of new word formation in English, from slang ('chillax', 'geektastic') to business jargon ('webinar,' 'advertorial')".

Testicles in the allegorical sense, representing courage and tenacity. Imported from Spanish by Ernest Hemingway in his 1932 nonfiction bullfighting opus Death in the Afternoon: "It takes more cojones," he wrote, "to be a sportsman where death is a closer party to the game."

A word created by the novelist, biographer and former advertising copywriter William E Woodward for the process of exposing false claims. He used it in his 1923 novel Bunk, in which he also created the term debunker and debunking. Others would later debunk Woodward's biographies of George Washington and Ulysses S Grant, which attempted to debunk great figures of history but were generally dismissed as exercises in cynicism and little else.

As a metaphor applied to a person upon whom other people "wipe their boots". First used in this sense by Dickens in Great Expectations: "She asked me and Joe whether we supposed she was door-mats under our feet, and how we dared to use her so."

William Shakespeare coined this word for something that is offensive to the eye. In The Taming of the Shrew, Baptista demanded: "Doff this habit, shame to your estate, an eyesore to our solemn festival!" The term was invoked with proper acknowledgment to its coiner in 2005 when plans were unveiled to build a massive metal shed in Stratford-on-Avon as a temporary home for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. It was immediately dubbed the Rusty Shed.

A term created by Norman Mailer in 1973 for a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact, although it is not actually true; or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print. Mailer wrote in Marilyn: "Factoids ... that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority." Lately, factoid has come to mean a trivial fact. That usage makes it a contranym (also called a Janus word) in that it means both one thing and its opposite, such as cleave (to cling or to split) or sanction (to permit or to punish).

One who advocates social, political and all other rights of women equal to those of men. Created by Alexandre Dumas (fils) in 1873 as féministe, translated as feminist by G Vandenhoff and identified in his translation as a neologism: "The feminists [Vr. féministes] (excuse this neologism) say, with perfectly good intentions, too: All the evil rises from the fact that we will not allow that woman is the equal of man."

Coined by the Royal Naval Air Service sometime during the first world war, this word was made known by a children's book called The Gremlins: A Royal Air Force Story, written in 1943 by Roald Dahl. According to the story, a gremlin is a small creature that causes mechanical problems in aircraft. After 1943, gremlins were blamed by Allied aircraft personnel for various mechanical and engine problems during the second world war. The name was bestowed on a small car by American Motors, but given its association with mechanical problems, it was replaced by Spirit in 1978.

A ploy in which an attractive person, usually a woman, lures another, usually a man, into revealing information; by extension, a person employing such a ploy. The term first came into play in 1974 in novelist John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: "You see, long ago when I was a little boy I made a mistake and walked into a honey-trap."

Coined by Jeremy Bentham in the book An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation published in 1789. In the very first instance where the term appears, it is aligned with the word "jurisprudence". International jurisprudence is suggested by the author to replace the term law of nations, which he deems to be "a misnomer".

Word coined by Alice Rush McKeon, a fierce and early advocate of highway beautification ... Her 1931 book The Litterbug Family was instrumental in passing the first billboard-control law in her home state of Maryland.

The fundamental units of culture, like DNA. First coined in 1976 by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, a meme, according to one neat summation, "represents ideas, behaviours or styles that spread from person to person. It can be a trendy dance, a viral video, a new fashion, a technological tool or a catchphrase. Like viruses, memes arise, spread, mutate and die."

A small computer employing microprocessors based on a single chip. In the July 1956 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov debuted the term in a story called The Dying Night in this line: "It had become the hallmark of the scientist, much as ... the microcomputer that of the statistician."

James Fenimore Cooper's term for a man of superior strength. He first used it in 1838 in Homeward Bound: "I suppose these muscle men will not have much use for any but the oyster-knives, as I am informed they eat with their fingers." According to the OED, the use of the term to mean a man who uses force to get his way does not come into the language until 1929.

The word first appears in print in 1950 in the children's book If I Ran the Zoo by American children's writer Dr Seuss. In the book, a boy named Gerald McGrew makes a great number of delightfully extravagant claims as to what he would do if he were in charge at the zoo where, he insists, the animals housed there were boring. Among these fanciful schemes is: "And then just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And bring back an IT-KUTCH, a PREEP, and a PROO, A NERKLE, a NERD, and SEERSUCKER, too!"

The accompanying illustration for nerd shows a grumpy Seuss creature with unruly hair and sideburns, wearing a black T-shirt. For whatever reasons, it-kutch, preep, proo and nerkle have never been enshrined in any dictionary.

Originally a fictional university introduced in William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Pendennis: "'Rough and ready, your chum seems,' the Major said. 'Somewhat different from your dandy friends at Oxbridge.'" Later, it was taken as a composite for Oxford and Cambridge as a way of distinguishing those two universities from other British universities.

For book 1 of his epic poem Paradise Lost, published in 1667, John Milton invented Pandemonium - from the Greek pan (all), and daimon (evil spirit), literally "a place for all the demons" - or, as Milton first expressed in the poem: "A solemn Councel forthwith to be held At Pandæmonium, the high Capital Of Satan and his Peers." Later in the work he calls it the "citie and proud seat of Lucifer". By the end of the century, Pandemonium had become a synonym not just for hell, but, because the devils created a lot of noise, uproar and tumult. In 1828, Edward Bulwer-Lytton applied it to a common location: "We found ourselves in that dreary pandaemonium ... a Gin-shop." Today, the term is applied to any scene of disarray, confusion or even heightened activity as in the headline: iPad pandemonium.

No one had an English word for someone who goes about on foot until 1791, when William Wordsworth coined the noun.

Coinage of Czech writer Karel Čapek's in his 1921 work R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). Čapek took the Czech term for "serf labor" and adopted it to the animatrons that we think of today. Asimov invented the words robotic and robotics after Čapek, in 1941.

General term for a misfit. From the name for a cartoon character created for Yank magazine by American cartoonist George Baker in 1942 for a hapless and blundering army private.

A timid person; a coward. Introduced in 1933 by US author Dorothy Parker in a short story The Waltz with this line: "Oh, yes, do let's dance together. It's so nice to meet a man who isn't scaredy-cat about catching my beri-beri."

The word was coined in 1840 by the Reverend William Whewell in his book The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, which contained a 70-page section on the Language of Science. In it he discusses how the new words of science should be constructed. He then coins the universally accepted term physicist, remarking that the existing term physician cannot be used in that sense. He then moves on to the larger concept. "We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a scientist." The word that scientist replaced was philosopher. An account of this coinage in Word Study, a newsletter published by Merriam-Webster in 1948, noted: "Few deliberately invented words have gained such wide currency, and many people will be surprised to learn that it is just over a century old."

A wedding made in haste or under duress by reason of the bride's pregnancy. The term and the concept were introduced in print by Sinclair Lewis in 1927 in his novel Elmer Gantry: "There were, in those parts and those days, not infrequent ceremonies known as 'shotgun weddings.'"

To suffer a great betrayal; to be destroyed by the bad faith of another, especially one who you trusted. The exact term and the action from which the metaphor derives is from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which describes in heartrending detail the tragic breakup of black Kentucky families who were actually sold to plantations farther down the Mississippi river where conditions were harsher. The term existed before Stowe used it, but she infused it with a sense of tragedy and betrayal.

A miserly person; one who keeps his wad of paper money tightly rolled. This word first appears in 1900 in George Ade's More Fables, a book in which familiar stories were told in slang.

The word that supplanted mid-1930s coinage unlaydownable after Raymond Chandler said of a book in 1947, "I found it absolutely ... unputdownable."

Term coined by Ford Madox Ford for a not-yet-complete artistic, theatrical or musical work, often made available for public viewing or listening. Ford applied it for snippets of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which he published as the editor of the Transatlantic Review. (The term is now used to describe young athletes who are raw but talented.)

In 1971, Dr Wayne E Oates wrote Confessions of a Workaholic: The Facts about Work Addiction, adding a word to the lexicon of the English language. His concept was that work can become an addiction, akin to alcoholism. Oates remarked in an interview at the time the book was published that the work addict "drops out of the human community" in a drive for peak performance. Oates's use of -aholic opened the drawbridge for a host of new words implying addictions. Although chocoholic and cakeaholic were already in use, in the wake of workaholic, came shopaholics, computerholics and so on.
Extracted from Authorisms: Words Wrought by Authors by Paul Dickson, published by Bloomsbury at £14.99 on 3 July 2014. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846

This article was amended on 19 June 2014. An earlier version referred to James Joyce's Ulysses instead of Finnegans Wake, and misspelled "cleave" as "cleve".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How authors from Dickens to Dr Seuss invented the words we use every day

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The English language didn't just spring from nowhere. So who introduced such gems as cojones, meme, nerd and butterfingers, asks Paul Dickson

# data[].attributes.headline
Understanding Body Language & The Signals...

# data[].attributes.subject
Understanding Body Language & The Signals...

# data[].attributes.body
Body language is one our most subtle, yet important modes of communication. Understanding body language, or non-verbal communication, enables us to positively develop our communication style, and improve our relationships with people around us.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Body language is an important part of communication. We discuss unspoken communication and what it might mean.

# data[].attributes.body
This site aims to help students learn about - and teachers teach - the English language.
See The Site Map for a full list of pages and themes.
There are tasks to help work through the material, expert advice and strategies for identifying unknown texts..

# data[].attributes.body
It’s hard to find clarity in a sea of over 7,000 languages. With Ethnologue you can get the details right – and make wise decisions for your business, clients, or research.

# data[].attributes.headline
How the language you speak changes your view of the world

# data[].attributes.subject
How the language you speak changes your view of the world

# data[].attributes.body
Bilinguals get all the perks. Better job prospects, a cognitive boost and even protection against dementia.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
German speakers think more about their goals. German speaking via FuzzBones/www.shutterstock.com

Bilinguals get all the perks. Better job prospects, a cognitive boost and even protection against dementia. Now new research shows that they can also view the world in different ways depending on the specific language they are operating in.

The past 15 years have witnessed an overwhelming amount of research on the bilingual mind, with the majority of the evidence pointing to the tangible advantages of using more than one language. Going back and forth between languages appears to be a kind of brain training, pushing your brain to be flexible.

Just as regular exercise gives your body some biological benefits, mentally controlling two or more languages gives your brain cognitive benefits. This mental flexibility pays big dividends especially later in life: the typical signs of cognitive ageing occur later in bilinguals - and the onset of age-related degenerative disorders such as dementia or Alzheimer's are delayed in bilinguals by up to five years.

Germans know where they're going

In research we recently published in Psychological Science, we studied German-English bilinguals and monolinguals to find out how different language patterns affected how they reacted in experiments.

We showed German-English bilinguals video clips of events with a motion in them, such as a woman walking towards a car or a man cycling towards the supermarket and then asked them to describe the scenes.

When you give a scene like that to a monolingual German speaker they will tend to describe the action but also the goal of the action. So they would tend to say "A woman walks towards her car" or "a man cycles towards the supermarket". English monolingual speakers would simply describe those scenes as "A woman is walking" or "a man is cycling", without mentioning the goal of the action.

The worldview assumed by German speakers is a holistic one - they tend to look at the event as a whole - whereas English speakers tend to zoom in on the event and focus only on the action.

The linguistic basis of this tendency appears to be rooted in the way different grammatical tool kits situated actions in time. English requires its speakers to grammatically mark events that are ongoing, by obligatorily applying the -ing morpheme: "I am playing the piano and I cannot come to the phone" or "I was playing the piano when the phone rang". German doesn't have this feature.

Research with second language users shows a relationship between linguistic proficiency in such grammatical constructions and the frequency with which speakers mention the goals of events.

In our study we also found that these cross-linguistic differences extend beyond language usage itself, to nonverbal categorisation of events. We asked English and German monolinguals to watch a series of video clips that showed people walking, biking, running, or driving. In each set of three videos, we asked subjects to decide whether a scene with an ambiguous goal (a woman walks down a road toward a parked car) was more similar to a clearly goal-oriented scene (a woman walks into a building) or a scene with no goal (a woman walks down a country lane).

German monolinguals matched ambiguous scenes with goal-oriented scenes more frequently than English monolinguals did. This difference mirrors the one found for language usage: German speakers are more likely to focus on possible outcomes of people's actions, but English speakers pay more attention to the action itself.

Switch languages, change perspective

When it came to bilingual speakers, they seemed to switch between these perspectives based on the language context they were given the task in. We found that Germans fluent in English were just as goal-focused as any other native speaker when tested in German in their home country. But a similar group of German-English bilinguals tested in English in the United Kingdom were just as action-focused as native English speakers.

In another group of German-English bilinguals, we kept one language in the forefront of their minds during the video-matching task by making participants repeat strings of numbers out loud in either English or German. Distracting one language seemed to automatically bring the influence of the other language to the fore.

When we "blocked" English, the bilinguals acted like typical Germans and saw ambiguous videos as more goal-oriented. With German blocked, bilingual subjects acted like English speakers and matched ambiguous and open-ended scenes. When we surprised subjects by switching the language of the distracting numbers halfway through the experiment, the subjects' focus on goals versus process switched right along with it.

These findings are in line with other research showing distinct behaviour in bilinguals depending on the language of operation. Israeli Arabs are more likely to associate Arab names such as Ahmed and Samir with positive words in an Arabic language context than in a Hebrew one, for example.

People self-report that they feel like a different person when using their different languages and that expressing certain emotions carries different emotional resonance depending on the language they are using.

When judging risk, bilinguals also tend to make more rational economic decisions in a second language. In contrast to one's first language, it tends to lack the deep-seated, misleading affective biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived. So the language you speak in really can affect the way you think.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How the language you speak changes your view of the world

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Bilinguals think differently depending on the language they're operating in.

# data[].attributes.body
How much could you know about the world if you had no language or means of communicating with other people?

How easy is it to misunderstand the body language of someone from a different culture?

?? Do you think animals have language ?

?? Is it possible to think without language? How does language facilitate, extend, direct or limit thinking?

?? To what extent is your use of language accompanied by images?  Does every word conjure up an image or only some of them?

?? Do you think communication would be improved if we got rid of vague words, or do you think they sometimes serve a useful purpose?

?? To what extent can punctuation help to reduce the ambiguity of a sentence?

?? In what ways does learning a second language contribute to, and expand, your knowledge of the world? Give some examples of words in your own language, or your second language, which have no precise English equivalent.

?? What are the main advantages and disadvantages of classifying people according to their nationality?

?? If you are fluent in more than one language, to what extent do you think differently when you switch between languages?

??  What kinds of experiences elude language altogether? Do we have alternative means of communication?

# data[].attributes.body
History is littered with animals who have "communicated" with humans, but as work with dolphins shows it is difficult to strike up a two-way conversation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"What's that Flipper? The treasure is over there?" So went a typical plotline for the popular TV series featuring the cute, bottlenosed dolphin who could communicate with his human guardians, and who - in the time-honoured fashion - used his animal powers to apprehend criminals.

The idea that animals like Flipper can communicate with humans is not just the preserve of the small and big screen. History is littered with celebrity animals who have communicated with human scientists, with varying degrees of success. Many apes, including Washoe and Nim the chimps, and Kanzi the bonobo, have learned to communicate by using sign language or symbols on a keyboard. Alex, an African grey parrot learned over 100 English words, which he could use and combine appropriately; his poignant last words to Irene Pepperberg, his scientist handler, were "You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow."

Dolphins hold a particular fascination; we are captivated by their intelligence and beauty, and swimming with dolphins features regularly on lists of things to do before you die. Denise Herzing has a lifetime of such experiences. For the last 27 years, she has been swimming with a group of Atlantic spotted dolphins in Florida as part of the Wild Dolphin Project. She can identify every individual and they, in turn, seem to trust and recognise her. It is a solid foundation for the boldest attempt yet to talk with dolphins.
One-way chat
"Talk" is tricky to define. A SeaWorld trainer who prompts a dolphin to jump for fish is arguably communicating with it. But such simple one-way interactions are a far cry from the conversational world of Dr Doolittle. Here, the dolphin responds, but says nothing intelligible back. Herzing's vision is much more ambitious - she wants to establish two-way communication with her dolphins, with both species exchanging and understanding information.

The idea of talking to dolphins has a long and chequered history. It was widely publicised in the 1960s by John Lilly, who argued that dolphins have such large brains that they must be extremely intelligent and have a natural language. All we had to do was to "crack the code". Much of Lilly's work was highly questionable. He once flooded a house to keep a captive dolphin, instigated failed attempts to teach them spoken English, and even gave the animals LSD (while taking the drug himself). But there is no denying his influence in popularising the idea of two-way dolphin communication. "He said that in a few years, we will have established complex dialogue with them," says Justin Gregg from the Dolphin Communication Project. "And he was saying that every few years."

Lilly was right about dolphin intelligence, but not dolphin language. A true language involves small elements that combine into larger chains, to convey complex, and sometimes abstract, information. And there is no good evidence that dolphins have that, despite their rich repertoire of whistles and clicks.
Little less conversation
Wild dolphin communication is hard to study. They are fast-moving and hard to follow. They travel in groups, making it hard to assign any call to a specific individual. And they communicate at frequencies beyond what humans can hear. Despite these challenges, there is some evidence that dolphins use sounds to represent concepts. Each individual has its own "signature whistle" which might act like a name. Developed in the first year of life, dolphins use these whistles as badges of identity, and may modulate them to reflect motivation and mood. This year, a study showed that when wild dolphins meet, one member of each group exchanges signature whistles.

But beyond this, dolphin chat is still largely mysterious. "To communicate with dolphins, we need to understand how they communicate with each other in the natural world," says psychologist Stan Kuczaj at the University of Southern Mississippi. "We still don't know basic things like what the units of dolphin communication are. Is a whistle the equivalent of a "word" or a "short sentence"? We don't know."

We may not be able to understand them yet, but we know that dolphins can learn to understand us. In the 1970s, Louis Herman taught an invented sign language, complete with basic syntax, to a bottlenose dolphin called Akeakamai. For example, if he made the gestures for "person surfboard fetch", Akeakamai would bring the board to him, while "surfboard person fetch" would prompt her to carry the person to the board. His experiments showed that dolphins could understand hundreds of words, and how those words could be combined using grammatical rules.
What's my motivation?
Herman's work was groundbreaking, but this was still one-way communication. It focused on comprehension, not conversation. In the 1980s, Diana Reiss had more luck by showing that dolphins could use underwater keyboards to make basic requests. When they prodded keys with their snouts, a whistle would play and Reiss gave a reward like a ball. Eventually, the dolphins used the artificial whistles to ask for the associated rewards.

But as conversations go, these were shallow ones. "The dolphins were only really interested in communicating about needs that they had, like a tool they needed or a fish they wanted," says Kuczaj, who was involved in a similar project at DisneyWorld's EPCOT Center. "We hoped they would also comment on other things going on in the aquarium but they didn't."

It is difficult persuading dolphins to learn some arbitrary signals, like a whistle signifying a ball, and then use them in a social context, admits Gregg. "They don't seem to run with it the same way that chimps or bonobos have. The big stumbling block is motivation. Dolphins don't seem to care."

Herzing disagrees. She notes that captive animals, which often lack stimulation, will respond to systems like the underwater keyboards. She thinks that these experiments disappointed because they were cumbersome. "The dolphins swim very fast and went to where they were requested, but humans are very slow in the water. There wasn't enough real-time interaction."
Chat line
Herzing is trying to solve that problem with Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT) - a lighter, portable version of the underwater keyboards. It consists of a small phone-sized computer, strapped to a diver's chest and connected to two underwater recorders, or hydrophones. The computer will detect and differentiate dolphin sounds, including the ultrasonic ones we cannot hear, and use flashing lights to tell the diver which animal made the call.

The CHAT device can also play artificial calls, allowing Herzing to coin dolphin-esque "words" for things that are relevant to them, like "seaweed" or "wave-surfing". She hopes the dolphins will mimic the artificial whistles, and use them voluntarily. By working with wild animals, and focusing on objects in their natural environment, rather than balls or hoops, Herzing hopes to pique their interest.

Herzing emphasises that her device is not a translator. It will not act as a dolphin-human Rosetta stone. Instead, she wants both species create a joint form of communication that they are both invested in. She hopes that CHAT will tap into the "natural propensity" that dolphins have "for creating common information when they have to interact". For example, in Costa Rica, distantly related bottlenose and Guyana dolphins will adopt a shared collection of sounds when they come together, using sounds that they don't use when apart.

As with past projects, all of this depends on whether the dolphins play along. Kuczaj says, "It's a remarkable challenge because she is working with wild dolphins so they've got the option to participate or not." Here, Herzing has an edge, since the animals know her, and vice versa. "We've been observing them underwater every summer since 1985," she says. "I know the individuals personally - their personalities and relationships. We've got a pretty good handle on what they'd be interested in." Perhaps this combination of cutting-edge technology and old-school fieldwork will finally produce the conversations that have eluded scientists for so long.
If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
History is littered with animals who have "communicated" with humans, but as work with dolphins shows it is difficult to strike up a two-way conversation.

# data[].attributes.body
Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Does Your Language Shape How You Think? (Published 2010)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The idea that your mother tongue shapes your experience of the world may be true after all.

# data[].attributes.body
'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own internet slang. But is the web changing language and is everyone up to speed?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own internet slang. But is the web changing language and is everyone up to speed?

In April 2010 the informal online banter of the internet-savvy collided with the traditional and austere language of the court room.

Christopher Poole, founder of anarchic image message board 4Chan, had been called to testify during the trial of the man accused of hacking into US politician Sarah Palin's e-mail account.

During the questioning he was asked to define a catalogue of internet slang that would be familiar to many online, but which was seemingly lost on the lawyers.

At one point during the exchange, Mr Poole was asked to define "rickrolling".

"Rickroll is a meme or internet kind of trend that started on 4chan where users - it's basically a bait and switch. Users link you to a video of Rick Astley performing Never Gonna Give You Up," said Mr Poole.

"And the term "rickroll" - you said it tries to make people go to a site where they think it is going be one thing, but it is a video of Rick Astley, right?," asked the lawyer.

"He was some kind of singer?"

The internet prank was just one of several terms including "lurker", "troll" and "caps" that Mr Poole was asked to explain to a seemingly baffled court.

But that is hardly a surprise, according to David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor, who says that new colloquialisms spread like wildfire amongst groups on the net.

"The internet is an amazing medium for languages," he told BBC News.

"Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly."

People using word play to form groups and impress their peers is a fairly traditional activity, he added.

"It's like any badge of ability, if you go to a local skatepark you see kids whose expertise is making a skateboard do wonderful things.

"Online you show how brilliant you are by manipulating the language of the internet."

One example of this is evident in Ukraine, where a written variation of the national tongue has sprung up on internet blogs and message boards called "padronkavskiy zhargon" - in which words are spelled out phonetically.

It is often used to voice disapproval or anger towards another commentator, says Svitlana Pyrkalo, a producer at the BBC World Service Ukrainian Service.

"Computer slang is developing pretty fast in Ukraine," she said.

The Mac and Linux communities even have their own word for people who prefer Microsoft Windows - віндузятники (vinduzyatnyky literally means "Windowers" but the "nyky" ending makes it derogatory).

"There are some original words with an unmistakably Ukrainian flavour," said Ms Pyrkalo.

The dreaded force-quit process of pressing 'Control, Alt, Delete' is known as Дуля (dulya).

"A dulya is an old-fashioned Ukrainian gesture using two fingers and a thumb - something similar to giving a finger in Anglo-Saxon cultures," she said.

"And you need three fingers to press the buttons. So it's like telling somebody (a computer in this case) to get lost."

For English speakers there are cult websites devoted to cult dialects - "LOLcat" - a phonetic and deliberately grammatically incorrect caption that accompanies a picture of a cat, and "Leetspeak" in which some letters are replaced by numbers which stem from programming code.

"There are about a dozen of these games cooked up by a crowd of geeks who, like anybody, play language games," said Professor Crystal.

"They are all clever little developments used by a very small number of people - thousands rather than millions. They are fashionable at the moment but will they be around in 50 years' time? I would be very surprised."

For him, the efforts of those fluent in online tongues is admirable.

"They might not be reading Shakespeare and Dickens but they are reading and cooking up these amazing little games - and showing that they are very creative. I'm quite impressed with these movements."

One language change that has definitely been overhyped is so-called text speak, a mixture of often vowel-free abbreviations and acronyms, says Prof Crystal.

"People say that text messaging is a new language and that people are filling texts with abbreviations - but when you actually analyse it you find they're not," he said.

In fact only 10% of the words in an average text are not written in full, he added.

They may be in the minority but acronyms seem to anger as many people as they delight.

Stephen Fry once blasted the acronym CCTV (closed circuit television) for being "such a bland, clumsy, rythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word".

But his inelegant group of letters is one of many acronyms to earn a place in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

The secret of their success is their longevity.

"We need evidence that people are using a word over a period of time," said Fiona McPherson, senior editor in the new words group at the OED.

She says the group looks for evidence that a word has been in use for at least five years before it can earn its place in the dictionary.

Such evidence comes in the form of correspondence from the public and trawling through dated material to find out when a term first started appearing.

Hence TMI (Too Much Information) and WTF (you may wish to look that one up for yourself) are in, while OMG (Oh My God) has yet to be included in the quarterly dictionary updates.

"Some people get quite exercised and say, 'do these things belong in our language?'," said Ms McPherson.

"But maybe this has always happened. TTFN [ta ta for now] is from the ITMA (It's That Man Again) radio series in the 1940s."

There is no doubt that technology has had a "significant impact" on language in the last 10 years, says Ms McPherson.

Some entirely new words like the verb 'to google', or look something up on a search engine, and the noun 'app', used to describe programmes for smartphones (not yet in the OED), have either been recently invented or come into popular use.

But the hijacking of existing words and phrases is more common.

Ms McPherson points out that the phrase "social networking" debuted in the OED in 1973. Its definition - "the use or establishment of social networks or connections" - has only comparatively recently been linked to internet-based activities.

"These are words that have arisen out of the phenomenon rather than being technology words themselves," she added.

"Wireless in the 1950s meant a radio. It's very rare to talk about a radio now as a wireless, unless you're of a particular generation or trying to be ironic. The word has taken on a whole new significance."

For Prof Crystal it is still too early to fully evaluate the impact of technology on language.

"The whole phenomenon is very recent - the entire technology we're talking about is only 20 years old as far as the popular mind is concerned."

Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to a word is that it becomes too mainstream, he argues.

"Remember a few years ago, West Indians started talking about 'bling'. Then the white middle classes started talking about it and they stopped using it.

"That's typical of slang - it happens with internet slang as well."

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and some countries are developing their own internet slang. But is everyone up to speed?

# data[].attributes.body
A new study looks at what happens when a language doesn't have words for numbers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A new study looks at what happens when a language doesn't have words for numbers

By Joshua Hartshorne

My seventh-grade English teacher exhorted us to study vocabulary with the following: "We think in words. The more words you know, the more thoughts you can have." This compound notion that language allows you to have ideas otherwise un-haveable, and that by extension people who own different words live in different conceptual worlds -- called "Whorfianism" after its academic evangelist, Benjamin Lee Whorf -- is so pervasive in modern thought as to be unremarkable.

Eskimos, as is commonly reported, have myriads of words for snow, affecting how they perceive frozen percipitation. A popular book on English notes that, unlike English, "French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition ... and knowledge that results from understanding." Politicians try to win the rhetorical battle ("pro-life" vs. "anti-abortion"; "estate tax" vs. "death tax") in order to gain the political advantage.

For all its social success, Whorfianism has fared less well scientifically. Careful consideration of the examples above shows why. Try calling dry snow "dax" and wet snow "blicket," and see if you notice a change in how you think about snow. I didn't. The English book's statement assumes that if you don't have a word for something, you can't talk about it ... a claim that the sentence proves false. Finally, calling the law of October 26, 2001 the "USA Patriot Act" may have done as much to stain the word "patriot" as increase enthusiasm for the law.

Oh, and Eskimos don't have all that many words for snow.

In fact, scientists have had so much difficulty demonstrating that language affects thought that in 1994 renown psychologist Steven Pinker called Whorfianism dead. Since then, Whorfianism has undergone a small resurgence. For instance, Lera Boroditsky and colleagues found that speakers of Russian, which treats light blue and dark blue as primary colors, are faster to categorize shades of blue.

While fascinating and important work, these and other similar results are a bit short of showing that "the more words you know, the more thoughts you can have." The recent study that comes closest is an investigation of number.

Although number words and counting are a fixture of life in most cultures from the time we are old enough to play hide-and-go-seek, some languages have only a handful of number words. In a paper published in 2008, MIT cognitive neuroscientist Michael Frank and colleagues demonstrated that Pirahã, a language spoken by a small Amazonian community, has no number words at all. The research team simply asked Pirahã speakers to count different numbers of batteries, nuts and other common objects. Rather than having a word consistently used to describe "one X" a different word for "two Xs" and yet another word for "three Xs," the Pirahã used hói to describe a small number of objects, hoí to describe a slightly larger number, and baágiso for an even larger number. Basically, these words mean "around one," "some" and "many."

The lack of number words had a profound and surprising effect on what the Pirahã could do. In a series of experiments, the researchers presented Pirahã participants with some number of spools of thread. The participants' task was simply to give the researcher the same number of balloons. If the participants were allowed to line up the balloons next to the spools of thread one-by-one, they did fine. But if they weren't allowed this crutch -- for instance, if the spools of thread were dropped into a bucket one at a time, and then the participant had to produce the same number of balloons -- they failed. Although they were generally able to stay in the ballpark -- if a lot of spools went into the bucket, they produced a lot of balloons; a small number of spools, a small number of balloons -- their responses were basically educated guesses.

Could it be that the Pirahã not understand the concept of "same amount"? That's unlikely. When allowed to match the balloons to spools one-by-one, they succeeded in the task. Instead, it seems that they failed to give the same number of balloons only when they had to rely on memory.

This actually makes a lot of sense. Try to imagine exactly seventeen balloons in your head, but without counting them. It's impossible. Decades of research have shown that people can tell the difference between one object and two or between three objects and four without counting, but such fine distinctions with larger numbers like seventeen versus eighteen requires counting. You wouldn't match seventeen balloons to seventeen spools by sight alone. You would count the spools and then count out the same number of balloons.

But the Pirahã can't count. They don't have number words.

This suggests a different way of thinking about the influence of language on thought: words are very handy mnemonics. We may not be able to remember what seventeen spools looks like, but we can remember the word seventeen. In his landmark The Language of Thought, philosopher Jerry Fodor argued that many words work like acronyms. French students use the acronym bans to remember which adjectives go before nouns ("Beauty, Age, Number, Goodneess, and Size"). Similarly, sometimes its easier to remember a word (calculus, Estonia) than what the word stands for. We use the word, knowing that should it becomes necessary, we can search through our minds -- or an encyclopedia -- and pull up the relevant information (how to calculate an integral; Estonia's population, capital and location on a map). Numbers, it seems, work the same way.

I don't know whether my seventh-grade English teacher would be disappointed. Do more words mean more thoughts? Probably not. But more words do make it easier to remember those thoughts -- and sometimes that's just as important.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A new study looks at what happens when a language doesn't have words for numbers

# data[].attributes.body
Kevin really got me thinking about the hidden forces that run our world, and the unintended consequences we create when we rely too heavily on algorithms to make decisions for us. It's a cautionary tale, but an important one.

# data[].attributes.body
The ability to identify logical fallacies in the arguments of others, and to avoid them in one’s own arguments, is both valuable and increasingly rare.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
You are here: Logical Fallacies Logical Fallacies An Encyclopedia […]

# data[].attributes.headline
Critical Thinking Part 1: A Valuable Argument

# data[].attributes.subject
Critical Thinking Part 1: A Valuable Argument

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Critical Thinking Part 1: A Valuable Argument

# data[].attributes.body
An Eskimo hunter once saw a polar bear far off across flat ice, where he couldnít stalk it without being seen.  But he knew an old technique of mimicking a seal.  He lay down in plain sight, conspicuous in his dark parka and pants, then lifted and dropped his head like a seal, scratched the ice and imitated flippers with his hands.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When an elder dies, a library burns. Traditional Knowledge Systems in the Arctic

An Eskimo hunter once saw a polar bear far off across flat ice, where he couldnt stalk it without being seen. But he knew an old technique of mimicking a seal. He lay down in plain sight, conspicuous in his dark parka and pants, then lifted and dropped his head like a seal, scratched the ice and imitated flippers with his hands. The bear mistook his pursuer for prey. Each time the hunter lifted his head the animal kept still; whenever the hunter slept, the bear crept closer. When it came near enough, a gunshot pierced the snowy silence. That night, polar bear meat was shared among the villagers.

A traditional hunter plumbs the depth of his intellect - his capacity to manipulate complex knowledge. But he also delves into his animal nature, drawing from intuitions of sense and body and heart; feeling the winds touch, listening for the tick of moving ice, peering from crannies, hiding himself as if he were the hunted. He moves in a world of eyes, where everything watches - the bear, the seal, the wind, the moon and stars, the drifting ice, the silent waters below. He is beholden to powers greater than his own.
What is traditional knowledge?
An understanding of traditional knowledge and how it differs from non-indigenous knowledge is an important basis for determining how to use it. Knowing what it contains and how it is acquired and held is fundamental to being able to make good use of the knowledge and to encourage all parties to be aware of the added value its use will bring.

The Director General of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Mayor, 1994) defines traditional knowledge:

The indigenous people of the world possess an immense knowledge of their environments, based on centuries of living close to nature. Living in and from the richness and variety of complex ecosystems, they have an understanding of the properties of plants and animals, the functioning of ecosystems and the techniques for using and managing them that is particular and often detailed. In rural communities in developing countries, locally occurring species are relied on for many - sometimes all - foods, medicines, fuel, building materials and other products. Equally, peoples knowledge and perceptions of the environment, and their relationships with it, are often important elements of cultural identity.

Most indigenous people have traditional songs, stories, legends, dreams, methods and practices as means of transmitting specific human elements of traditional knowledge. Sometimes it is preserved in artifacts handed from father to son or mother to daughter. In indigenous knowledge systems, there is usually no real separation between secular and sacred knowledge and practice - they are one and the same. In virtually all of these systems, knowledge is transmitted directly from individual to individual.

How do Native people define traditional knowledge?

It is practical common sense based on teachings and experiences passed on from generation to generation.

It is knowing the country. It covers knowledge of the environment - snow, ice, weather, resources - and the relationships between things.

It is holistic. It cannot be compartmentalized and cannot be separated from the people who hold it. It is rooted in the spiritual health, culture and language of the people. It is a way of life.

Traditional knowledge is an authority system. It sets out the rules governing the use of resources - respect, an obligation to share. It is dynamic, cumulative and stable. It is truth.

Traditional knowledge is a way of life -wisdom is using traditional knowledge in good ways. It is using the heart and the head together. It comes from the spirit in order to survive.

It gives credibility to the people.

Comparisons between indigenous and scientific knowledge
The temptation to compare scientific and traditional knowledge comes from collecting traditional knowledge without the contextual elements. For example, Native people have a far richer and more subtle understanding of the characteristics of ice and snow than do non-indigenous people. In fact, some Native classification is available only by virtue of its relationship to human activities and feelings. These comparisons sometimes incorrectly lead science practitioners to trivialize traditional understanding.

Whereas scientific practice generally excludes the humanistic perspective, traditional understanding assumes a holistic view including language, culture, practice, spirituality, mythology, customs and even the social organization of the local communities.

For many indigenous people today, the communication of traditional knowledge is hampered by competition from other cultures that capture the imagination of the young. They are bombarded by technology that teaches them non-indigenous ways and limits the capacity of elders to pass on traditional knowledge to the young. As the elders die, the full richness of tradition is diminished, because some of it has not been passed on and so is lost. It is important therefore to find ways of preserving this knowledge. One of the most effective ways to embody it in the decisions about projects that affect the communities.

Too often, traditional knowledge is incorrectly made parallel only to science. Science is but a small part of non-indigenous knowledge. Similarly, to suggest that traditional knowledge is only the equivalent of science is to diminish incorrectly the strength and breadth of traditional knowledge. Thus, the suggestion that traditional knowledge should be characterized as traditional science diminishes its breadth and value.

While it is not appropriate to compare scientific and traditional knowledge as equivalents, the use of traditional knowledge in scientific knowledge in science means that the two knowledge bases will be in contact with each other as practitioners attempt to weave the two together.

To see a comparison table of traditional and scientific knowledge styles and uses, click HERE.

To view or go to the Traditional Knowledge & Native Foods Database (website), click HERE.
Role of women and children in traditional knowledge
Traditional knowledge that is held by women needs special consideration for a number of reasons. Native women, as the primary harvesters of medicinal plants, seed stocks and small game, are keepers of the knowledge about significant spheres of biodiversity in their own right, and as such, are the only ones able to identify the environmental indicators of ecological health in those spheres.

Perhaps even more central in importance is the fact that women share with men the responsibility for stewardship of values in their societies. They feel a keen responsibility to future generations for action undertaken today that affect the world in which we all live and for their descendants. It is women, for the most part, who transmit to the next generation these values as part of their stewardship role. Their multi-generational perspective must be taken into account.
Back to Top The Structure of Local Systems of Native Knowledge Traditional and nontraditional knowledge
Many Natives hold traditional knowledge handed down to them from previous generations through oral tradition. This traditional knowledge is the cornerstone of Native cultural identity and survival as a people. Some aspects of traditional knowledge are common and shared throughout the Arctic. Other aspects are more localized and specific to certain communities, families and even individuals.

However, Native knowledge is not just traditional. Natives also possess knowledge that does not have its origin in traditional lifestyles, spirituality, philosophy, social relations, customs, cultural values, etc. In other words, Natives have obtained an extensive body of nontraditional knowledge through direct exposure (e.g. cultural interaction and formal schooling) and indirect exposure (e.g. television and other media) to non-Native values, attitudes, ways of thinking, philosophies, institutions, etc. Together, these two sources of knowledge, traditional and nontraditional, articulate to produce a frame of understanding and validation that give meaning to the world around them.

In fact, it can be argued that all Native knowledge, traditional and otherwise, is contemporary. It has given meaning from a frame of reference that is continually being updated and revised. Viewing native knowledge as traditional and static invites denial of the relevance and efficacy of the application of Native knowledge to contemporary issues and problems. In other words, Native sometimes feel that the use of traditional knowledge to denote all that they know imposes a way of life on them that is shackled to the past and does not allow them to change.
Ecological and non-ecological knowledge
Many Natives possess ecological knowledge that is traditional in nature. They depend extensively on this knowledge for maintaining their relationship with animals and providing food for their families. But they have also gained extensive ecological knowledge from their own experiences with the land and other sources (e.g. formal schooling and contact with biologists). In fact, their experiences often validate, inform and give new meaning and value to traditional knowledge. Thus, Native ecological knowledge is composed of both traditional knowledge and experiential knowledge (i.e. knowledge gained through personal experience).
Native systems of local knowledge
Local knowledge systems are based on the shared experiences, customs, values, traditions, lifestyles, social interactions, ideological orientations and spiritual beliefs specific to Native communities. These are forever evolving as new knowledge is obtained or generated.

But Native knowledge is more than the sum of its parts. These parts articulate or merge to form unique, dynamic and evolving systems of local knowledge. The richness and complexity of local knowledge systems derive principally from the fact that they incorporate, and are often the resolution of, two very different world views. A researcher cannot separate out any one aspect or component of Native knowledge (e.g. traditional ecological knowledge) to the exclusion of any other without misinterpreting it as Natives see and understand it. This is why Native want control over how their knowledge is collected, interpreted and used.
Maintaining ownership and control of traditional knowledge
Natives own the intellectual property rights to their traditional knowledge, even if much of it has yet to be written down. No one has the right to document or use traditional knowledge without permission. And, when their knowledge is recorded by others, Natives have the right to insist that it not be taken out of context or misrepresented. When traditional knowledge is cited by others, Natives also have the right to insist that the source of this knowledge be properly acknowledged. In other words, Native have the rights to own and control access to their traditional knowledge.

Native possess both collective and individual traditional knowledge. Most traditional knowledge is shared among community members. But some traditional knowledge may be specific to an individual. For example, some elders and resource-users will, because of different life experiences, be the only source of certain types of traditional knowledge.

It remains up to the individual to decide whether s/he wishes to share his/her knowledge with outside parties. However, we recognize that there is an urgent need to assume and maintain control over how local and traditional knowledge is collected, interpreted and used by non-local interests. Thus, we are in the process of formally taking responsibility for, and control of, any traditional knowledge studies to be carried out in Native communities. This is not to suggest that biologists and other researchers are not welcomed to participate in traditional knowledge research. Rather, by having this type of research controlled locally, it will ensure that:

Community needs and interests will be served first, and

The real contributions of local and traditional knowledge will have the potential to be realized.

Traditional knowledge incorporates knowledge of ecosystem relationships and a code of ethics governing appropriate use of the environment. This code includes rules and conventions promoting desirable ecosystem relations, human-animal interactions and even social relationships, since the latter continue to be established and reaffirmed through hunting and other activities on the land. Traditional knowledge articulates with nontraditional knowledge to form a rich and distinctive understanding of life and the world.

Many Natives view the extraction of their traditional knowledge from its broader cultural context as a form of theft and, understandably, have been reluctant to share the depth and breadth of what they know with outside interests. They also fear that, because many wildlife managers and decision-makers do not understand their culture, customs or values, their traditional knowledge will somehow be used against them (e.g. setting quotas and other hunting regulations). At best, piecemeal extraction of traditional knowledge from its larger cultural context invites misrepresentation and misinterpretation. At worst, it represents a form of misappropriation and cultural exploitation.
Back to Top
Alaska Federation of Natives Board Policy Guidelines for Research

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When an elder dies, a library burns. Traditional Knowledge Systems in the Arctic An Eskimo hunter once saw a polar bear far off across flat ice, where he couldnt stalk it without being seen. But he knew an old technique of mimicking a seal.

# data[].attributes.headline
Indigenous Knowledge Systems/Alaska Native Ways of Knowing

# data[].attributes.subject
Indigenous Knowledge Systems/Alaska Native Ways of Knowing

# data[].attributes.body
This article seeks to extend our understanding of the processes of learning that occur within and at the intersection of diverse world views and knowledge systems, drawing on experiences derived from across Fourth World contexts, with an emphasis on the Alaska context in particular.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Indigenous Knowledge Systems/Alaska Native Ways of Knowing

by
Ray Barnhardt
Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley
University of Alaska Fairbanks
[updated & posted online 4/29/2005]

Barnhardt, R., & Kawagley, A. O. (2005). Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Alaska Native Ways of Knowing. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 36(1), pp. 8-23.
ABSTRACT
This article seeks to extend our understanding of the processes of learning that occur within and at the intersection of diverse world views and knowledge systems, drawing on experiences derived from across Fourth World contexts, with an emphasis on the Alaska context in particular. The article outlines the rationale behind a comprehensive program of educational initiatives that are closely articulated with the emergence of a new generation of indigenous scholars who are seeking to move the role of indigenous knowledge and learning from the margins to the center of the educational research arena and thus take on some of the most intractable and salient issues of our times.

A few years ago, a group of Alaska Native elders and educators was assembled to identify ways to more effectively utilize the traditional knowledge systems and ways of knowing that are embedded in the Native communities to enrich the school curriculum and enliven the learning experiences of the students. After listening for two days to lengthy discussions of topics such as indigenous world views, Native ways of knowing, cultural and intellectual property rights and traditional ecological knowledge, an Inupiaq elder stood up and explained through an interpreter that he was going to describe how he and his brother were taught to hunt caribou by their father, before guns were commonplace in the upper Kobuk River area of northern Alaska.

The elder described how his father had been a highly respected hunter who always brought food home when he went out on hunting trips and shared it with others in the village. One day when he and his brother were coming of age, their father told them to prepare to go with him to check out a herd of caribou that was migrating through a valley a few miles away. They eagerly assembled their clothing and equipment and joined their father for their first caribou hunt. When they reached a ridge overlooking the nearby valley, they could see a large herd grazing and moving slowly across a grassy plain below. Their father told his sons to lay quietly up on the ridge and watch as he went down with his bow and arrows to intercept the caribou.

The boys watched as their father proceeded to walk directly toward the caribou herd, which as he approached began to move away from him in a file behind the lead bulls, yet he just kept walking openly toward them. This had the two brothers scratching their heads wondering why their father was chasing the caribou away from him. Once the father reached the area where the caribou had been grazing, he stopped and put his bow and arrows down on the ground. As the (now) elder told the story, he demonstrated how his father then got into a crouching position and slowly began to move his arms up and down, slapping them against his legs as though he were mimicking a giant bird about to take off. The two brothers watched intently as the lead bulls in the caribou heard stopped and looked back curiously at their father's movements. Slowly at first, the caribou began to circle back in a wide arc watching the figure flapping its wings out on the tundra, and then they began running, encircling their father in a closing spiral until eventually they were close enough that he reached down, picked up his bow and arrows and methodically culled out the choice caribou one at a time until he had what he needed. He then motioned for his sons to come down and help prepare the meat to be taken back to the village.

As the elder completed the story of how he and his brother were taught the accrued knowledge associated with hunting caribou, he explained that in those days the relationship between the hunter and the hunted was much more intimate than it is now. With the intervention of modern forms of technology, the knowledge associated with that symbiotic relationship is slowly being eroded. But for the elder, the lessons he and his brother had learned from their father out on the tundra that day where just as vivid when he shared them with us as they had been the day he learned them, and he would have little difficulty passing a graduation qualifying exam on the subject 70 years later. The knowledge, skills and standards of attainment required to be a successful hunter were self-evident, and what a young hunter needed to know and be able to do was both implicit and explicit in the lesson the father provided. The insights conveyed to us by the Inupiaq elder drawing on his childhood experience also have relevance to educators today as we seek ways to make education meaningful in the 21st century. It is to explicating such relevance that the remainder of this article will be directed through a close examination of common features that indigenous knowledge systems share around the world, followed by a closer look at some of the initiatives that are contributing to the resurgence of Alaska Native knowledge systems and ways of knowing as a catalyst for educational renewal.

Indigenous peoples throughout the world have sustained their unique worldviews and associated knowledge systems for millennia, even while undergoing major social upheavals as a result of transformative forces beyond their control. Many of the core values, beliefs and practices associated with those worldviews have survived and are beginning to be recognized as having an adaptive integrity that is as valid for today's generations as it was for generations past. The depth of indigenous knowledge rooted in the long inhabitation of a particular place offers lessons that can benefit everyone, from educator to scientist, as we search for a more satisfying and sustainable way to live on this planet.

Actions currently being taken by indigenous people in communities throughout the world clearly demonstrate that a significant "paradigm shift" is under way in which indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing are beginning to be recognized as consisting of complex knowledge systems with an adaptive integrity of their own (cf. Winter, 2004 special issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly on indigenous education). As this shift evolves, it is not only indigenous people who are the beneficiaries, since the issues that are being addressed are of equal significance in non-indigenous contexts (Nader 1996). Many of the problems that are manifested under conditions of marginalization have gravitated from the periphery to the center of industrial societies, so the new (but old) insights that are emerging from indigenous societies may be of equal benefit to the broader educational community.

The tendency in the earlier literature on indigenous education, most of which was written from a non-indigenous perspective, was to focus on how to get Native people to acquire the appurtenances of the Western/scientific view of the world (Darnell 1972; Orvik and Barnhardt 1974). Until recently there was very little literature that addressed how to get Western scientists and educators to understand Native worldviews and ways of knowing as constituting knowledge systems in their own right, and even less on what it means for participants when such divergent systems coexist in the same person, organization or community. It is imperative, therefore, that we come at these issues on a two-way street, rather than view them as a one-way challenge to get Native people to buy into the western system. Native people may need to understand western society, but not at the expense of what they already know and the way they have come to know it. Non-Native people, too, need to recognize the co-existence of multiple worldviews and knowledge systems, and find ways to understand and relate to the world in its multiple dimensions and varied perspectives.

The intent of this article is to extend our understanding of the processes of learning that occur within and at the intersection of diverse world views and knowledge systems through a comparative analysis of experiences derived from across multiple Fourth World contexts, drawing in particular on our work with the Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative over the past ten years. The article will outline the rationale behind a comprehensive program of educational initiatives that are closely articulated with the emergence of a new generation of indigenous scholars who are seeking to move the role of indigenous knowledge and learning from the margins to the center of the educational research arena and thus take on some of the most intractable and salient issues of our times.
Indigenous Knowledge Systems
In 2003 the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a comprehensive report titled, A Quiet Crisis: Federal Funding and Unmet Needs in Indian Country, in which the following conclusion was drawn with regard to education of Native American students:

As a group, Native American students are not afforded educational opportunities equal to other American students. They routinely face deteriorating school facilities, underpaid teachers, weak curricula, discriminatory treatment, and outdated learning tools. In addition, the cultural histories and practices of Native students are rarely incorporated in the learning environment. As a result, achievement gaps persist with Native American students scoring lower than any other racial/ethnic group in basic levels of reading, math, and history. Native American students are also less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to drop out in earlier grades (2003:xi).

Students in indigenous societies around the world have, for the most part, demonstrated a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the experience of schooling in its conventional form-an aversion that is most often attributable to an alien institutional culture, rather than any lack of innate intelligence, ingenuity, or problem-solving skills on the part of the students (Battiste 2002). The curricula, teaching methodologies and assessment strategies associated with mainstream schooling are based on a worldview that does not adequately recognize or appreciate indigenous notions of an interdependent universe and the importance of place in their societies (Kawagley, Norris-Tull and Norris-Tull 1998)

Indigenous people have had their own ways of looking at and relating to the world, the universe, and to each other (Ascher 2002; Eglash 2002). Their traditional education processes were carefully constructed around observing natural processes, adapting modes of survival, obtaining sustenance from the plant and animal world, and using natural materials to make their tools and implements. All of this was made understandable through demonstration and observation accompanied by thoughtful stories in which the lessons were imbedded (Kawagley 1995; Cajete 2000). However, indigenous views of the world and approaches to education have been brought into jeopardy with the spread of western social structures and institutionalized forms of cultural transmission (Barnhardt and Kawagley 1999).

Recently, many Indigenous as well as non-Indigenous people have begun to recognize the limitations of a mono-cultural education system, and new approaches have begun to emerge that are contributing to our understanding of the relationship between indigenous ways of knowing and those associated with western society and formal education. Our challenge now is to devise a system of education for all people that respects the epistemological and pedagogical foundations provided by both indigenous and western cultural traditions. While the examples used here will be drawn primarily from the Alaska Native context, they are intended to be illustrative of the issues that emerge in any indigenous context where efforts are underway to reconnect education to a sense of place and its attendant cultural practices and manifestations.
Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science Converge
While western science and education tend to emphasize compartmentalized knowledge which is often de-contextualized and taught in the detached setting of a classroom or laboratory, indigenous people have traditionally acquired their knowledge through direct experience in the natural world. For them, the particulars come to be understood in relation to the whole, and the "laws" are continually tested in the context of everyday survival. Western thought also differs from indigenous thought in its notion of competency. In western terms, competency is often assessed based on predetermined ideas of what a person should know, which is then measured indirectly through various forms of "objective" tests. Such an approach does not address whether that person is actually capable of putting that knowledge into practice. In the traditional Native sense, competency has an unequivocal relationship to survival or extinction—if you fail as a caribou hunter, your whole family may be in jeopardy . You either have it, or you don't, and it is tested in a real-world context.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has begun to recognize the potential contributions that indigenous people can make to our understanding of the world around us (Lambert 2003). In addition to sponsoring a day-long symposium on "Native Science" at the 2003 Annual Meeting in Denver, AAAS has published a Handbook on Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Property to guide traditional knowledge holders in protecting their intellectual property and maintaining biological diversity (Hansen and VanFleet 2003). In the handbook, AAAS defines traditional knowledge as follows:

Traditional knowledge is the information that people in a given community, based on experience and adaptation to a local culture and environment, have developed over time, and continue to develop. This knowledge is used to sustain the community and its culture and to maintain the genetic resources necessary for the continued survival of the community (2003:3).

Indigenous people do a form of "science" when they are involved in the annual cycle of subsistence activities. They have studied and know a great deal about the flora and fauna, and they have their own classification systems and versions of meteorology, physics, chemistry, earth science, astronomy, botany, pharmacology, psychology (knowing one's inner world), and the sacred (Burgess 1999). For a Native student imbued with an indigenous, experientially grounded, holistic world view, typical approaches to schooling can present an impediment to learning, to the extent that they focus on compartmentalized knowledge with little regard for how academic subjects relate to one another or to the surrounding universe.

To bring significance to learning in indigenous settings, the explanations of natural phenomena are best understood by students if they are cast first in indigenous terms to which they can relate, and then explained in western terms. For example, when choosing an eddy along the river for placing a fishing net, it can be explained initially in the indigenous way of understanding, pointing out the currents, the movement of debris and sediment in the water, the likely path of the fish, the condition of the river bank, upstream conditions affecting water levels, the impact of passing boats, etc. Once the students understand the significance of the knowledge being presented, it can then be explained in western terms, such as flow, velocity, resistance, turbidity, sonar readings, tide tables, etc., to illustrate how the modern explanation adds to the traditional understanding (and vice versa). All learning can start with what the student and community already know and have experienced in everyday life. The indigenous student (as with most students) will then become more motivated to learn when the subject matter is based on something useful and suitable to the livelihood of the community and is presented in a way that reflects a familiar world view (Kawagley 1995; Lipka 1998; Battiste 2000).

Since western scientific perspectives influence decisions that impact every aspect of indigenous people's lives, from education to fish and wildlife management, indigenous people themselves have begun to take an active role in re-asserting their own traditions of science in various research and policy-making arenas (Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy 1993; Cochran 2004). As a result, there is a growing awareness of the depth and breadth of knowledge that is extant in many indigenous societies and its potential value in addressing issues of contemporary significance, including the adaptive processes associated with learning and knowledge construction. The following observation by Bielawski illustrates this point:

Indigenous knowledge is not static, an unchanging artifact of a former lifeway. It has been adapting to the contemporary world since contact with "others" began, and it will continue to change. Western science in the North is also beginning to change in response to contact with indigenous knowledge. Change was first seen in the acceptance that Inuit (and other Native northerners) have knowledge, that is 'know something.' Then change moved to involving Inuit in the research process as it is defined by western science. Then community-based research began, wherein communities and native organizations identified problems and sought the means to solve them. I believe the next stage will be one in which Inuit and other indigenous peoples grapple with the nature of what scientists call research (1990:8).

Such an awareness of the contemporary significance of indigenous knowledge systems has entered into policy development arenas on an international level, as is evident in the following statement in the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy:

Resolving the various concerns that indigenous peoples have about the development of scientific based information must be addressed through both policy and programs. This begins with reformulating the principles and guidelines within which research will be carried out and involves the process of consultation and the development of appropriate techniques for identifying problems that indigenous peoples wish to see resolved. But the most important step that must be taken is to assure that indigenous environmental and ecological knowledge becomes an information system that carries its own validity and recognition. A large effort is now underway in certain areas within the circumpolar region, as well as in other parts of the world, to establish these information systems and to set standards for their use (1993:27).

Indigenous societies, as a matter of survival, have long sought to understand the regularities in the world around them, recognizing that nature is underlain with many unseen patterns of order. For example, out of necessity, Alaska Native people have made detailed observations of animal behavior (including the inquisitiveness of caribou). They have learned to decipher and adapt to the constantly changing patterns of weather and seasonal cycles. The Native elders have long been able to predict weather based upon observations of subtle signs that presage what subsequent conditions are likely to be. The wind, for example, has irregularities of constantly varying velocity, humidity, temperature, and direction due to topography and other factors. There are non-linear dimensions to clouds, irregularities of cloud formations, anomalous cloud luminosity, and different forms of precipitation at different elevations. Behind these variables, however, there are patterns, such as prevailing winds or predictable cycles of weather phenomena that can be discerned through long observation (though global climate change is taking its toll on weather predictability). Over time, Native people have observed that the weather's dynamic is not unlike the mathematical characteristics of fractals, where patterns are reproduced within themselves and the parts of a part are part of another part which is a part of still another part, and so on.

For indigenous people there is a recognition that many unseen forces are at play in the elements of the universe and that very little is naturally linear, or occurs in a two-dimensional grid or a three dimensional cube. They are familiar with the notions of conservation of energy, irregularities in patterns and anomalies of form and force. Through long observation they have become specialists in understanding the interconnectedness and holism of our place in the universe (Barnhardt and Kawagley 1999; Cajete 2000; Eglash 2002).

The new sciences of chaos and complexity and the study of non-linear dynamic systems have helped Western scientists to also recognize order in phenomena that were previously considered chaotic and random. These patterns reveal new sets of relationships which point to the essential balances and diversity that help nature to thrive. Indigenous people have long recognized these interdependencies and have sought to maintain harmony with all of life. Western scientists have constructed the holographic image, which lends itself to the Native concept of everything being connected. Just as the whole contains each part of the image, so too does each part contain the makeup of the whole. The relationship of each part to everything else must be understood to produce the whole image. With fractal geometry, holographic images and the sciences of chaos and complexity, the Western thought-world has begun to focus more attention on relationships, as its proponents recognize the interconnectedness in all elements of the world around us (Capra 1996; Sahtouris 2000). Thus there is a growing appreciation of the complementarity that exists between what were previously considered two disparate and irreconcilable systems of thought (Kawagley and Barnhardt 2004).

The incongruities between western institutional structures and practices and indigenous cultural forms will not be easy to reconcile. The complexities that come into play when two fundamentally different worldviews converge present a formidable challenge. The specialization, standardization, compartmentalization, and systematization that are inherent features of most western bureaucratic forms of organization are often in direct conflict with social structures and practices in indigenous societies, which tend toward collective decision-making, extended kinship structures, ascribed authority vested in elders, flexible notions of time, and traditions of informality in everyday affairs (Barnhardt 2000). It is little wonder then that formal education structures, which often epitomize western bureaucratic forms, have been found wanting in addressing the educational needs of traditional societies.

When engaging in the kind of comparative analysis of different world views outlined above, any generalizations should be recognized as indicative and not definitive, since indigenous knowledge systems are diverse themselves and are constantly adapting and changing in response to new conditions. The qualities identified for both indigenous and western systems represent tendencies rather than fixed traits, and thus must be used cautiously to avoid overgeneralization (Gutierrez and Rogoff 2003). At the same time, it is the diversity and dynamics of indigenous societies that enrich our efforts as we seek avenues to integrate indigenous knowledge systems in a complementary way with the system of education we call schooling.
Intersecting World Views: The Alaska Experience
The sixteen distinct indigenous cultural and language systems that continue to survive in villages throughout Alaska have a rich cultural history that still governs much of everyday life in those communities. For over six generations, however, Alaska Native people have been experiencing recurring negative feedback in their relationships with the external systems that have been brought to bear on them, the consequences of which have been extensive marginalization of their knowledge systems and continuing erosion of their cultural integrity. Though diminished and often in the background, much of the Native knowledge systems, ways of knowing and world views remains intact and in practice, and there is a growing appreciation of the contributions that indigenous knowledge can make to our contemporary understanding in areas such as medicine, resource management, meteorology, biology, and in basic human behavior and educational practices (James 2001).

Alaska Natives have been at the forefront in bringing indigenous perspectives into a variety of policy arenas through a wide range of research and development initiatives in recent years. In the past two years alone, the National Science Foundation has funded projects incorporating indigenous knowledge in the study of climate change, the development of indigenous-based math curriculum, the effects of contaminants on subsistence foods, observations of the aurora, and alternative technology for waste disposal. In addition, Native people have formed new institutions of their own (e.g., the Consortium for Alaska Native Higher Education, the Alaska Native Science Commission and the First Alaskans Institute) to address some of these same issues through an indigenous lens.

Alaska Native people have taken an active role in promoting the integration of traditional knowledge with western science traditions, though their reasons for sharing their knowledge with outsiders have been varied, as indicated by Richard Glenn, an Inupiaq who has served on the Arctic Research Consortium and the Alaska Native Science Commission:

Why do Iñupiat share traditional knowledge? Despite the stigma, our community is proud of a long history of productive, cooperative efforts with visiting researchers, hunters, travelers, scientists, map makers and others. We share when we consider others close enough to be part of Iñupiat culture and share when it is in the best interest of a greater cultural struggle (Glenn 2000:13–14).

In an effort to address the issues associated with converging knowledge systems in a more comprehensive way and apply new insights to address long-standing and often intractable problems, in1995 the University of Alaska Fairbanks, under contract with the Alaska Federation of Natives and with funding support from the National Science Foundation program, entered into a ten-year educational development endeavor—the Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative. The most critical salient feature of the context in which this work has been situated is the vast cultural and geographical diversity represented by the sixteen distinct indigenous linguistic/cultural groups distributed across five major geographic regions, as the following map illustrates.

Through the Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative (AKRSI), a statewide network of 20 partner school districts was formed, involving a total of 176 rural schools serving nearly 20,000 predominately Alaska Native students. The remaining 28 rural school districts in Alaska (103 rural schools serving mostly non-Native communities) have served as a comparison group for assessing the impact of the AKRSI initiatives. Utilizing an educational reform strategy focusing on integrating local knowledge and pedagogical practices into all aspects of the education system, this established network of partner schools serving diverse indigenous populations has provided a fertile real-world context in which to address the many issues associated with learning and indigenous knowledge systems outlined above.

The activities associated with the Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative have been aimed at fostering connectivity and complementarity between the indigenous knowledge systems rooted in the Native cultures that inhabit rural Alaska and the formal education systems that have been imported to serve the educational needs of rural Native communities. The underlying purpose of these efforts has been to implement a set of research-based initiatives to systematically document the indigenous knowledge systems of Alaska Native people and to develop pedagogical practices and school curricula that appropriately incorporate indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing into the formal education system. The following initiatives have constituted the major thrusts of the AKRSI applied research and educational development strategy (details are available at www.ankn.uaf.edu):

Indigenous Science Knowledge Base/Multimedia Cultural Atlas Development
Native Ways of Knowing/Parent Involvement
Elders and Cultural Camps/Academy of Elders
Village Science Applications/Science Camps and Fairs
Alaska Native Knowledge Network/Cultural Resources and Web Site
Alaska Standards for Culturally Responsive Schools
Native Educator Associations/Leadership Development

Over a period of ten years, these initiatives have served to strengthen the quality of educational experiences and consistently improve the academic performance of students in participating schools throughout rural Alaska (AKRSI Annual Report 2003). In the course of implementing the AKRSI initiatives, we have come to recognize that there is much more to be gained from further mining the fertile ground that exists within indigenous knowledge systems, as well as at the intersection of converging knowledge systems and world views. The following diagram is intended to capture some of the critical elements that come into play when indigenous knowledge systems and western science traditions are put side-by-side and nudged together in an effort to develop more culturally responsive science curricula (Stephens 2000).

Diagram 1
Qualities Associated with Traditional Knowledge and Western Science

In the Handbook for Culturally Responsive Science Curriculum, Sidney Stephens explains the significance of the various components of this diagram as follows:

For many Native educators, culturally responsive science curriculum has to do with their passion for making cultural knowledge, language and values a prominent part of the schooling system. It has to do with presenting science within the whole of cultural knowledge in a way that embodies that culture (the Traditional Native Knowledge circle in the diagram), and with demonstrating that science standards can be met in the process. It also has to do with finding the knowledge, strategies and support needed to carry out this work. For those educators not so linked to the local culture, culturally responsive science curriculum has more to do with connecting what is known about Western science education to what local people know and value (the Western Science circle) (2000:10)

The implications for the learning processes imbedded in the three domains of knowledge represented in the overlapping circles are numerous and of considerable significance. Stephens highlights some of the implications for how we approach education as follows:

Although educators obviously differ in their perspective, there is no doubt that the creation of culturally responsive science curriculum has powerful implications for students for at least three reasons. The first is that a student might conceivably develop all of the common ground skills and understandings while working from and enhancing a traditional knowledge base. The second is that acquisition of the common ground, regardless of route, is a significant accomplishment. And the third is that exploration of a topic through multiple knowledge systems can only enrich perspective and create thoughtful dialog (2000:10-11).

With these considerations in mind, the Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative has sought to serve as a catalyst to promulgate curricular and pedagogical reforms focusing on increasing the level of connectivity and complementarity between the formal education systems and the indigenous knowledge systems of the communities in which the schools are situated. In so doing, the AKRSI has attempted to bring the two systems together in a manner that promotes a synergistic relationship such that the two previously disparate systems join to form a more comprehensive holistic system that can better serve all students, not just Alaska Natives, while at the same time preserving the essential integrity of each component of the larger over-lapping system. The implications of such an approach to learning as it relates to indigenous knowledge systems extend far beyond Native communities in Alaska, as indicated by Battiste in her comprehensive literature review on Indigenous Knowledge and Pedagogy in First Nations Education (Canada):

Indigenous scholars discovered that indigenous knowledge is far more than the binary opposite of western knowledge. As a concept, indigenous knowledge benchmarks the limitations of Eurocentric theory — its methodology, evidence, and conclusions — reconceptualizes the resilience and self-reliance of indigenous peoples, and underscores the importance of their own philosophies, heritages, and educational processes. Indigenous knowledge fills the ethical and knowledge gaps in Eurocentric education, research, and scholarship (2002:5).

Examples of what this "fresh vantage point" looks like are provided in recently developed curriculum materials that seek to integrate western and indigenous knowledge in a complementary way (cf. Aikenhead 2001; Adams and Lipka 2003; Carlson 2003). Indigenous people themselves have begun to rethink their role and seek to blend old and new practices in ways that are more likely to fit contemporary conditions. There are ways to break out of the mindset in which we are oftentimes stuck, though it takes some effort. There are ways to develop linkages that connect different worldviews, at least for a few people under the right conditions. The kinds of insights that emerge from such efforts often open up as many questions as answers. We have learned a tremendous amount from recent experience, and we find each year that the more we learn the less we know, in terms of having penetrated through another layer of understanding of what life in an indigenous context is all about, only to recognize the existence of many additional layers that lie beyond our current understanding.

One of the major limitations in these endeavors, however, has been the severe lack of indigenous people with advanced indigenous expertise and western research experience to bring balance to the indigenous knowledge/western science research enterprise. Thus, one of the long-term goals of the AKRSI has been to develop a sustainable research and development infrastructure that makes effective use of the rich cultural and natural environments of indigenous peoples to implement an array of intensive and comparative research initiatives, with partnerships and collaborations in indigenous communities across the U.S. and around the world. To begin to address this issue, UAF has expanded its program offerings through a series of special seminars, distance education courses, visiting scholars, international exchanges, internships and Indigenous Elder Academies. In addition, a new M.A. with an emphasis on indigenous knowledge systems has been established, with the following graduate courses now available to students anywhere in the U.S. or Canada through the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies distance education program:

CCS 601, Documenting Indigenous Knowledge
CCS 608, Indigenous Knowledge Systems
CCS 610, Education and Cultural Processes
CCS 611, Culture, Cognition and Knowledge Acquisition
CCS 612, Traditional Ecological Knowledge
CCS 602, Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights

The initiatives outlined above have brought together the resources of indigenous-serving institutions and the communities they serve to forge new configurations and collaborations that break through the obfuscations associated with conventional paradigms of research on cultural influences in learning. Alaska, along with the other indigenous cultural regions of the world, provides a natural laboratory in which indigenous and non-indigenous scholars can get first-hand experience integrating the study of learning and indigenous knowledge systems.

There are numerous opportunities to probe deeper into the basic issues that arise as we explore terrain that has always been a part of our existence, but is now being seen through new multi-dimensional lens that provide greater breadth and depth to our understanding. Given the comprehensive nature of indigenous knowledge systems, they provide fertile ground for pursuing a broad interdisciplinary research agenda. In the next section we will identify some of the most promising research opportunities that have emerged from the intersection of indigenous knowledge systems and western educational and scientific endeavors.
Emerging Research Associated with Indigenous Knowledge Systems
The study of indigenous knowledge systems as it relates to education falls into three inter-related research themes: documentation and articulation of indigenous knowledge systems; delineating epistemological structures and learning/cognitive processes associated with indigenous ways of knowing; and developing/assessing educational strategies integrating indigenous and western knowledge and ways of knowing. These issues encompass some of the most long-standing cultural, social and political challenges facing education in indigenous societies around the world. Public debate on these issues has revolved around apparent conflicts between educational, political and cultural values, all of which are highly interrelated, so it is essential that future research address the issues in an integrated, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary manner, and with strong indigenous influence. Following is a brief description of some of the major research initiatives that have emerged from the study of indigenous knowledge systems.

Native Ways of Knowing/Indigenous Epistemologies: Indigenous scholars have begun to identify the epistemological underpinnings and learning processes associated with indigenous knowledge systems (Kawagley 1995; Cajete 2000; Meyer 2001). The Venn diagram depicting the intersection of traditional Native knowledge and western science presented earlier contains numerous topical areas in which comparative research can be undertaken to gain a better understanding of the inner-workings of the many and varied indigenous knowledge systems around the world, as well as a more detailed explication of the elements of "common ground" that emerge when the diverse knowledge systems interact with one another. Collaboration among scholars across the indigenous cultural regions will enhance the degree of generalizability that can be achieved as well as facilitate the transfer of knowledge to other related sectors.

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy/Contextual Learning: The development and implementation of the "Alaska Standards for Culturally Responsive Schools" and "Guidelines for Respecting Cultural Knowledge" by the Assembly of Alaska Native Educators (1998) has fostered a great deal of promising innovation in schools seeking to integrate indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing into their curriculum and pedagogical practices. While there appears to be a strong positive correlation between the implementation of the Cultural Standards in the schools/ communities and Native student academic performance, the details of those associations have not yet been fully delineated. The research implications and opportunities in this area are of considerable interest and potential consequence with regard to how we approach schooling in general, not just in indigenous settings. Research initiatives should engage scholars incorporating multiple research traditions and theories associated with cultural and contextual influences on learning, teaching and cognition. Of particular interest are the implications of current theories associated with various forms of contextually-driven teaching and learning (Johnson 2000).

Ethno-mathematics: Ethno-mathematics has emerged in the last decade as a powerful blending of insights from the mathematical sciences and cross-cultural analysis (Asher 2002; Eglash 2002). The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics recently published a collection of articles under the heading, Changing the Faces of Mathematics: Perspectives on Indigenous People of North America, several of which reflected research from Alaska (Hankes and Fast 2002). Alaska has been at the forefront in the development of curriculum materials that utilize Alaska Native constructs such as fish rack construction, egg gathering, salmon harvesting and star navigation as an avenue for teaching mathematical content that prepares students to meet national and state standards and related assessment mandates (Adams and Lipka 2003). All of these recent breakthroughs in our understanding of how mathematical knowledge is constructed and utilized provide extensive opportunities for research on mathematics learning across cultures that has significant implications for schooling, particularly since mathematics is one of the critical elements in the current assessment systems associated with No Child Left Behind.

Indigenous Language Learning: Indigenous languages are an integral part of indigenous knowledge systems and thus warrant particular attention in our efforts to understand how to better integrate learning in school with the cultural context of the home/community in indigenous societies. Research issues associated with indigenous languages extend beyond the makeup of the language itself to include the thought processes imbedded in the language, as well as how, when, where and for what purposes the language is used (sociolinguistics). Only then can we begin to understand what happens to an indigenous knowledge system when the language associated with that system of thought is usurped by another (G.H. Smith 2002).

Cross-Generational Learning/Role of Elders/Camps: A dominant theme throughout the Alaska Standards for Culturally Responsive Schools (Assembly of Alaska Native Educators 1998) is the importance of drawing Native elders into the educational process and utilizing natural learning environments in which the knowledge that is being passed on to the students by the elders takes on appropriate meaning and value and is reinforced in the larger community context. While available data affirms the broad educational value of cross-generational learning in culturally appropriate contexts (Johnson 2002; Battiste 2002), the dynamics associated with such learning has not yet been well documented and translated into comprehensive pedagogical or curricular strategies.

Place-based Education: The importance of linking education to the physical and cultural environment in which the student/school is situated has special significance in indigenous settings, where people have acquired a deep and abiding sense of place and relationship to the land in which they have lived for millennia (Barnhardt and Kawagley 1999; Semken and Morgan 1997). "Place-based" educational practices have received wide-spread national recognition and support as a way to foster civic responsibility while also enriching the educational experiences for all students—rural and urban, indigenous and non-indigenous alike (G. Smith 2002; Gruenewald 2003; Sobel 2004). Indigenous scientific and cultural knowledge associated with local environments is a critical ingredient for developing an interdisciplinary pedagogy of place (Cajete 2000). As such, these systems of knowledge offer many opportunities for comparative research into how traditional indigenous ways of learning and knowing can be drawn upon to expand our understanding of basic educational processes for all students.

Native Science/Sense-Making: The ways of constructing, organizing, using, and communicating knowledge that have been practiced by indigenous peoples for centuries have come to be recognized as constituting a form of science with its own integrity and validity, as indicated by a day-long AAAS-sponsored symposium on "Native Science" at its 2003 meeting (Lambert 2003). Mainstream science also has its distinctive ways of constructing, organizing, using and communicating knowledge. Both Native and mainstream knowledge systems are largely implicit, however, and while they overlap, they also diverge in ways important to how knowledge is learned and applied. Native scholars have been actively contributing their insights to the growing body of literature around the themes of Native science and sense-making (Cajete 2000; James 2001; Krupnik and Jolly 2002; Hankes and Fast 2002).

Cultural Systems, Complexity and Learning: An area of special interest in exploring the implications of indigenous knowledge systems and the structures by which they are perpetuated is the potential insights that can be gained from the application of complexity theory to our understanding of the dynamics that occur when diverse knowledge systems collide with one another (Eglash 2002; Barnhardt and Kawagley 2003). Since this is a sufficiently broad (and complex) arena with many convergent, divergent and emergent properties and possibilities, it has the potential to evolve as a significant research theme that capitalizes on the recent insights gained from the study of complex adaptive systems and through which we can apply those insights to stimulate the development of self-organizing structures that emerge from interactions within and between diverse knowledge systems.

Indigenizing Research in Education: Until recently, research traditions in education have been dominated by western science methods, models and practices, including those applied to indigenous peoples. In 1999, Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith published Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, which articulated the importance of indigenous people devising and using their own research methodologies and addressing issues from frames of reference that derive from within their own communities and cultural traditions. Indigenous scholars are in a position to enlarge the scope of research paradigms in ways that will benefit all research traditions.

The research topics outlined above have the potential to advance our understanding of learning as it occurs in diverse cultural contexts by exploring the interface between indigenous and western knowledge systems, as well as contributing to the further conceptualization, critique and development of indigenous knowledge systems in their own right, drawing on the experiences of indigenous peoples from around the world. The expansion of the knowledge base associated with learning and indigenous knowledge systems will contribute to an emerging interdisciplinary body of scholarly work regarding the critical role that the local cultural context can play in fostering academic success in learning, particularly among indigenous peoples.
Conclusion
An underlying theme of this article has been the need to reconstitute the relationship between indigenous peoples and the immigrant societies in which they are embedded. By documenting the integrity of locally situated cultural knowledge and skills and critiquing the learning processes by which such knowledge is transmitted, acquired and utilized, Alaska Native and other indigenous people are engaging in a form of self-determination that will not only benefit themselves, but will open opportunities to better understand learning in all its manifestations and thus inform educational practices for everyone's benefit. Traditional processes for learning to hunt caribou by observation and meaningful participation can offer insights into how we create opportunities for students learning to operate a computer. To overcome the long-standing estrangement between indigenous communities and the external institutions impacting their lives, all parties in this endeavor (community, school, higher education, state and national agencies) will need to form a true multi-lateral partnership in which mutual respect is accorded the contributions that each brings to the relationship. The key to overcoming the historical imbalance in that regard is the development of collaborative research endeavors specifically focusing on education and indigenous knowledge systems, with primary direction coming from indigenous people so they are able to move from a passive role subject to someone else's agenda to an active leadership position with explicit authority in the construction and implementation of the research initiatives (Harrison 2001).

In this context, the task of achieving broad-based support hinges on our ability to demonstrate that such an undertaking has relevance and meaning in the local indigenous contexts with which it is associated, as well as in the broader social, political and educational arenas involved. By utilizing research strategies that link the study of learning to the knowledge base and ways of knowing already established in the local community and culture, indigenous communities are more likely to find value in what emerges and be able to put the new insights into practice toward achieving their own ends as a meaningful exercise in real self-determination. In turn, the knowledge gained from these efforts will have applicability in furthering our understanding of basic human processes associated with learning and the transmission of knowledge in all forms.
References Cited
Adams, Barbara L. and Jerry Lipka
2003 Building a Fish Rack: Investigations into Proof, Properties, Perimeter and Area. Calagary, AB: Detselig Enterprises.

Aikenhead, Glen
2001 Integrating Western and Aboriginal Sciences: Cross-Cultural Science Teaching. Research in Science Education 31(3): 337-355.

Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative
2003 Annual Report. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Knowledge Network (ankn.uaf.edu/arsi.html), University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy
1993 A Research Program on Indigenous Knowledge, Anchorage, AK: Inuit Circumpolar Conference.

Ascher, Martha
2002 Mathematics Elsewhere: An Exploration of Ideas Across Cultures. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Assembly of Alaska Native Educators
1998 Alaska Standards for Culturally Responsive Schools. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Knowledge Network , University of Alaska Fairbanks.
http://ankn.uaf.edu/Publications/standards.html

Barnhardt, Ray and A. Oscar Kawagley
2004 Culture, Chaos and Complexity: Catalysts for Change in Indigenous Education. Cultural Survival Quarterly 27(4): 59-64.

Barnhardt, Ray
2002 Domestication of the Ivory Tower: Institutional Adaptation to Cultural Distance. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 33(2): 238-249.

Barnhardt, Ray and A. Oscar Kawagley
1999 Education Indigenous to Place: Western Science Meets Indigenous Reality. In Ecological Education in Action. Gregory Smith and Dilafruz Williams, eds. Pp. 117-140. New York: State University of New York Press.

Battiste, Marie
2002 Indigenous Knowledge and Pedagogy in First Nations Education: A Literature Review with Recommendations. Ottawa: Indian and Northern Affairs Canada.

Bielawski, Ellen
1990 Cross-Cultural Epistemology: Cultural Readaptation Through the Pursuit of Knowledge. Edmonton: Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta.

Burgess, Philip
1999 Traditional Knowledge: A Report prepared for the Arctic Council Indigenous Peoples' Secretariat. Copenhagen: Indigenous Peoples' Secretariat, Arctic Council.

Cajete, Gregory
2000 Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. Sante Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers.

Capra, Frithof
1996 The Web of LIfe: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York: Doubleday.

Carlson, Barbara S.
2003 Unangam Hitnisangin/Unangam Hitnisangis: Aleut Plants. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Knowledge Network.

Cochran, Patricia
2004 What is Traditional Knowledge? Traditional Knowledge Systems in the North. Anchorage: ( http://www.nativescience.org/html/traditional_knowledge.html) Alaska Native Science Commission.

Darnell, Frank, ed.
1972 Education in the North: The First International Conference on Cross-Cultural Education in the Circumpolar Nations. Fairbanks: Center for Northern Education Research, University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Eglash, Ron
2002 Computation, Complexity and Coding in Native American Knowledge Systems. In Changing the Faces of Mathematics: Perspectives on Indigenous People of North America. Judith E. Hankes and Gerald R. Fast, eds. Pp. 251-262. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Glenn, Richard
2000 Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Assessment, and the Clash of Two Cultures. In Handbook for Culturally Responsive Science Curriculum. S. Stephens, ed. Pp. 13-14. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Knowledge Network.

Gruenewald, David A.
2003 The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place. Educational Researcher 32(4): 3-12.

Gutierrez, Kris D. and Barbara Rogoff
2003 Cultural Ways of Learning: Individual Traits or Repertoires of Practice. Educational Researcher 32(5): 19-25.

Hankes, Judith E. and Gerald R. Fast, eds.
2002 Changing the Faces of Mathematics: Perspectives on Indigenous People of North America. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Hansen, Stephen A. and Justin W. VanFleet
2003 Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Property. Washington, D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Harrison, Barbara
2001 Collaborative Programs in Indigenous Communities. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

James, Keith, ed.
2001 Science and Native American Communities. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Johnson, Elaine
2002 Contextual Teaching and Learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Kawagley, A. Oscar, Delena Norris-Tull and Roger Norris-Tull
1998 The Indigenous Worldview of Yupiaq Culture: It's Scientific Nature and Relevance to the Practice and Teaching of Science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 35(2): 133-144.

Kawagley, A. Oscar
1995 A Yupiaq World View: A Pathway to Ecology and Spirit. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
Krupnik, Igor and Dyanna Jolly, eds.
2001 The Earth is Faster Now: Indigenous Observations of Arctic Environmental Change. Fairbanks: Arctic Research Consortium of the United States.

Lambert, Lori
2003 From 'Savages' to Scientists: Mainstream Science Moves Toward Recognizing Traditional Knowledge. Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education 15(1): 11-12.

Lipka, Jerry
1998 Transforming the Culture of Schools: Yup'ik Eskimo Examples. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Meyer, Manulani A.
2001 Our Own Liberation: Reflections on Hawaiian Epistemology. The Contemporary Pacific 13(1): 124-148.

Nader, Laura
1996 Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiries into Boundaries, Power and Knowledge. New York, NY: Routledge.

Orvik, James, and Ray Barnhardt, eds.
1974 Cultural Influences in Alaska Native Education. Fairbanks: Center for Northern Education Research, University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Sahtouris, Elisabet
2000 The Indigenous Way. In EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution, Elisabet Sahtouris. New York, NY: iUniversity Press: 323-343.

Semken, Steve C. and F. Morgan
1997 Navajo Pedagogy and Earth Systems: Journal of Geoscience Education, 45(1): 109-112.

Smith, Gregory
2002 Place-based Education. Phi Delta Kappan 84(2): 584-594.

Smith, Graham H.
2002 Kaupapa Maori Theory: An Indigenous Theory of Transformative Praxis. Auckland, NZ: University of Auckland/Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi.

Smith, Linda T.
1999 Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York: Zed Books.

Sobel, David
2004 Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities. Great Barrington, MA: The Orion Society.

Stephens, Sidney
2000 Handbook for Culturally Responsive Science Curriculum. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Knowledge Network.

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
2003 A Quiet Crisis: Federal Funding and Unmet Needs in Indian Country, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Indigenous Knowledge Systems/Alaska Native Ways of Knowing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Indigenous Knowledge Systems/Alaska Native Ways of Knowing by Ray Barnhardt Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley University of Alaska Fairbanks [updated & posted online 4/29/2005] Barnhardt, R., & Kawagley, A. O. (2005). Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Alaska Native Ways of Knowing. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 36(1), pp. 8-23.

# data[].attributes.headline
Tools for Teaching and Research in Indigenous Studies

# data[].attributes.subject
Tools for Teaching and Research in Indigenous Studies

# data[].attributes.body
"The Indigenous Knowledge Commons provides a forum for thinking creatively about the social and cultural roles of Indigenous Studies, especially in relation to online teaching and research in the field."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Indigenous Knowledge Commons provides a forum for thinking creatively about the social and cultural roles of Indigenous Studies, especially in relation to online teaching and research in the field. We invite you to join us in thinking about ways in which Indigenous Knowledge can be acknowledged, valued, celebrated, and shared. We welcome participation from teachers, students, tribal elders, cultural leaders, artists, scholars and professionals working in indigenous contexts in many countries. IK Commoners include thinkers and doers, indigenous and non-indigenous, with and without institutional affiliation.

Please don't leave without visiting some of our tools and resources listed above. And let us know what you think!

Find out more about the philosophy behind the Indigenous Knowledge Commons.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Indigenous Knowledge Commons provides a forum for thinking creatively about the social and cultural roles of Indigenous Studies, especially in relation to online teaching and research in the field. We invite you to join us in thinking about ways in which Indigenous Knowledge can be acknowledged, valued, celebrated, and shared.

# data[].attributes.body
"If you wanted to change a culture in a single generation, how would you do it?
You would change the way it educates its children."
Read the Essays and Articles.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Long reads on learning, culture, unschooling, life, by Carol Black, director of the film “Schooling the World.” Also Carol Black’s blog.

# data[].attributes.body
Education transforms lives and is at the heart of UNESCO’s mission to build peace, eradicate poverty and drive sustainable development.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Education is at the heart of UNESCO's mission to build peace, eradicate poverty and drive sustainable development. It is a human right for all throughout life.

# data[].attributes.headline
Indigenous Ways of Knowing: An Introduction to Crossing Cultures

# data[].attributes.subject
Indigenous Ways of Knowing: An Introduction to Crossing Cultures

# data[].attributes.body
Professor Stephen Gilchrist discusses the exhibition Crossing Cultures: The Owen and Wagner Collection of Contemporary Aboriginal Art.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Indigenous Ways of Knowing: An Introduction to Crossing Cultures

# data[].attributes.body
Determining what is real and what is fake has long been a problem for art curators. It is estimated that 20 percent of the worldwide art market is made up of forgeries.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Determining what is real and what is fake has long been a problem for art curators. It is estimated that 20 percent of the worldwide art market is made up of forgeries. But art lover and Dartmouth College mathematics department Chairman Daniel Rockmore has developed a technique that is helping to determine the difference between excellent copy and the real McCoy.

"I joke a lot that I am a mathematician by mistake," says Rockmore. "It was something that I had an aptitude at, but I've always had lots of interests."

One thing Rockmore is particularly interested in is art. And a few years ago, his professional skills and personal interest collided.
The Juncture Of Math And Art
In 2001, through a friend, Rockmore met Nadine Orenstein, a curator of prints and drawings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. At the time, Orenstein was working on an exhibition of the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a Flemish painter from the 16th century. She invited Rockmore to the museum to see the show.

The exhibition featured both drawings by Bruegel and several that had long been attributed to him, but that historians later suspected were drawn by others. "Our exhibition was really the first time we were getting together in one place all of the drawings by Bruegel and the ones that were no longer considered to be by him," says Orenstein.

Rockmore says it was at this exhibit that he realized how his mathematical training could intersect with his love of art. "Nadine was explaining to me the various pen strokes that seem to be characteristic of the way Bruegel works, the way he creates a scene," says Rockmore.

He realized that if he had digital images of the drawings, he could use his math skills to design a computer program that would analyze the pen strokes and characterize which were Bruegel-like and which weren't. So he and some colleagues got hold of the digital images, and wrote the program.
An Art Historian's Tool
By 2004 they had a program that was pretty good at identifying real Bruegels. And now, as Rockmore reports in a recent edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the program has been further improved through the use of a different kind of statistical sampling technique.

The program determines whether a particular drawing is consistent with an artist's style. Until now, Rockmore has only tested his program on Bruegel drawings, but he says there is no reason it could not be used for other artists.

While it can identify suspicious works, it cannot definitively prove that they are fake.

But, says Orenstein, it "might kind of put a little light bulb in the head of the scholar and say, 'Oh, here's something we need to further investigate.' "
A Way To Better Understand Art
In the end, Rockmore doesn't see his work as leading to a way to track down forgers but rather as a tool to deconstruct art - a way of describing what it means to be Picasso-like or Bruegel-like.

"You get deeper questions about the creation of art, and our experience of art," he says. "But it's probably more fun to report on whether or not that's a fake Bruegel."

Although reporting on the science of how we experience art is fun too.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Professor Daniel Rockmore is an art lover - and the chairman of the math department at Dartmouth College. He has united his two interests, art and math, to develop a program that analyzes pen strokes. The program gives art historians a new tool for detecting art forgeries, which are estimated to make up 20 percent of the worldwide art market.

# data[].attributes.body
By combining art and math, this talk provides compelling information for anyone interested in either field. I learned so much about coral reefs, crochet work, hyperbolic geometry — and how two seemingly divergent disciplines can merge to form something beautiful.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Margaret Wertheim leads a project to re-create the creatures of the coral reefs using a crochet technique invented by a mathematician -- celebrating the amazements of the reef, and deep-diving into the hyperbolic geometry underlying coral creation.

# data[].attributes.body
Exploring the concepts, ideas, and results of mathematics is a fascinating topic. On the one hand some breakthroughs in mathematical thought we will study came as accidents, and on the other hand as consequences of attempts to solve some great open problem.

# data[].attributes.body
Articles, excerpts and reader-submitted analyses related to the abacus.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An introduction to the chinese abacus, a brief history of counting devices showing the evolution of the abacus through time and various articles about ancient computers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
IB Maths Resources from Intermathematics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Scroll down this page to find over 300 examples of maths IA exploration topics and ideas for IB mathematics students doing their internal assessment (IA) coursework. Topics include Algebra and Number (proof), Geometry, Calculus, Statistics and Probability, Physics, and links with other subjects. Suitable for Applications and Interpretations students (SL and HL) and also Analysis and Approaches students (SL and HL).

Essential resources for IB students:

Make sure to also visit my page on Paper 3s to download 13 different Paper 3s (which would also make excellent coursework starting points) complete with full markschemes. All free!

Also make sure to visit my page for Exploration Guides to download 3 specific guides to support the whole coursework process for IB students. Also all free!

Essential resources for IB teachers:

If you are a teacher then please also visit my new site: intermathematics.com. My new site has been designed specifically for teachers of mathematics at international schools. The content now includes over 3000 pages of pdf content for the entire SL and HL Analysis syllabus and also the SL and HL Applications syllabus. Some of the content includes:

1. Original pdf worksheets (with full worked solutions) designed to cover all the syllabus topics. These make great homework sheets or in class worksheets - and are each designed to last between 40 minutes and 1 hour.

2. Original Paper 3 investigations (with full worked solutions) to develop investigative techniques and support both the exploration and the Paper 3 examination.

3. A large number of enrichment activities such as treasure hunts, quizzes, investigations, Desmos explorations, Python coding and more - to engage IB learners in the course.

Maths IA - Maths Exploration Topics
A list with over 300 examples of maths IA exploration topics and ideas for IB mathematics students doing their internal assessment (IA) coursework. Suitable for Applications and Interpretations students (SL and HL) and also Analysis and Approaches students (SL and HL).
Algebra and number
1) Modular arithmetic - This technique is used throughout Number Theory. For example, Mod 3 means the remainder when dividing by 3.

2) Goldbach's conjecture: "Every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes." One of the great unsolved problems in mathematics.

3) Probabilistic number theory

4) Applications of complex numbers: The stunning graphics of Mandelbrot and Julia Sets are generated by complex numbers.

5) Diophantine equations: These are polynomials which have integer solutions. Fermat's Last Theorem is one of the most famous such equations.

6) Continued fractions: These are fractions which continue to infinity. The great Indian mathematician Ramanujan discovered some amazing examples of these.

7) Patterns in Pascal's triangle: There are a large number of patterns to discover - including the Fibonacci sequence.

8) Finding prime numbers: The search for prime numbers and the twin prime conjecture are some of the most important problems in mathematics. There is a $1 million prize for solving the Riemann Hypothesis and $250,000 available for anyone who discovers a new, really big prime number.

9) Random numbers

10) Pythagorean triples: A great introduction into number theory - investigating the solutions of Pythagoras' Theorem which are integers (eg. 3,4,5 triangle).

11) Mersenne primes: These are primes that can be written as 2^n -1.

12) Magic squares and cubes: Investigate magic tricks that use mathematics. Why do magic squares work?

13) Loci and complex numbers

14) Egyptian fractions: Egyptian fractions can only have a numerator of 1 - which leads to some interesting patterns. 2/3 could be written as 1/6 + 1/2. Can all fractions with a numerator of 2 be written as 2 Egyptian fractions?

15) Complex numbers and transformations

16) Euler's identity: An equation that has been voted the most beautiful equation of all time, Euler's identity links together 5 of the most important numbers in mathematics.

17) Chinese remainder theorem. This is a puzzle that was posed over 1500 years ago by a Chinese mathematician. It involves understanding the modulo operation.

18) Fermat's last theorem: A problem that puzzled mathematicians for centuries - and one that has only recently been solved.

19) Natural logarithms of complex numbers

20) Twin primes problem: The question as to whether there are patterns in the primes has fascinated mathematicians for centuries. The twin prime conjecture states that there are infinitely many consecutive primes ( eg. 5 and 7 are consecutive primes). There has been a recent breakthrough in this problem.

21) Hypercomplex numbers

22) Diophantine application: Cole numbers

23) Perfect Numbers: Perfect numbers are the sum of their factors (apart from the last factor). ie 6 is a perfect number because 1 + 2 + 3 = 6.

24) Euclidean algorithm for GCF

25) Palindrome numbers: Palindrome numbers are the same backwards as forwards.

26) Fermat's little theorem: If p is a prime number then a^p - a is a multiple of p.

27) Prime number sieves

28) Recurrence expressions for phi (golden ratio): Phi appears with remarkable consistency in nature and appears to shape our understanding of beauty and symmetry.

29) The Riemann Hypothesis - one of the greatest unsolved problems in mathematics - worth $1million to anyone who solves it (not for the faint hearted!)

30) Time travel to the future: Investigate how traveling close to the speed of light allows people to travel "forward" in time relative to someone on Earth. Why does the twin paradox work?

31) Graham's Number - a number so big that thinking about it could literally collapse your brain into a black hole.

32) RSA code - the most important code in the world? How all our digital communications are kept safe through the properties of primes.

33) The Chinese Remainder Theorem: This is a method developed by a Chinese mathematician Sun Zi over 1500 years ago to solve a numerical puzzle. An interesting insight into the mathematical field of Number Theory.

34) Cesaro Summation: Does 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 ... = 1/2?. A post which looks at the maths behind this particularly troublesome series.

35) Fermat's Theorem on the sum of 2 squares - An example of how to use mathematical proof to solve problems in number theory.

36) Can we prove that 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 .... = -1/12 ? How strange things happen when we start to manipulate divergent series.

37) Mathematical proof and paradox - a good opportunity to explore some methods of proof and to show how logical errors occur.

38) Friendly numbers, Solitary numbers, perfect numbers. Investigate what makes a number happy or sad, or sociable! Can you find the loop of infinite sadness?

39) Zeno's Paradox - Achilles and the Tortoise - A look at the classic paradox from ancient Greece - the philosopher "proved" a runner could never catch a tortoise - no matter how fast he ran.

40) Stellar Numbers - This is an excellent example of a pattern sequence investigation. Choose your own pattern investigation for the exploration.

41) Arithmetic number puzzle - It could be interesting to do an exploration where you solve number problems - like this one.

42) Normal Numbers - and random number generators - what is a normal number - and how are they connected to random number generators?

43) Narcissistic Numbers - what makes a number narcissistic - and how can we find them all?

44) Modelling Chaos - how we can use grahical software to understand the behavior of sequences

45) The Mordell Equation. What is the Mordell equation and how does it help us solve mathematical problems in number theory?

46) Ramanujan's Taxi Cab and the Sum of 2 Cubes. Explore this famous number theory puzzle.

47) Hollow cubes and hypercubes investigation. Explore number theory in higher dimensions!

48) When do 2 squares equal 2 cubes? A classic problem in number theory which can be solved through computational power.

49) Rational approximations to irrational numbers. How accurately can be approximate irrationals?

50) Square triangular numbers. When do we have a square number which is also a triangular number?

51) Complex numbers as matrices - Euler's identity. We can use a matrix representation of complex numbers to test whether Euler's identity still holds.

52) Have you got a Super Brain? How many different ways can we use to solve a number theory problem?
Geometry
1a) Non-Euclidean geometries: This allows us to "break" the rules of conventional geometry - for example, angles in a triangle no longer add up to 180 degrees. In some geometries triangles add up to more than 180 degrees, in others less than 180 degrees.

1b) The shape of the universe - non-Euclidean Geometry is at the heart of Einstein's theories on General Relativity and essential to understanding the shape and behavior of the universe.

2) Hexaflexagons: These are origami style shapes that through folding can reveal extra faces.

3) Minimal surfaces and soap bubbles: Soap bubbles assume the minimum possible surface area to contain a given volume.

4) Tesseract - a 4D cube: How we can use maths to imagine higher dimensions.

5) Stacking cannon balls: An investigation into the patterns formed from stacking canon balls in different ways.

6) Mandelbrot set and fractal shapes: Explore the world of infinitely generated pictures and fractional dimensions.

7) Sierpinksi triangle: a fractal design that continues forever.

8) Squaring the circle: This is a puzzle from ancient times - which was to find out whether a square could be created that had the same area as a given circle. It is now used as a saying to represent something impossible.

9) Polyominoes: These are shapes made from squares. The challenge is to see how many different shapes can be made with a given number of squares - and how can they fit together?

10) Tangrams: Investigate how many different ways different size shapes can be fitted together.

11) Understanding the fourth dimension: How we can use mathematics to imagine (and test for) extra dimensions.

12) The Riemann Sphere - an exploration of some non-Euclidean geometry. Straight lines are not straight, parallel lines meet and angles in a triangle don't add up to 180 degrees.

13) Graphically understanding complex roots - have you ever wondered what the complex root of a quadratic actually means graphically? Find out!

14) Circular inversion - what does it mean to reflect in a circle? A great introduction to some of the ideas behind non-euclidean geometry.

15) Julia Sets and Mandelbrot Sets - We can use complex numbers to create beautiful patterns of infinitely repeating fractals. Find out how!

16) Graphing polygons investigation. Can we find a function that plots a square? Are there functions which plot any polygons? Use computer graphing to investigate.

17) Graphing Stewie from Family Guy. How to use graphic software to make art from equations.

18) Hyperbolic geometry - how we can map the infinite hyperbolic plane onto the unit circle, and how this inspired the art of Escher.

19) Elliptical Curves - how this class of curves have importance in solving Fermat's Last Theorem and in cryptography.

20) The Coastline Paradox - how we can measure the lengths of coastlines, and uses the idea of fractals to arrive at fractional dimensions.

21) Projective geometry - the development of geometric proofs based on points at infinity.

22) The Folium of Descartes. This is a nice way to link some maths history with studying an interesting function.

23) Measuring the Distance to the Stars. Maths is closely connected with astronomy - see how we can work out the distance to the stars.

24) A geometric proof for the arithmetic and geometric mean. Proof doesn't always have to be algebraic. Here is a geometric proof.

25) Euler's 9 Point Circle. This is a lovely construction using just compasses and a ruler.

26) Plotting the Mandelbrot Set - using Geogebra to graphically generate the Mandelbrot Set.

27) Volume optimization of a cuboid - how to use calculus and graphical solutions to optimize the volume of a cuboid.

28) Ford Circles - how to generate Ford circles and their links with fractions.

29) Classical Geometry Puzzle: Finding the Radius. This is a nice geometry puzzle solved using a variety of methods.

30) Can you solve Oxford University's Interview Question?. Try to plot the locus of a sliding ladder.

31) The Shoelace Algorithm to find areas of polygons. How can we find the area of any polygon?

32) Soap Bubbles, Wormholes and Catenoids. What is the geometric shape of soap bubbles?

33) Can you solve an Oxford entrance question? This problem asks you to explore a sliding ladder.

34) The Tusi circle - how to create a circle rolling inside another circle using parametric equations.

35) Sphere packing - how to fit spheres into a package to minimize waste.

36) Sierpinski triangle - an infinitely repeating fractal pattern generated by code.

37) Generating e through probability and hypercubes. This amazing result can generate e through considering hyper-dimensional shapes.

38) Find the average distance between 2 points on a square. If any points are chosen at random in a square what is the expected distance between them?

39) Finding the average distance between 2 points on a hypercube. Can we extend our investigation above to a multi-dimensional cube?

40) Finding focus with Archimedes. The Greeks used a very different approach to understanding quadratics - and as a result had a deeper understanding of their physical properties linked to light and reflection.

41) Chaos and strange Attractors: Henon's map. Gain a deeper understanding of chaos theory with this investigation.
Calculus/analysis and functions
1) The harmonic series: Investigate the relationship between fractions and music, or investigate whether this series converges.

2) Torus - solid of revolution: A torus is a donut shape which introduces some interesting topological ideas.

3) Projectile motion: Studying the motion of projectiles like cannon balls is an essential part of the mathematics of war. You can also model everything from Angry Birds to stunt bike jumping. A good use of your calculus skills.

4) Why e is base of natural logarithm function: A chance to investigate the amazing number e.

5) Fourier Transforms - the most important tool in mathematics? Fourier transforms have an essential part to play in modern life - and are one of the keys to understanding the world around us. This mathematical equation has been described as the most important in all of physics. Find out more! (This topic is only suitable for IB HL students).

6) Batman and Superman maths - how to use Wolfram Alpha to plot graphs of the Batman and Superman logo

7) Explore the Si(x) function - a special function in calculus that can't be integrated into an elementary function.

8) The Remarkable Dirac Delta Function. This is a function which is used in Quantum mechanics - it describes a peak of zero width but with area 1.

9) Optimization of area - an investigation. This is an nice example of how you can investigation optimization of the area of different polygons.

10) Envelope of projectile motion. This investigates a generalized version of projectile motion - discover what shape is created.

11) Projectile Motion Investigation II. This takes the usual projectile motion ideas and generalises them to investigate equations of ellipses formed.

12) Projectile Motion III: Varying gravity. What would projectile motion look like on different planets?

13) The Tusi couple - A circle rolling inside a circle. This is a lovely result which uses parametric functions to create a beautiful example of mathematical art.

14) Galileo's Inclined Planes. How did Galileo achieve his breakthrough understanding of gravity? Follow in the footsteps of a genius!
Statistics and modelling 1 [topics could be studied in-depth]
1) Traffic flow: How maths can model traffic on the roads.

2) Logistic function and constrained growth

3) Benford's Law - using statistics to catch criminals by making use of a surprising distribution.

4) Bad maths in court - how a misuse of statistics in the courtroom can lead to devastating miscarriages of justice.

5) The mathematics of cons - how con artists use pyramid schemes to get rich quick.

6) Impact Earth - what would happen if an asteroid or meteorite hit the Earth?

7) Black Swan events - how usefully can mathematics predict small probability high impact events?

8) Modelling happiness - how understanding utility value can make you happier.

9) Does finger length predict mathematical ability? Investigate the surprising correlation between finger ratios and all sorts of abilities and traits.

10) Modelling epidemics/spread of a virus

11) The Monty Hall problem - this video will show why statistics often lead you to unintuitive results.

12) Monte Carlo simulations

13) Lotteries

14) Bayes' theorem: How understanding probability is essential to our legal system.

15) Birthday paradox: The birthday paradox shows how intuitive ideas on probability can often be wrong. How many people need to be in a room for it to be at least 50% likely that two people will share the same birthday? Find out!

16) Are we living in a computer simulation? Look at the Bayesian logic behind the argument that we are living in a computer simulation.

17) Does sacking a football manager affect results? A chance to look at some statistics with surprising results.

18) Which times tables do students find most difficult? A good example of how to conduct a statistical investigation in mathematics.

19) Introduction to Modelling. This is a fantastic 70 page booklet explaining different modelling methods from Moody's Mega Maths Challenge.

20) Modelling infectious diseases - how we can use mathematics to predict how diseases like measles will spread through a population

21) Using Chi Squared to crack codes - Chi squared can be used to crack Vigenere codes which for hundreds of years were thought to be unbreakable. Unleash your inner spy!

22) Modelling Zombies - How do zombies spread? What is your best way of surviving the zombie apocalypse? Surprisingly maths can help!

23) Modelling music with sine waves - how we can understand different notes by sine waves of different frequencies. Listen to the sounds that different sine waves make.

24) Are you psychic? Use the binomial distribution to test your ESP abilities.

25) Reaction times - are you above or below average? Model your data using a normal distribution.

26) Modelling volcanoes - look at how the Poisson distribution can predict volcanic eruptions, and perhaps explore some more advanced statistical tests.

27) Could Trump win the next election? How the normal distribution is used to predict elections.

28) How to avoid a Troll - an example of a problem solving based investigation

29) The Gini Coefficient - How to model economic inequality

30) Maths of Global Warming - Modeling Climate Change - Using Desmos to model the change in atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.

31) Modelling radioactive decay - the mathematics behind radioactivity decay, used extensively in science.

32) Circular Motion: Modelling a Ferris wheel. Use Tracker software to create a Sine wave.

33) Spotting Asset Bubbles. How to use modeling to predict booms and busts.

34) The Rise of Bitcoin. Is Bitcoin going to keep rising or crash?

35) Fun with Functions!. Some nice examples of using polar coordinates to create interesting designs.

36) Predicting the UK election using linear regression. The use of regression in polling predictions.

37) Modelling a Nuclear War. What would happen to the climate in the event of a nuclear war?

38) Modelling a football season. We can use a Poisson model and some Excel expertise to predict the outcome of sports matches - a technique used by gambling firms.

39) Modeling hours of daylight - using Desmos to plot the changing hours of daylight in different countries.

40) Modelling the spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19). Using the SIR model to understand epidemics.

41) Finding the volume of a rugby ball (or American football). Use modeling and volume of revolutions.

42) The Martingale system paradox. Explore a curious betting system still used in currency trading today.
Statistics and modelling 2 [more simplistic topics: correlation, normal, Chi squared]
1) Is there a correlation between hours of sleep and exam grades? Studies have shown that a good night's sleep raises academic attainment.

2) Is there a correlation between height and weight? (pdf). The NHS use a chart to decide what someone should weigh depending on their height. Does this mean that height is a good indicator of weight?

3) Is there a correlation between arm span and foot height? This is also a potential opportunity to discuss the Golden Ratio in nature.

4) Is there a correlation between smoking and lung capacity?

5) Is there a correlation between GDP and life expectancy? Run the Gapminder graph to show the changing relationship between GDP and life expectancy over the past few decades.

7) Is there a correlation between numbers of yellow cards a game and league position?
Use the Guardian Stats data to find out if teams which commit the most fouls also do the best in the league.

8) Is there a correlation between Olympic 100m sprint times and Olympic 15000m times?
Use the Olympic database to find out if the 1500m times have got faster in the same way the 100m times have got quicker over the past few decades.

9) Is there a correlation between time taken getting to school and the distance a student lives from school?

10) Does eating breakfast affect your grades?

11) Is there a correlation between stock prices of different companies? Use Google Finance to collect data on company share prices.

12) Is there a correlation between blood alcohol laws and traffic accidents?

13) Is there a correlation between height and basketball ability? Look at some stats for NBA players to find out.

14) Is there a correlation between stress and blood pressure?

15) Is there a correlation between Premier League wages and league positions?

16) Are a sample of student heights normally distributed? We know that adult population heights are normally distributed - what about student heights?

17) Are a sample of flower heights normally distributed?

18) Are a sample of student weights normally distributed?

19) Are the IB maths test scores normally distributed? (pdf). IB test scores are designed to fit a bell curve. Investigate how the scores from different IB subjects compare.

20) Are the weights of "1kg" bags of sugar normally distributed?

21) Does gender affect hours playing sport? A UK study showed that primary school girls play much less sport than boys.

22) Investigation into the distribution of word lengths in different languages. The English language has an average word length of 5.1 words. How does that compare with other languages?

23) Do bilingual students have a greater memory recall than non-bilingual students?
Studies have shown that bilingual students have better "working memory" - does this include memory recall?
Games and game theory
1) The prisoner's dilemma: The use of game theory in psychology and economics.

2) Sudoku

3) Gambler's fallacy: A good chance to investigate misconceptions in probability and probabilities in gambling. Why does the house always win?

4) Bluffing in Poker: How probability and game theory can be used to explore the the best strategies for bluffing in poker.

5) Knight's tour in chess: This chess puzzle asks how many moves a knight must make to visit all squares on a chess board.

6) Billiards and snooker

7) Zero sum games

8) How to "Solve" Noughts and Crossess (Tic Tac Toe) - using game theory. This topics provides a fascinating introduction to both combinatorial Game Theory and Group Theory.

9) Maths and football - Do managerial sackings really lead to an improvement in results? We can analyse the data to find out. Also look at the finances behind Premier league teams

10) Is there a correlation between Premier League wages and league position? Also look at how the Championship compares to the Premier League.

11) The One Time Pad - an uncrackable code? Explore the maths behind code making and breaking.

12) How to win at Rock Paper Scissors. Look at some of the maths (and psychology behind winning this game.

13) The Watson Selection Task - a puzzle which tests logical reasoning. Are maths students better than history students?
Topology and networks
1) Knots

2) Steiner problem

3) Chinese postman problem - This is a problem from graph theory - how can a postman deliver letters to every house on his streets in the shortest time possible?

4) Travelling salesman problem

5) Königsberg bridge problem: The use of networks to solve problems. This particular problem was solved by Euler.

6) Handshake problem: With n people in a room, how many handshakes are required so that everyone shakes hands with everyone else?

7) Möbius strip: An amazing shape which is a loop with only 1 side and 1 edge.

8) Klein bottle

9) Logic and sets

10) Codes and ciphers: ISBN codes and credit card codes are just some examples of how codes are essential to modern life. Maths can be used to both make these codes and break them.

11) Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise: How can a running Achilles ever catch the tortoise if in the time taken to halve the distance, the tortoise has moved yet further away?

12) Four colour map theorem - a puzzle that requires that a map can be coloured in so that every neighbouring country is in a different colour. What is the minimum number of colours needed for any map?

13) Telephone Numbers - these are numbers with special properties which grow very large very quickly. This topic links to graph theory.

14) The Poincare Conjecture and Grigori Perelman - Learn about the reclusive Russian mathematician who turned down $1 million for solving one of the world's most difficult maths problems.
Mathematics and Physics
1) The Monkey and the Hunter - How to Shoot a Monkey - Using Newtonian mathematics to decide where to aim when shooting a monkey in a tree.

2) How to Design a Parachute - looking at the physics behind parachute design to ensure a safe landing!

3) Galileo: Throwing cannonballs off The Leaning Tower of Pisa - Recreating Galileo's classic experiment, and using maths to understand the surprising result.

4) Rocket Science and Lagrange Points - how clever mathematics is used to keep satellites in just the right place.

5) Fourier Transforms - the most important tool in mathematics? - An essential component of JPEG, DNA analysis, WIFI signals, MRI scans, guitar amps - find out about the maths behind these essential technologies.

6) Bullet projectile motion experiment - using Tracker software to model the motion of a bullet.

7) Quantum Mechanics - a statistical universe? Look at the inherent probabilistic nature of the universe with some quantum mechanics.

8) Log Graphs to Plot Planetary Patterns. The planets follow a surprising pattern when measuring their distances.

9) Modeling with springs and weights. Some classic physics - which generates some nice mathematical graphs.

10) Is Intergalactic space travel possible? Using the physics of travel near the speed of light to see how we could travel to other stars.
Maths and computing
1) The Van Eck Sequence - The Van Eck Sequence is a sequence that we still don't fully understand - we can use programing to help!

2) Solving maths problems using computers - computers are really useful in solving mathematical problems. Here are some examples solved using Python.

3) Stacking cannonballs - solving maths with code - how to stack cannonballs in different configurations.

4) What's so special about 277777788888899? - Playing around with multiplicative persistence - can you break the world record?

5) Project Euler: Coding to Solve Maths Problems. A nice starting point for students good at coding - who want to put these skills to the test mathematically.

6) Square Triangular Numbers. Can we use a mixture of pure maths and computing to solve this problem?

7) When do 2 squares equal 2 cubes? Can we use a mixture of pure maths and computing to solve this problem?

8) Hollow Cubes and Hypercubes investigation. More computing led investigations

9) Coding Hailstone Numbers. How can we use computers to gain a deeper understanding of sequences?
Further ideas:
1) Radiocarbon dating - understanding radioactive decay allows scientists and historians to accurately work out something's age - whether it be from thousands or even millions of years ago.

2) Gravity, orbits and escape velocity - Escape velocity is the speed required to break free from a body's gravitational pull. Essential knowledge for future astronauts.

3) Mathematical methods in economics - maths is essential in both business and economics - explore some economics based maths problems.

4) Genetics - Look at the mathematics behind genetic inheritance and natural selection.

5) Elliptical orbits - Planets and comets have elliptical orbits as they are influenced by the gravitational pull of other bodies in space. Investigate some rocket science!

6) Logarithmic scales - Decibel, Richter, etc. are examples of log scales - investigate how these scales are used and what they mean.

7) Fibonacci sequence and spirals in nature - There are lots of examples of the Fibonacci sequence in real life - from pine cones to petals to modelling populations and the stock market.

8) Change in a person's BMI over time - There are lots of examples of BMI stats investigations online - see if you can think of an interesting twist.

9) Designing bridges - Mathematics is essential for engineers such as bridge builders - investigate how to design structures that carry weight without collapse.

10) Mathematical card tricks - investigate some maths magic.

11) Flatland by Edwin Abbott - This famous book helps understand how to imagine extra dimension. You can watch a short video on it here

12) Towers of Hanoi puzzle - This famous puzzle requires logic and patience. Can you find the pattern behind it?

13) Different number systems - Learn how to add, subtract, multiply and divide in Binary. Investigate how binary is used - link to codes and computing.

14) Methods for solving differential equations - Differential equations are amazingly powerful at modelling real life - from population growth to to pendulum motion. Investigate how to solve them.

15) Modelling epidemics/spread of a virus - what is the mathematics behind understanding how epidemics occur? Look at how infectious Ebola really is.

16) Hyperbolic functions - These are linked to the normal trigonometric functions but with notable differences. They are useful for modelling more complex shapes.

17) Medical data mining - Explore the use and misuse of statistics in medicine and science.

18) Waging war with maths: Hollow squares. How mathematical formations were used to fight wars.

19) The Barnsley Fern: Mathematical Art - how can we use iterative processes to create mathematical art?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Maths IA - 300 Maths Exploration Topics: Scroll down this page to find over 300 examples of maths IA exploration topics and ideas for IB mathematics students doing their internal assessment (IA) co...

# data[].attributes.headline
Philosophy v science: which can answer the big questions of life?

# data[].attributes.subject
Philosophy v science: which can answer the big questions of life?

# data[].attributes.body
Philosopher Julian Baggini fears that, as we learn more and more about the universe, scientists are becoming increasingly determined to stamp their mark on other disciplines. Here, he challenges theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss over 'mission creep' among his peers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Julian Baggini No one who has understood even a fraction of what science has told us about the universe can fail to be in awe of both the cosmos and of science. When physics is compared with the humanities and social sciences, it is easy for the scientists to feel smug and the rest of us to feel somewhat envious. Philosophers in particular can suffer from lab-coat envy. If only our achievements were so clear and indisputable! How wonderful it would be to be free from the duty of constantly justifying the value of your discipline.

However - and I'm sure you could see a "but" coming - I do wonder whether science hasn't suffered from a little mission creep of late. Not content with having achieved so much, some scientists want to take over the domain of other disciplines.

I don't feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere. Science was once natural philosophy and psychology sat alongside metaphysics. But there are some issues of human existence that just aren't scientific. I cannot see how mere facts could ever settle the issue of what is morally right or wrong, for example.

Some of the things you have said and written suggest that you share some of science's imperialist ambitions. So tell me, how far do you think science can and should offer answers to the questions that are still considered the domain of philosophy?

Lawrence Krauss Thanks for the kind words about science and your generous attitude. As for your "but" and your sense of my imperialist ambitions, I don't see it as imperialism at all. It's merely distinguishing between questions that are answerable and those that aren't. To first approximation, all the answerable ones end up moving into the domain of empirical knowledge, aka science.

Getting to your question of morality, for example, science provides the basis for moral decisions, which are sensible only if they are based on reason, which is itself based on empirical evidence. Without some knowledge of the consequences of actions, which must be based on empirical evidence, then I think "reason" alone is impotent. If I don't know what my actions will produce, then I cannot make a sensible decision about whether they are moral or not. Ultimately, I think our understanding of neurobiology and evolutionary biology and psychology will reduce our understanding of morality to some well-defined biological constructs.

The chief philosophical questions that do grow up are those that leave home. This is particularly relevant in physics and cosmology. Vague philosophical debates about cause and effect, and something and nothing, for example - which I have had to deal with since my new book appeared - are very good examples of this. One can debate until one is blue in the face what the meaning of "non-existence" is, but while that may be an interesting philosophical question, it is really quite impotent, I would argue. It doesn't give any insight into how things actually might arise and evolve, which is really what interests me.

JB I've got more sympathy with your position than you might expect. I agree that many traditional questions of metaphysics are now best approached by scientists and you do a brilliant job of arguing that "why is there something rather than nothing?" is one of them. But we are missing something if we say, as you do, that the "chief philosophical questions that do grow up are those that leave home". I think you say this because you endorse a principle that the key distinction is between empirical questions that are answerable and non-empirical ones that aren't.

My contention is that the chief philosophical questions are those that grow up without leaving home, important questions that remain unanswered when all the facts are in. Moral questions are the prime example. No factual discovery could ever settle a question of right or wrong. But that does not mean that moral questions are empty questions or pseudo-questions. We can think better about them and can even have more informed debates by learning new facts. What we conclude about animal ethics, for example, has changed as we have learned more about non-human cognition.

What is disparagingly called scientism insists that, if a question isn't amenable to scientific solution, it is not a serious question at all. I would reply that it is an ineliminable feature of human life that we are confronted with many issues that are not scientifically tractable, but we can grapple with them, understand them as best we can and we can do this with some rigour and seriousness of mind.

It sounds to me as though you might not accept this and endorse the scientistic point of view. Is that right?

LK In fact, I've got more sympathy with your position than you might expect. I do think philosophical discussions can inform decision-making in many important ways, by allowing reflections on facts, but that ultimately the only source of facts is via empirical exploration. And I agree with you that there are many features of human life for which decisions are required on issues that are not scientifically tractable. Human affairs and human beings are far too messy for reason alone, and even empirical evidence, to guide us at all stages. I have said I think Lewis Carroll was correct when suggesting, via Alice, the need to believe several impossible things before breakfast. We all do it every day in order to get out of bed - perhaps that we like our jobs, or our spouses, or ourselves for that matter.

Where I might disagree is the extent to which this remains time-invariant. What is not scientifically tractable today may be so tomorrow. We don't know where the insights will come from, but that is what makes the voyage of discovery so interesting. And I do think factual discoveries can resolve even moral questions.

Take homosexuality, for example. Iron age scriptures might argue that homosexuality is "wrong", but scientific discoveries about the frequency of homosexual behaviour in a variety of species tell us that it is completely natural in a rather fixed fraction of populations and that it has no apparent negative evolutionary impacts. This surely tells us that it is biologically based, not harmful and not innately "wrong". In fact, I think you actually accede to this point about the impact of science when you argue that our research into non-human cognition has altered our view of ethics.

I admit I am pleased to have read that you agree that "why is there something rather than nothing?" is a question best addressed by scientists. But, in this regard, as I have argued that "why" questions are really "how" questions, would you also agree that all "why" questions have no meaning, as they presume "purpose" that may not exist?

JB It would certainly be foolish to rule out in advance the possibility that what now appears to be a non-factual question might one day be answered by science. But it's also important to be properly sceptical about how far we anticipate science being able to go. If not, then we might be too quick to turn over important philosophical issues to scientists prematurely.

Your example of homosexuality is a case in point. I agree that the main reasons for thinking it is wrong are linked with outmoded ways of thought. But the way you put it, it is because science shows us that homosexual behaviour "is completely natural", "has no apparent negative evolutionary impacts", is "biologically based" and "not harmful" that we can conclude it is "not innately 'wrong'". But this mixes up ethical and scientific forms of justification. Homosexuality is morally acceptable, but not for scientific reasons. Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural. There have been claims, for example, that rape is both natural and has evolutionary advantages. But the people who made those claims were also at great pains to stress this did not make them right - efforts that critics sadly ignored. Similar claims have been made for infidelity. What science tells us about the naturalness of certain sexual behaviours informs ethical reflection, but does not determine its conclusions. We need to be clear on this. It's one thing to accept that one day these issues might be better addressed by scientists than philosophers, quite another to hand them over prematurely.

LK Once again, there are only subtle disagreements. We have an intellect and can therefore override various other biological tendencies in the name of social harmony. However, I think that science can either modify or determine our moral convictions. The fact that infidelity, for example, is a fact of biology must, for any thinking person, modify any "absolute" condemnation of it. Moreover, that many moral convictions vary from society to society means that they are learned and, therefore, the province of psychology. Others are more universal and are, therefore, hard-wired - a matter of neurobiology. A retreat to moral judgment too often assumes some sort of illusionary belief in free will which I think is naive.

I want to change the subject. I admit I am pleased that you agree that "why is there something rather than nothing" is a question best addressed by scientists. But I claim more generally that the only meaningful "why" questions are really "how" questions. Do you agree?

Let me give an example to put things in context. Astronomer Johannes Kepler claimed in 1595 to answer an important "why" question: why are there six planets? The answer, he believed, lay in the five Platonic solids whose faces can be composed of regular polygons - triangles, squares, etc - and which could be circumscribed by spheres whose size would increase as the number of faces increased. If these spheres then separated the orbits of the planets, he conjectured, perhaps their relative distances from the sun and their number could be understood as revealing, in a deep sense, the mind of God.

"Why" was then meaningful because its answer revealed purpose to the universe. Now, we understand the question is meaningless. We not only know there are not six planets, but moreover that our solar system is not unique, nor necessarily typical. The important question then becomes: "How does our solar system have the number of planets distributed as it does?" The answer to this question might shed light on the likelihood of finding life elsewhere in the universe, for example. Not only has "why" become "how" but "why" no longer has any useful meaning, given that it presumes purpose for which there is no evidence.

JB I don't know whether it's a virtue or a vice, but in philosophy there is nothing "only" about subtle disagreements! But given we've got as close as we're probably going to on ethics, let's turn to the difference between "how" and "why" questions.

Again, I agree with a lot here. I am unpersuaded, for example, by the argument that there is never any conflict between religion and science because the latter deals with "how" questions and the former "why" ones. The two cannot be so easily disentangled. If a Christian argues that God explains why there was a big bang, then that inevitably says something about God's role in how the universe came into being, too. But I would not go so far as to say that all "why" questions can only be properly understood as "how" ones. The clearest example here is of human action, for which adequate explanations can rarely do without "why" questions. We do things for reasons.

Some very hard-nosed philosophers and scientists describe this as a convenient fiction, an illusion. They claim the real explanation for human action lies at the level of "how", specifically, how brains receive information, process it and then produce action.

But if we want to know why someone made a sacrifice for a person close to them, a purely neurological answer would not be a complete one. The full truth would require saying that there was a "why" at work, too: love. Love is indeed at root the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones. How the biochemical and psychological points of view fit together is clearly puzzling, and, as your aside on free will suggests, our naive assumptions about human freedom are almost certainly false. But we have no reason to think that one day science will make it unnecessary for us to ask "why" questions about human action to which things such as love will be the answer. Or is that romantic tosh? Is there no reason why you're bothering to have this conversation, that you are doing it simply because your brain works the way it does?

LK Well, I am certainly enjoying the conversation, which is apparently "why" I am doing it. However, I know that my enjoyment derives from hard-wired processes that make it enjoyable for humans to tangle linguistically and philosophically. I guess I would have to turn your question around and ask why (if you will excuse the "why" question!) you think that things such as love will never be reducible to the firing of neurons and biochemical reactions? For that not to be the case, there would have to be something beyond the purely "physical" that governs our consciousness. I guess I see nothing that suggests this is the case. Certainly, we already understand many aspects of sacrifice in terms of evolutionary biology. Sacrifice is, in many cases, good for survival of a group or kin. It makes evolutionary sense for some people, in this case to act altruistically, if propagation of genes is driving action in a basic sense. It is not a large leap of the imagination to expect that we will one day be able to break down those social actions, studied on a macro scale, to biological reactions at a micro scale.

In a purely practical sense, this may be computationally too difficult to do in the near future, and maybe it will always be so, but everything I know about the universe makes me timid to use the word always. What isn't ruled out by the laws of physics is, in some sense, inevitable. So, right now, I cannot imagine that I could computationally determine the motion of all the particles in the room in which I am breathing air, so that I have to take average quantities and do statistics in order to compute physical behaviour. But, one day, who knows?

JB Who knows? Indeed. Which is why philosophy needs to accept it may one day be made redundant. But science also has to accept there may be limits to its reach.

I don't think there is more stuff in the universe than the stuff of physical science. But I am sceptical that human behaviour could ever be explained by physics or biology alone. Although we are literally made of the same stuff as stars, that stuff has organised itself so complexly that things such as consciousness have emerged that cannot be fully understood only by examining the bedrock of bosons and fermions. At least, I think they can't. I'm happy for physicists to have a go. But, until they succeed, I think they should refrain from making any claims that the only real questions are scientific questions and the rest is noise. If that were true, wouldn't this conversation just be noise too?

LK We can end in essential agreement then. I suspect many people think many of my conversations are just noise, but, in any case, we won't really know the answer to whether science can yield a complete picture of reality, good at all levels, unless we try. You and I agree fundamentally that physical reality is all there is, but we merely have different levels of optimism about how effectively and how completely we can understand it via the methods of science. I continue to be surprised by the progress that is possible by continuing to ask questions of nature and let her answer through experiment. Stars are easier to understand than people, I expect, but that is what makes the enterprise so exciting. The mysteries are what make life worth living and I would be sad if the day comes when we can no longer find answerable questions that have yet to be answered, and puzzles that can be solved. What surprises me is how we have become victims of our own success, at least in certain areas. When it comes to the universe as a whole, we may be frighteningly close to the limits of empirical inquiry as a guide to understanding. After that, we will have to rely on good ideas alone, and that is always much harder and less reliable.
The Ego Trick A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence M Krauss is published by Simon & Schuster. by Julian Baggini is published by Granta.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Philosophy v science: which can answer the big questions of life?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Philosopher Julian Baggini challenges physicist Lawrence Krauss over 'mission creep' in the scientific community

# data[].attributes.body
The series puts a new spin on science by remixing lectures, documentaries, and movies into music videos celebrating the most mind-blowing knowledge we have.  The videos have been used in classrooms around the world as a means to get people interested in science.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Symphony of Science is a view of our universe through the prism of music.

The series puts a new spin on science by remixing lectures, documentaries, and movies into music videos celebrating the most mind-blowing knowledge we have. The videos have been used in classrooms around the world as a means to get people interested in science.

Since its launch in Fall 2009, Symphony of Science has been featured on CNN, NPR, Wired, Adult Swim, and more, attracting over 50 million views online. The first single, A Glorious Dawn, found release on Jack White's Third Man Records label as a special 7" vinyl single.

"Really quite beautiful and amazing in both its sincerity and aims."

- Carrie Brownstein

The series is the brain child of melodysheep, a musician and filmmaker living in the Pacific Northwest. His work spans from television and music production, having done extensive work with Disney, National Geographic, PBS, and many other collaborators. A TED guest and Webby Award winner, he strives to evoke a sense of awe with his work by celebrating the musicality of life, nature, and pop culture.

In 2016, "A Glorious Dawn" became the first record ever played in space.

"Only when creative people take ownership of cosmic discovery will society accept science as the cultural activity that it is. And so I applaud all such efforts of artists."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

# data[].attributes.headline
Everything you need to teach and to learn chemistry!

# data[].attributes.subject
Everything you need to teach and to learn chemistry!

# data[].attributes.body
Here you will find exemplary digital resources, tools, and online services; your 24:7 aid for teaching and learning chemistry. A collaborative, community-driven effort, ChemEd DL is the place for sharing your work and benefitting from what others have done.

# data[].attributes.headline
Thomas Kuhn: Paradigms and what is Science?

# data[].attributes.subject
Thomas Kuhn: Paradigms and what is Science?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Thomas Kuhn: Paradigms and what is Science?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Thomas Kuhn and "the Structure of Scientific Revolutions"

# data[].attributes.body
Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria "talk" to each other, using a chemical language that lets them coordinate defense and mount attacks. The find has stunning implications for medicine, industry — and our understanding of ourselves.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria “talk” to each other, using a chemical language that lets them coordinate defense and mount attacks. The find has stunning implications for medicine, industry -- and our understanding of ourselves.

# data[].attributes.body
Why should anyone bother learning about things that happened far away and long ago? Who cares about Cleopatra, Charlemagne, Montezuma or Confucius? And why worry about George Washington, or how democratic government and industrial society arose? Isn't there quite enough to learn about the world today?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Why should anyone bother learning about things that happened far away and long ago? Who cares about Cleopatra, Charlemagne, Montezuma or Confucius? And why worry about George Washington, or how democratic government and industrial society arose? Isn't there quite enough to learn about the world today? Why add to the burden by looking at the past? Historians ought to try to answer such questions by saying what the study of history is good for, and what it cannot do. But since no one can speak for the historical profession as a whole, this essay is no more than a personal statement, commissioned by the American Historical Association in the hope of convincing all concerned that the study of history is indeed worthwhile and necessary for the education of effective citizens and worthy human beings. Historical knowledge is no more and no less than carefully and critically constructed collective memory. As such it can both make us wiser in our public choices and more richly human in our private lives.

Historical knowledge is no more and no less than carefully and critically constructed collective memory.

Without individual memory, a person literally loses his or her identity, and would not know how to act in encounters with others. Imagine waking up one morning unable to tell total strangers from family and friends! Collective memory is similar, though its loss does not immediately paralyze everyday private activity. But ignorance of history-that is, absent or defective collective memory-does deprive us of the best available guide for public action, especially in encounters with outsiders, whether the outsiders are another nation, another civilization, or some special group within national borders.

Often it is enough for experts to know about outsiders, if their advice is listened to. But democratic citizenship and effective participation in the determination of public policy require citizens to share a collective memory, organized into historical knowledge and belief. Otherwise, agreement on what ought to be done in a given situation is difficult to achieve. Agreement on some sort of comfortable falsehood will not do, for without reasonably accurate knowledge of the past, we cannot expect to accomplish intended results, simply because we will fail to foresee how others are likely to react to anything we decide on. Nasty surprises and frustrating failures are sure to multiply under such circumstances.

This value of historical knowledge obviously justifies teaching and learning about what happened in recent times, for the way things are descends from the way they were yesterday and the day before that. But in fact, institutions that govern a great deal of our everyday behavior took shape hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Having been preserved and altered across the generations to our own time, they are sure to continue into the future. The United States government is such an institution; so is the world market, armies and the Christian church. Skills like writing, and devices like bureaucracy are even older than Christianity, and concerns that bother us still can be read into the cave paintings left behind by Stone Age hunters as much as twenty thousand years ago. Only an acquaintance with the entire human adventure on earth allows us to understand these dimensions of contemporary reality.

Memory is not something fixed and forever. As time passes, remembered personal experiences take on new meanings. A bitter disappointment may come to seem a blessing in disguise; a triumph may later turn sour, while something trivial may subsequently loom large-all because of what happens later on. Collective memory is quite the same. Historians are always at work reinterpreting the past, asking new questions, searching new sources and finding new meanings in old documents in order to bring the perspective of new knowledge and experience to bear on the task of understanding the past. This means, of course, that what we know and believe about history is always changing. In other words, our collective, codified memory alters with time just as personal memories do, and for the same reasons.

. . . the changing perspectives of historical understanding are the very best introduction we can have to the practical problems of real life.

When teachers of history admit that their best efforts at understanding the past are only tentative and sure to be altered in time to come, skeptics are likely to conclude that history has no right to take student time from other subjects. If what is taught today is not really true, how can it claim space in a crowded school curriculum?

But what if the world is more complicated and diverse than words can ever tell? What if human minds are incapable of finding' neat pigeon holes into which everything that happens will fit? What if we have to learn to live with uncertainty and probabilities, and act on the basis of the best guesswork we are capable of? Then, surely, the changing perspectives of historical understanding are the very best introduction we can have to the practical problems of real life. Then, surely, a serious effort to understand the interplay of change and continuity in human affairs is the only adequate introduction human beings can have to the confusing flow of events that constitutes the actual, adult world.

Since that is the way the world is, it follows that study of history is essential for every young person. Systematic sciences are not enough. They discount time, and therefore oversimplify reality, especially human reality. Current events are not enough either. Destined to almost instant obsolescence, they foreshorten and thereby distort the time dimension within which human lives unfold and, thanks to memory, are conducted.

Memory, indeed, makes us human. History, our collective memory, carefully codified and critically revised, makes us social, sharing ideas and ideals with others so as to form all sorts of different human groups. Each such group acts as it does largely because of shared ideas and beliefs about the past and about what the past, as understood and interpreted by the group in question, tells about the present and probable future.

BUT, you may say: suppose we agree that some sort of knowledge of history is essential for an adult understanding of the world, what actually belongs in our classrooms? The varieties of history are enormous; facts and probabilities about the past are far too numerous for anyone to comprehend them all. Every sort of human group has its own history; so do ideas, institutions, techniques, areas, civilizations, and humanity at large. How to begin? Where to start? How bring some sort of order to the enormous variety of things known and believed about the past?

Teachers of history have always had to struggle with these questions. Early in this century, teachers and academic administrators pretty well agreed that two sorts of history courses were needed: a survey of the national history of the United States and a survey of European history. This second course was often broadened into a survey of Western civilization in the 1930s and 1940s. But by the 1960s and 1970s these courses were becoming outdated, left behind by the rise of new kinds social and quantitative history, especially the history of women, of Blacks, and of other formerly overlooked groups within the borders of the United States, and of peoples emerging from colonial status in the world beyond our borders. These, and still other new sorts of history, enhanced older sensibilities and corrected older biases; but, being both new and different, did not fit smoothly into existing surveys of U.S. national history and western civilization.

Clearly we need careful reflection about, and search for, enduring patterns and critical turning points in the past, for these are the historical facts that everyone needs to know ...

Teachers found it exciting to teach the new kinds of history in special courses that allowed them time to develop the subject properly. It was less satisfying and much harder to combine old with new to make an inclusive, judiciously balanced (and far less novel) introductory course for high school or college students.

But abandoning the effort to present a meaningful portrait of the entire national and civilizational past destroyed the original justification for requiring students to study history. As specialized electives multiplied, historians could not convince others that random samples from the past, reflecting each teacher's special expertise or interests, belonged in everyone's education. For if one sample was as good as another, none could claim to be essential. Competing subjects abounded, and no one could or would decide what mattered most and should take precedence. As this happened, studying history became only one among many possible ways of spending time in school.

Level I. Personal-Local History

The costs of this change are now becoming apparent, and many concerned persons agree that returning to a more structured curriculum, in which history ought to play a prominent part, is imperative. But choice of what sort of history to teach remains as difficult as ever. Clearly we need careful reflection about, and search for, enduring patterns and critical turning points in the past, for these are the historical facts that everyone needs to know, not what happens to interest a particular teacher or aspiring specialist. Whether historians will rise to the occasion and successfully bring old and new sorts of history together into an understandable whole remains to be seen. In the meanwhile, a few obvious suggestions are all that can be offered here.

Amongst all the varieties of history that specialists have so energetically and successfully explored in recent decades, three levels of generality seem likely to have the greatest importance for ordinary people. First is family, local, neighborhood history: something often transmitted orally, but worth attention in school for all that. This would seem especially important for primary school years, when children start to experience the world outside their homes. Second is national history, because that is where political power is concentrated in our time. Last is global history, because intensified communications make encounters with all the other peoples of the earth increasingly important. These levels belong to high school and college, in the years when young people start to pay attention to public affairs and prepare to assume the responsibilities of citizenship. Other pasts are certainly worth attention, but are better studied in the context of a prior acquaintance with personal-local, national, and global history. That is because these three levels are the ones that affect most powerfully what all other groups and segments of society actually do.

Can such courses be taught and fitted into the curriculum? The answer is yes, if teachers and administrators try hard to put first things first and achieve a modicum of clarity about what everyone ought to know. National history that leaves out Blacks and women and other minorities is no longer acceptable; but American history that leaves out the Founding Fathers and the Constitution is not acceptable either. What is needed is a vision of the whole, warts and all. Global history is perhaps more difficult. Certainly our traditional training sidesteps the problem of attaining a satisfactory vision of the history of humanity, since few historians even try for a global overview. Still, some have made the attempt. Moreover, every scale of history has its own appropriate patterns which, once perceived, are as definite and as easily tested by the evidence as are the meaningful patterns that emerge on any other scale. This means, I think, that careful and critical world history is attainable just as surely as is a careful and critical national history that does not omit the important and newly self-conscious groups that were previously overlooked.

Level II: National History

But consensus is slow to come, and may never be achieved. In the meanwhile, teachers and curriculum planners have a difficult task. Authoritative models for courses in national and global history are not readily available. Personal and neighborhood history, too, must be worked out independently for each classroom and locality. But questions to be asked and the range of information that can be handled by children in the primary grades is, perhaps, less difficult to agree upon than at the high school and college levels. Serious and concentrated effort is clearly called for. Only so can history and historians deserve and expect to regain the central place in the education of the young that once was theirs.

Level III: Global History

THREE points remain. First, the study of history does not lead to exact prediction of future events. Though it fosters practical wisdom, knowledge of the past does not permit anyone to know exactly what is going to happen. Looking at some selected segment from the past in order to find out what will occur "next time" can mislead the unwary, simply because the complex setting within which human beings act is never twice the same. Consequently, the lessons of history, though supremely valuable when wisely formulated, become grossly misleading when oversimplifiers try to transfer them mechanically from one age to another, or from one place to another. Anyone who claims to perform such a feat is sadly self-deceived. Practical wisdom requires us instead to expect differences as well as similarities, changes as well as continuities-always and everywhere. Predictable fixity is simply not the human way of behaving. Probabilities and possibilities-together with a few complete surprises-are what we live with and must learn to expect.

Second, as acquaintance with the past expands, delight in knowing more and more can and often does become an end in itself. History offers innumerable heroes and villains. Reading about what people did in far away times and places enlarges our sense of human capacities both for good and evil. Encountering powerful commitments to vanished ideas and ideals, like those that built the pyramids, puts our personal commitment to our own ideals into a new perspective, perhaps bitter-sweet. Discovering fears and hopes like our own in pages written by the medieval Japanese courtier, Lady Murasaki, or reading about the heroic and futile quest for immortality undertaken by the ancient Mesopotamian king, Gilgamesh, stirs a sense of shared humanity that reaches back to the beginning of civilization and across all cultural barriers.

On the other hand, studying alien religious beliefs, strange customs, diverse family patterns and vanished social structures shows how differently various human groups have tried to cope with the world around them. Broadening our humanity and extending our sensibilities by recognizing sameness and difference throughout the recorded past is therefore an important reason for studying history, and especially the history of peoples far away and long ago. For we can only know ourselves by knowing how we resemble and how we differ from others. Acquaintance with the human past is the only way to such self knowledge.

... ignorance of history--that is, absent or defective collective memory--does deprive us of the best available guide for public action .. .

Finally, for those especially attracted to it, search into odd corners and contemplation of the main outlines of history can develop into a hunt for understandings of one's own, as new ideas about connections between one thing and another spring to mind. This sort of historical research and creativity is, of course, the special province of graduate school and of the historical profession at large. Reinterpretations and modifications of received notions about what really happened result from such personal venturing; and new ideas and meanings, tested against the evidence available to other historians, feed into high school and college classrooms by providing teachers with an ever-evolving understanding of the past to set before the young.

In such interaction between research and teaching, eternal and unchanging truth does not emerge. Only inspired, informed guesses about what mattered and how things changed through time. That is all human minds can do to unravel the mystery of humanity and of human groups' encounters with one another and with the world. Not very good, perhaps; simply the best we have in the unending effort to understand ourselves and others, and what happens and will happen to us and to them, time without end.

William H. McNeill was born in Canada in 1917, received his PhD from Cornell University in 1947, and currently serves as Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor of History emeritus at the University of Chicago. He has written more than twenty books, of which the most important is The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago, 1963). His other works include Venire: The Hinge of Europe, 1097-1797 (Chicago, 1974); Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY, 1976); The Metamorphosis of Greece since 1945 (Chicago, 1978); The Human Condition: Art Historical and Ecological View (Princeton, 1980); Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force anal Society since 1000 A.D. (Chicago, 1982); and Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago, 1986). McNeill served as AHA president in 1985, and gave his address on "Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Why should anyone bother learning about things that happened far away and long ago? Who cares about Cleopatra, Charlemagne, Montezuma or Confucius? And why worry about George Washington, or how democratic government and industrial society arose? Isn't there quite enough to learn about the world today?

# data[].attributes.headline
Top 10 Unethical Psychological Experiments

# data[].attributes.subject
Top 10 Unethical Psychological Experiments

# data[].attributes.body
Psychology is a relatively new science which gained popularity in the early 20th century with Wilhelm Wundt.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Psychology is a relatively new science which gained popularity in the early 20th century with Wilhelm Wundt. In the zeal to learn about the human thought process and behavior, many early psychiatrists went too far with their experimentations, leading to stringent ethics codes and standards. Though these are highly unethical experiments, it should be mentioned that they did pave the way to induct our current ethical standards of experiments, and that should be seen as a positive. There is some crossover on this list with the Top 10 Evil Human Experiments. Three items from that list are reproduced here (items 8, 9, and 10) for the sake of completeness.

The Monster Study was a stuttering experiment on 22 orphan children in Davenport, Iowa, in 1939 conducted by Wendell Johnson at the University of Iowa. Johnson chose one of his graduate students, Mary Tudor, to conduct the experiment and he supervised her research. After placing the children in control and experimental groups, Tudor gave positive speech therapy to half of the children, praising the fluency of their speech, and negative speech therapy to the other half, belittling the children for every speech imperfection and telling them they were stutterers. Many of the normal speaking orphan children who received negative therapy in the experiment suffered negative psychological effects and some retained speech problems during the course of their life. Dubbed "The Monster Study" by some of Johnson's peers who were horrified that he would experiment on orphan children to prove a theory, the experiment was kept hidden for fear Johnson's reputation would be tarnished in the wake of human experiments conducted by the Nazis during World War II. The University of Iowa publicly apologized for the Monster Study in 2001.

South Africa's apartheid army forced white lesbian and gay soldiers to undergo 'sex-change' operations in the 1970's and the 1980's, and submitted many to chemical castration, electric shock, and other unethical medical experiments. Although the exact number is not known, former apartheid army surgeons estimate that as many as 900 forced 'sexual reassignment' operations may have been performed between 1971 and 1989 at military hospitals, as part of a top-secret program to root out homosexuality from the service.

Army psychiatrists aided by chaplains aggressively ferreted out suspected homosexuals from the armed forces, sending them discretely to military psychiatric units, chiefly ward 22 of 1 Military Hospital at Voortrekkerhoogte, near Pretoria. Those who could not be 'cured' with drugs, aversion shock therapy, hormone treatment, and other radical 'psychiatric' means were chemically castrated or given sex-change operations.

Although several cases of lesbian soldiers abused have been documented so far-including one botched sex-change operation-most of the victims appear to have been young, 16 to 24-year-old white males drafted into the apartheid army.

Dr. Aubrey Levin (the head of the study) is now Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry (Forensic Division) at the University of Calgary's Medical School. He is also in private practice, as a member in good standing of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta.

This study was not necessarily unethical, but the results were disastrous, and its sheer infamy puts it on this list. Famed psychologist Philip Zimbardo led this experiment to examine that behavior of individuals when placed into roles of either prisoner or guard and the norms these individuals were expected to display.

Prisoners were put into a situation purposely meant to cause disorientation, degradation, and depersonalization. Guards were not given any specific directions or training on how to carry out their roles. Though at first, the students were unsure of how to carry out their roles, eventually they had no problem. The second day of the experiment invited a rebellion by the prisoners, which brought a severe response from the guards. Things only went downhill from there.

Guards implemented a privilege system meant to break solidarity between prisoners and create distrust between them. The guards became paranoid about the prisoners, believing they were out to get them. This caused the privilege system to be controlled in every aspect, even in the prisoners' bodily functions. Prisoners began to experience emotional disturbances, depression, and learned helplessness. During this time, prisoners were visited by a prison chaplain. They identified themselves as numbers rather than their names, and when asked how they planned to leave the prison, prisoners were confused. They had completely assimilated into their roles.

Dr. Zimbardo ended the experiment after five days, when he realized just how real the prison had become to the subjects. Though the experiment lasted only a short time, the results are very telling. How quickly someone can abuse their control when put into the right circumstances. The scandal at Abu Ghraib that shocked the U.S. in 2004 is prime example of Zimbardo's experiment findings.

While animal experimentation can be incredibly helpful in understanding man, and developing life saving drugs, there have been experiments which go well beyond the realms of ethics. The monkey drug trials of 1969 were one such case. In this experiment, a large group of monkeys and rats were trained to inject themselves with an assortment of drugs, including morphine, alcohol, codeine, cocaine, and amphetamines. Once the animals were capable of self-injecting, they were left to their own devices with a large supply of each drug.

The animals were so disturbed (as one would expect) that some tried so hard to escape that they broke their arms in the process. The monkeys taking cocaine suffered convulsions and in some cases tore off their own fingers (possible as a consequence of hallucinations), one monkey taking amphetamines tore all of the fur from his arm and abdomen, and in the case of cocaine and morphine combined, death would occur within 2 weeks.

The point of the experiment was simply to understand the effects of addiction and drug use; a point which, I think, most rational and ethical people would know did not require such horrendous treatment of animals.

In 1924, Carney Landis, a psychology graduate at the University of Minnesota developed an experiment to determine whether different emotions create facial expressions specific to that emotion. The aim of this experiment was to see if all people have a common expression when feeling disgust, shock, joy, and so on.

Most of the participants in the experiment were students. They were taken to a lab and their faces were painted with black lines, in order to study the movements of their facial muscles. They were then exposed to a variety of stimuli designed to create a strong reaction. As each person reacted, they were photographed by Landis. The subjects were made to smell ammonia, to look at pornography, and to put their hands into a bucket of frogs. But the controversy around this study was the final part of the test.

Participants were shown a live rat and given instructions to behead it. While all the participants were repelled by the idea, fully one third did it. The situation was made worse by the fact that most of the students had no idea how to perform this operation in a humane manner and the animals were forced to experience great suffering. For the one third who refused to perform the decapitation, Landis would pick up the knife and cut the animals head off for them.

The consequences of the study were actually more important for their evidence that people are willing to do almost anything when asked in a situation like this. The study did not prove that humans have a common set of unique facial expressions.

John Watson, father of behaviorism, was a psychologist who was apt to using orphans in his experiments. Watson wanted to test the idea of whether fear was innate or a conditioned response. Little Albert, the nickname given to the nine month old infant that Watson chose from a hospital, was exposed to a white rabbit, a white rat, a monkey, masks with and without hair, cotton wool, burning newspaper, and a miscellanea of other things for two months without any sort of conditioning. Then experiment began by placing Albert on a mattress in the middle of a room. A white laboratory rat was placed near Albert and he was allowed to play with it. At this point, the child showed no fear of the rat.

Then Watson would make a loud sound behind Albert's back by striking a suspended steel bar with a hammer when the baby touched the rat. In these occasions, Little Albert cried and showed fear as he heard the noise. After this was done several times, Albert became very distressed when the rat was displayed. Albert had associated the white rat with the loud noise and was producing the fearful or emotional response of crying.

Little Albert started to generalize his fear response to anything fluffy or white (or both). The most unfortunate part of this experiment is that Little Albert was not desensitized to his fear. He left the hospital before Watson could do so.

In 1965, psychologists Mark Seligman and Steve Maier conducted an experiment in which three groups of dogs were placed in harnesses. Dogs from group one were released after a certain amount of time, with no harm done. Dogs from group two were paired up and leashed together, and one from each pair was given electrical shocks that could be ended by pressing a lever. Dogs from group three were also paired up and leashed together, one receiving shocks, but the shocks didn't end when the lever was pressed. Shocks came randomly and seemed inevitable, which caused "learned helplessness," the dogs assuming that nothing could be done about the shocks. The dogs in group three ended up displaying symptoms of clinical depression.

Later, group three dogs were placed in a box with by themselves. They were again shocked, but they could easily end the shocks by jumping out of the box. These dogs simply "gave up," again displaying learned helplessness. The image above is a healthy pet dog in a science lab, not an animal used in experimentation.

The notorious Milgrim Study is one of the most well known of psychology experiments. Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist at Yale University, wanted to test obedience to authority. He set up an experiment with "teachers" who were the actual participants, and a "learner," who was an actor. Both the teacher and the learner were told that the study was about memory and learning.

Both the learner and the teacher received slips that they were told were given to them randomly, when in fact, both had been given slips that read "teacher." The actor claimed to receive a "learner" slip, so the teacher was deceived. Both were separated into separate rooms and could only hear each other. The teacher read a pair of words, following by four possible answers to the question. If the learner was incorrect with his answer, the teacher was to administer a shock with voltage that increased with every wrong answer. If correct, there would be no shock, and the teacher would advance to the next question.

In reality, no one was being shocked. A tape recorder with pre-recorded screams was hooked up to play each time the teacher administered a shock. When the shocks got to a higher voltage, the actor/learner would bang on the wall and ask the teacher to stop. Eventually all screams and banging would stop and silence would ensue. This was the point when many of the teachers exhibited extreme distress and would ask to stop the experiment. Some questioned the experiment, but many were encouraged to go on and told they would not be responsible for any results.

If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was told by the experimenter, Please continue. The experiment requires that you continue. It is absolutely essential that you continue. You have no other choice, you must go on. If after all four orders the teacher still wished to stop the experiment, it was ended. Only 14 out of 40 teachers halted the experiment before administering a 450 volt shock, though every participant questioned the experiment, and no teacher firmly refused to stop the shocks before 300 volts.

In 1981, Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. wrote that the Milgram Experiment and the later Stanford prison experiment were frightening in their implications about the danger lurking in human nature's dark side.

Dr. Harry Harlow was an unsympathetic person, using terms like the "rape rack" and "iron maiden" in his experiments. He is most well-known for the experiments he conducted on rhesus monkeys concerning social isolation. Dr. Harlow took infant rhesus monkeys who had already bonded with their mothers and placed them in a stainless steel vertical chamber device alone with no contact in order to sever those bonds. They were kept in the chambers for up to one year. Many of these monkeys came out of the chamber psychotic, and many did not recover. Dr. Harlow concluded that even a happy, normal childhood was no defense against depression, while science writer Deborah Blum called these, "common sense results."

Gene Sackett of the University of Washington in Seattle, one of Harlow's doctoral students, stated he believes the animal liberation movement in the U.S. was born as a result of Harlow's experiments. William Mason, one of Harlow's students, said that Harlow "kept this going to the point where it was clear to many people that the work was really violating ordinary sensibilities, that anybody with respect for life or people would find this offensive. It's as if he sat down and said, 'I'm only going to be around another ten years. What I'd like to do, then, is leave a great big mess behind.' If that was his aim, he did a perfect job."

In 1965, a baby boy was born in Canada named David Reimer. At eight months old, he was brought in for a standard procedure: circumcision. Unfortunately, during the process his penis was burned off. This was due to the physicians using an electrocautery needle instead of a standard scalpel. When the parents visited psychologist John Money, he suggested a simple solution to a very complicated problem: a sex change. His parents were distraught about the situation, but they eventually agreed to the procedure. They didn't know that the doctor's true intentions were to prove that nurture, not nature, determined gender identity. For his own selfish gain, he decided to use David as his own private case study.

David, now Brenda, had a constructed vagina and was given hormonal supplements. Dr. Money called the experiment a success, neglecting to report the negative effects of Brenda's surgery. She acted very much like a stereotypical boy and had conflicting and confusing feelings about an array of topics. Worst of all, her parents did not inform her of the horrific accident as an infant. This caused a devastating tremor through the family. Brenda's mother was suicidal, her father was alcoholic, and her brother was severely depressed.

Finally, Brenda's parents gave her the news of her true gender when she was fourteen years old. Brenda decided to become David again, stopped taking estrogen, and had a penis reconstructed. Dr. Money reported no further results beyond insisting that the experiment had been a success, leaving out many details of David's obvious struggle with gender identity. At the age of 38, David committed suicide.

This article is licensed under the GFDL because it contains quotations from Wikipedia.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Top 10 Unethical Psychological Experiments - Listverse

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Psychology is a relatively new science which gained popularity in the early 20th century with Wilhelm Wundt. In the zeal to learn about the human thought

# data[].attributes.headline
10 Ways Young Generations Are Better Than Their Parents

# data[].attributes.subject
10 Ways Young Generations Are Better Than Their Parents

# data[].attributes.body
Young people get a bad rap. Current generations are often portrayed as unmotivated and irresponsible compared to the hard-working, sensible generations that came before them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Young people get a bad rap. Current generations are often portrayed as unmotivated and irresponsible compared to the hard-working, sensible generations that came before them. However, it turns out that a lot of these stereotypes aren't true, and the trends run in the opposite direction.

10 Youth Violence Is Actually On The Decline

Hot on the tail of the release of Grand Theft Auto V, violence among young people is a hot-button issue. Rap music, video games, and movies are all becoming increasingly violent, leading many to believe that a generation of unfeeling thugs is inevitable.

The CDC keeps a record of youth violence rates among those aged 10-24. In 2011, over 700,000 cases were reported, which sounds high, but the rate has actually dropped to 7.5 cases per 100,000 kids from 15.2 in 1994. Youth violence has declined far more rapidly than the general decrease in violence seen across all age groups.

9Teen Pregnancy Is Down

Along with violence, sex in the media is blamed for creating a generation of immorality and lust. Teens today are sexualized from a young age. Programs like MTV's 16 and Pregnant alongside high-profile cases of teen pregnancy such as Bristol Palin suggest that it's a rising problem.

However, the numbers tell a different story. Teen pregnancy rates are at a record low and have been dropping for two decades. Hispanic teens' rates have dropped by 34 percent since 2007, and the rate is 24 percent for black teenage girls. Sex education programs and access to contraceptives are credited with the success.

8Teen Drug Use Is Down

A lot of parents worry about drugs-understandably so. Drugs can cause a lot of damage, and no one wants to hear their teenager has been getting high. Parents also worry about underage drinking, with peer pressure now more of a factor than ever.

But the statistics contradict that stereotype. Drinking and marijuana use is down among teenagers. Surprisingly, the group using more illicit substances than ever is the 50-64 age group. Parents of teenagers worried about substance abuse should probably be looking at their own generation.

7 IQ Scores Are Going Up

While teenagers have always thought they knew everything, current generations are part of a continuing trend of increasing IQ scores over the last 100 years. James Flynn, who first observed the trend, says it's due to the world becoming increasingly complex. People are becoming better and better at analyzing the world, rather than thinking in terms of what's useful to their survival. As technology and access to information continues to increase, it's possible that IQ scores will as well.

6 Teen Driving Accidents Have Declined

Teen drivers have been getting safer and safer over the past several decades. Across the US, teen driving deaths dropped from 42 per 100,000 to 25 per 100,000 between 1980 and 1998. Michigan and North Carolina both reported a reduction of over 25 percent in teen crashes between 1997 and 1999, while Florida's fatal accident rate simultaneously dropped 9 percent. In total, since 1975, deaths have dropped by 40 percent among teen male drivers, and 9 percent among females. And it's not just because cars are getting safer, either. In fact, some research has shown that people are generally comfortable with a certain level of risk and that when cars have more safety features, drivers will actually increase their risks to compensate for it.

5 They Are Earning More

Despite the recession, it appears the majority of young people are earning more than their parents did at the same age. A study by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 84 percent of young adults had a higher income than their parents did, with an even greater improvement among those at the bottom of the income scale.

The research hints at greater social mobility than at any point in the past. There are areas of concern-black people were less likely to have surpassed their parents income. They clocked in at at two-thirds, as opposed to to almost 90 percent of Caucasians.

4 Kids Are More Eco-Aware

With the impending threats of global warming and depletion of resources, looking after the environment is more important than ever. Children know this and are turning into a generation of eco-warriors, policing their parents into using less energy and producing less waste.

While some parents might be annoyed, the trend seems to be accelerating in the direction of kids being more eco-conscious. The introduction of school programs and green awards in organizations like the Girl Scouts suggests that the next generation will be more dedicated to saving the planet than any before.

3 Teenagers Are More Generous And Tolerant

Selfishness is the bugbear of the millennial generation. Civic-mindedness and community have gone out of the window, and teenagers don't want to help anyone but themselves. Except that teenagers today are more likely to volunteer than at any point in history. Participation in political demonstrations is also at an all-time high, even more than it was during the revolutionary '60s.

On top of that, younger generations are more racially tolerant, less sexist, and significantly less homophobic than their parents and grandparents were.

2 Play Has Become More Imaginative

With the increase in everything from TV to videogames, children are spending less time playing. That's inevitably causing them to lose the ability to entertain themselves using only their imagination, the way their parents and grandparents were forced to, right? Apparently not.

Researchers from Cleveland did an analysis and found that elementary school children in 2008 were more imaginative than children of the same age were in 1985, despite spending less time playing. The kids also found playing make-believe more comforting, suggesting that electronics aren't killing children's imaginations after all.

1 Millenials Get Along With Their Parents

Those born since the 1980s seem to get along with their parents better than earlier generations. Research by Pew suggests that the ability of young adults to engage with their parents over disagreements has improved since the culture clashes in the later half of the 20th century. Even taste in music, a point which generations are renowned to disagree over, is more similar than before, with large percentages of 20-somethings liking the same music their parents listened to.

You can read some of Alan's non-list writing at skepticalnumber.com or email him at [email protected] .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
10 Ways Young Generations Are Better Than Their Parents - Listverse

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Young people get a bad rap. Current generations are often portrayed as unmotivated and irresponsible compared to the hard-working, sensible generations

# data[].attributes.body
Is empathy a purely human quality? In this segment, Jad and Robert explore the inner workings of the spindle cell, those long neurons that might connect thoughts to feelings, with the help of Dr. Patrick Hof and Jonah Lehrer. Then they talk to Dr. Clive Wynne again to get a different take on how to connect with an animal.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Idea That a Scientific Theory Can Be ‘Falsified’ Is a Myth

# data[].attributes.subject
The Idea That a Scientific Theory Can Be ‘Falsified’ Is a Myth

# data[].attributes.body
J.B.S. Haldane, one of the founders of modern evolutionary biology theory, was reportedly asked what it would take for him to lose faith in the theory of evolution and is said to have replied, “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.”

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
J.B.S. Haldane, one of the founders of modern evolutionary biology theory, was reportedly asked what it would take for him to lose faith in the theory of evolution and is said to have replied, "Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian." Since the so-called "Cambrian explosion" of 500 million years ago marks the earliest appearance in the fossil record of complex animals, finding mammal fossils that predate them would falsify the theory.

But would it really?

The Haldane story, though apocryphal, is one of many in the scientific folklore that suggest that falsification is the defining characteristic of science. As expressed by astrophysicist Mario Livio in his book Brilliant Blunders: "[E]ver since the seminal work of philosopher of science Karl Popper, for a scientific theory to be worthy of its name, it has to be falsifiable by experiments or observations. This requirement has become the foundation of the 'scientific method.'"

But the field known as science studies (comprising the history, philosophy and sociology of science) has shown that falsification cannot work even in principle. This is because an experimental result is not a simple fact obtained directly from nature. Identifying and dating Haldane's bone involves using many other theories from diverse fields, including physics, chemistry and geology. Similarly, a theoretical prediction is never the product of a single theory but also requires using many other theories. When a "theoretical" prediction disagrees with "experimental" data, what this tells us is that that there is a disagreement between two sets of theories, so we cannot say that any particular theory is falsified.

Fortunately, falsification-or any other philosophy of science-is notnecessary for the actual practice of science. The physicist Paul Dirac was right when he said, "Philosophy will never lead to important discoveries. It is just a way of talking about discoveries which have already been made." Actual scientific history reveals that scientists break all the rules all the time, including falsification. As philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn noted, Newton's laws were retained despite the fact that they were contradicted for decades by the motions of the perihelion of Mercury and the perigee of the moon. It is the single-minded focus on finding what works that gives science its strength, not any philosophy. Albert Einstein said that scientists are not, and should not be, driven by any single perspective but should be willing to go wherever experiment dictates and adopt whatever works.

Unfortunately, some scientists have disparaged the entire field of science studies, claiming that it was undermining public confidence in science by denying that scientific theories were objectively true. This is a mistake since science studies play vital roles in two areas. The first is that it gives scientists a much richer understanding of their discipline. As Einstein said: "So many people today-and even professional scientists-seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is-in my opinion-the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth." The actual story of how science evolves results in inspiring more confidence in science, not less.

The second is that this knowledge equips people to better argue against antiscience forces that use the same strategy over and over again, whether it is about the dangers of tobacco, climate change, vaccinations or evolution. Their goal is to exploit the slivers of doubt and discrepant results that always exist in science in order to challenge the consensus views of scientific experts. They fund and report their own results that go counter to the scientific consensus in this or that narrow area and then argue that they have falsified the consensus. In their book Merchants of Doubt, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway say that for these groups "[t]he goal was to fight science with science-or at least with the gaps and uncertainties in existing science, and with scientific research that could be used to deflect attention from the main event."

Science studies provide supporters of science with better arguments to combat these critics, by showing that the strength of scientific conclusions arises because credible experts use comprehensive bodies of evidence to arrive at consensus judgments about whether a theory should be retained or rejected in favor of a new one. These consensus judgments are what have enabled the astounding levels of success that have revolutionized our lives for the better. It is the preponderance of evidence that is relevant in making such judgments, not one or even a few results.

So, when anti-vaxxers or anti-evolutionists or climate change deniers point to this or that result to argue that they have falsified the scientific consensus, they are making a meaningless statement. What they need to do is produce a preponderance of evidence in support of their case, and they have not done so.

Falsification is appealing because it tells a simple and optimistic story of scientific progress, that by steadily eliminating false theories we can eventually arrive at true ones. As Sherlock Holmes put it, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Such simple but incorrect narratives abound in science folklore and textbooks. Richard Feynman in his book QED, right after "explaining" how the theory of quantum electrodynamics came about, said, "What I have just outlined is what I call a "physicist's history of physics," which is never correct. What I am telling you is a sort of conventionalized myth-story that the physicists tell to their students, and those students tell to their students, and is not necessarily related to the actual historical development which I do not really know!"

But if you propagate a "myth-story" enough times and it gets passed on from generation to generation, it can congeal into a fact, and falsification is one such myth-story.

It is time we abandoned it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Idea That a Scientific Theory Can Be ‘Falsified’ Is a Myth

# data[].attributes.headline
WorldmapperRediscover the world as you’ve never seen it before

# data[].attributes.subject
WorldmapperRediscover the world as you’ve never seen it before

# data[].attributes.body
Worldmapper is a collection of world maps called cartograms, where territories are resized on each map according to the subject of interest. Our range of maps is continuously extended and updated. Explore the world as you’ve never seen it before!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Worldmapper | rediscover the world as you’ve never seen it before

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Mapping our place in the world: The atlas for the 21st century. Worldmapper is a collection of world maps where countries are resized according to a broad range of global issues. Our cartograms are unique visualisations that show the world as you’ve never seen it before. Explore them all!

# data[].attributes.body
Is it possible for historical writing to be free from perspective?

What is a fact in history?

How can historical accounts be assessed?

How can one gauge the extent to which a history is told from a particular cultural or national perspective?

To what extent do you think that people learn from their mistakes, and to what extent do you think they keep making the same mistakes?

If you keep a diary, what determines what you choose to include and what you choose to omit?

What is the relation between the style of language used and the history written?

What distinguishes a better historical account from a worse one?

How do we decide which events are historically significant?

# data[].attributes.body
What follows are a series of quotations about history and the historian's craft. They have been culled from a variety of sources and they appear here in totally random order. Their purpose is to incite, energize and stimulate your historical imagination.

# data[].attributes.body
Historians do not, as too many of my colleagues keep mindlessly repeating, "reconstruct" the past.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Historians do not, as too many of my colleagues keep mindlessly repeating, "reconstruct" the past. What historians do is produce knowledge about the past, or, with respect to each individual, fallible historian, produce contributions to knowledge about the past. Thus the best and most concise definition of history is:

The bodies of knowledge about the past produced by historians, together with everything that is involved in the production, communication of, and teaching about that knowledge.

2. The Necessity for History

All developed countries have their National Archives (called the Public Record Office in Britain) and a historical profession, both paid for out of taxpayers' money. This is in recognition of the simple fact that knowledge of the past is essential to society. What happens in the present, and what will happen in the future, is very much governed by what happened in the past. It is obvious that knowledge of the past has not brought easy solutions to problems in, say, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, or Palestine. But without a thorough knowledge of past events and circumstances, we could not even attempt to grapple with these problems. Without knowledge of the past we would be without identity, we would be lost on an endless sea of time. The simplest answer to the questions "Why do history?" or "What is the use of history?" is: "Try to imagine what it would be like to live in a society where there was absolutely no knowledge of the past." The mind boggles. Of course, if history has this vital importance for society, then it must be as accurate as possible, it must be based on evidence and logical thought, not on specious theory or political ideology.

3. Other Justifications for History

Those who study history, for career purposes, or just for personal enjoyment, have other reasons apart from this all-embracing justification for national resources being channelled into the study of history. Many of us feel the almost poetic appeal of the past, have a passionate interest in finding out what really did happen in the past - practically all of the world's major tourist traps relate to the appeal of the past (the Tower of London, San Gimignano in Tuscany, Ephesus in Turkey). It is historians who provide the contextual knowledge that eventually works its way into the guide books, and again the need is for accuracy not specious theory. Historians also provide the contextual knowledge for great works of art and literature, thus enhancing our enjoyment of these. In addition, the study of history offers to individuals major utilitarian learning outcomes. Training in history is training in analysing, evaluating, and interpreting both secondary and primary sources. It develops an understanding that everything written pertaining to history, secondary or primary, must be approached with scepticism and caution. It develops the ability to distinguish between pieces of writing which are well-substantiated and logical, and those which simply express theory, hypothesis, or opinion. The skills and learning outcomes rising from historical study are invaluable in a contemporary world which is dominated by information and communications. The methods and skills required of the historian, and, more important, the attitudes of mind transmitted in the teaching of history, are of vital importance in assessing and filtering the messages constantly battering against us. History also provides a training in the writing up of the results of one's researches, in the form of essays, reports, dissertations. What is essential in history is clear and effective communication, well structured, and written in precise and explicit language.

4. The Subjectivity Question

Many who call themselves "historians" do, indeed, use "history" as a vehicle for expressing their own political commitment. That is sheer is self-indulgence. History is a scholarly, not a political, activity, and while, as citizens, we certainly should act upon our political views, in writing history we have an absolute obligation to try to exclude them. Most historians, like, most scientists, are motivated by the urge to find out. Much nonsense is talked about historians inevitably being "subjective"; the real point is that, being mere human beings, they are "fallible", and subject to many kinds of career and social pressures, or indeed common incompetence. Historians do disagree with each other in their interpretations, as do scientists. But history deals with human values, in a way the sciences do not, so there is more scope for differences in evaluation. Historical evidence is fragmentary, intractable, and imperfect. Individual books and articles may clash with each other; there will always be areas where uncertainty persists, but steadily agreed knowledge emerges in the form of works of synthesis and high-quality textbooks. History, like the sciences, is a co-operative enterprise. Some historians today still seem to perceive historians (usually themselves) as great literary and media figures, as individual intellectual and moral giants giving leadership to ordinary readers. Such historians - subscribers to what I call the " auteur theory" - tend to glory in their own subjectivity. By all means enjoy their literary flourishes, but always remember that the aims of a work of history are very different from those of a work of literature.

The existence of the (mistaken) notion that historians "reconstruct" the past does indicate that there is an awareness of the distinction between "history" and "the past", though this distinction is often obfuscated. Particularly is this the case with the metahistorians - A.J. Toynbee, right-wing political scientists like Francis Fukuyama, Marxists, and postmodernists - who, apart from any other uses, apply the term "history" to some great process (invented by themselves) whereby the past unfolds in a series of stages into the present and on into the future. In their own studies this process is taken as a given, and they test the history of historians against this given. No, to keep clear of all the misconceptions which abound in historical epistemology we have to make a firm distinction between history as "the bodies of knowledge about the past produced by historians", and "the past" as "everything which actually happened, whether known, or written, about by historians or not".

It follows from all of this that periodization, the dividing of the past up into the eras or periods, has no a priori existence. It is simply an analytical tool of historians. A periodization which makes sense for the West, will not make sense for Africa or Asia. A periodization which makes sense for economic history, may well not make sense for social or political history.

7. Primary and Secondary Sources

The only way we can have knowledge of the past is through studying the relics and traces left by past societies, the primary sources. Primary sources, as it were, form the basic "raw material" of history; they are sources which came into existence within the period being investigated. The articles and books written up later by historians, drawing upon these primary sources, converting the raw material into history, are secondary sources (pedants insist on pointing out that secondary sources may become primary sources for still later historians, but this is a matter of such triviality as scarcely to be worth bothering about). The distinction between primary and secondary sources is a critical one, though no historian has ever pretended that it offers a magic key to the nature of historical study, or that primary sources have a necromantic potency denied to secondary ones. There is always some excitement about being in contact with a genuine primary source, but one will not learn very much from a single source. Reading through an edited selection of excerpts from primary sources will have the salutary effect of bringing one in contact with the thinking and language of past generations, but it will not amount to research. If the ordinary reader, or history student, wants to learn quickly about the role and status of women during the Renaissance, or about the causes of the First World War, they will be well advised to go to the secondary authorities, a knowledge of the principles of history being useful in separating out the more reliable from the less. But if you are planning to make an original contribution to historical knowledge, you are unlikely to make much of a stir if you stick strictly to other people's work, that is, the secondary sources - to which, it should be stressed the research historian will frequently return throughout all stages of research and writing. The difference is critical in that strategy which all historians, in one way or another, devise in embarking on a new research project. It is through the secondary sources that one becomes beware of the gaps in knowledge, problems unsolved, suspect explanations. It is with the aid of the secondary sources, and all the other resources of the profession, that one begins to identify the archives in which one will commence one's researches. Primary sources, numbingly copious in some areas, are scarce and fragmentary in others. Much has to be garnered indirectly and by inference. Historians do not rely on single sources, but are always seeking corroboration, qualification, correction; the production of history is very much a matter of accumulating details, refining nuances. The technical skills of the historian lie in sorting these matters out, in understanding how and why a particular source came into existence, how relevant it is to the topic under investigation, and, obviously, the particular codes or language in accordance with which the particular source came into being as a concrete artefact. Philosophers, and others ignorant of history, get confused because they think "primary" means "more truthful", and "secondary" means "less truthful". That is not the distinction at all. A good secondary source will be as reliable as the historian can possibly make it. Primary sources are full of prejudices and errors. They were not written to serve the interests of historians coming along later: they were written to serve the interests of those who created them, going about their own business. We need to understand not just the distinction between primary and secondary sources, but also that there are different types and levels of secondary source. These range from the most highly specialised research-based work, through high-quality textbooks which incorporate some personal research as well as summarise the work of others, to the simple textbooks, and then on to the many types of popular and non-academic history.

8. Witting and Unwitting Testimony

In their work, historians have always recognised that primary sources, as well as containing many kinds of imperfection, also contain many types and many layers of evidence, even if they have tended not to make explicit statements about this. The crucial, though never absolutely rigid, distinction is between the "witting" testimony and the "unwitting". "Witting" means "deliberate" or " intentional"; " unwitting" means "unaware" or "unintentional". "Testimony" means "evidence". Thus, "witting testimony" is the deliberate or intentional message of a document or other source; the "unwitting testimony" is the unintentional evidence (about, for example, the attitudes and values of the author, or about the "culture" to which he/she belongs) that it also contains. Actually, it is the writer, creator, or creators of the document or source who is, or are, intentional or unintentional, not the testimony itself, so these phrases are examples of a figure of speech, the transferred epithet, where the adjective, which strictly speaking should be applied to a person, is transferred to what the person produced - the phrase is all the more effective for that. An understanding of the nature of unwitting testimony, often the most valuable evidence for a historian, might have guarded against the fashion for invoking anthropology and postmodernist theory: from at least the time of Frederick Maitland (1850-1896), historians have been using unwitting testimony to establish the beliefs and customs of past societies. No one is more familiar than the historian with the problems of language to be encountered in primary sources, which abound in obscure technical terms, words and phrases which have changed their meanings over the centuries, attitudes and concepts which no longer exist today, and may be scarcely expressible in the language of today.

It is fun, and it is becoming fashionable, for historians to work with novels, films, paintings, and even music. Doing this is not evidence of some superior virtue, or sensibility; in fact, most of what we know about most periods in the past will continue to come from the more conventional sources. Historians have had a habit of quoting odd lines from novels, as if these, in themselves, somehow provided some extra illumination. Worse, historians refer to characters in novels (or even films) as if they were real people. If cultural artefacts are to be used at all in serious historical writing (and I believe they should - they can be invaluable for attitudes, values, and quality of cultural life), they have to be used seriously. If one is going to refer to a novel or a film, one must provide the essential contextual information about the artefact, and its production and reception, to make the reference a genuine contribution to knowledge: one must provide a "Quintessential Summary" (nature of the artefact, authorial intentions, and so on). When the temptation comes to make use of some cultural artefact the crucial questions to ask are "Does it tell us anything we didn't know already?", and, more probingly, "Does it tell us anything we couldn't discover more readily from another source?" Novels have sometimes been used as sources for living conditions and standards, as paintings of domestic scenes have sometimes been used as sources for what people ate. But it is far better to go directly to the actual statistics of wage rates and to social investigations for the first topic, and to household accounts, statistics of retail sales and so on for the latter one. A painting of eighteenth-century French peasants consuming bread, garlic and wine may be evidence of their regular diet, but there is always the quite strong possibility that the artist might have been more concerned with infusing his painting with the religious symbolism of the Last Supper than with accurate sociological observation. It is perfectly legitimate for editors and publishers to wish to brighten up articles and books by including reproductions of various works of art. But, with rare exceptions, such art works will, at best, be no more than illustrations; at worst they may have little real relevance to what is being said in the article or book. Serious historians should only use such reproductions as genuine primary sources, explicating them in exactly the same way as they would explicate an extract from a written primary source.

10. Strategy and Structure

I have already mentioned the need for identifying a research strategy, using the secondary sources to identify the topics to be addressed and the archives to be used. The writing of history is an iterative process: frequently in writing up one's researches, one will encounter problems necessitating further research in the primary sources, or perhaps the consultation of more secondary sources. The writing of history imposes demands on historians which are very different from those of writing a novel, or, say, literary criticism or sociology. In producing an account which presents a sense of chronological change, and, perhaps, of the movement from one period to another, incorporates explanation, analysis and description, explains causes and consequences, discusses different topics and themes and different aspects of the past (economic, cultural, and so on), and which best conveys to the reader what actually was happening, what interactions there were, what changed, and what did not, it is essential to develop a structure (that is, the sequence of chapters and sections within chapters, and the way in which these are related to each other).

We expect novelists, poets, and playwrights to exploit the ambiguities and resonances of language, even, perhaps, to express directly the dictates of the unconscious, not always logical in its choice of words. Historians, on the other hand, should convey their findings as clearly and explicitly as possible. Some metaphors may be an aid to communication, others will simply contribute to confusion and obfuscation. With all the temptations to indulge in metaphor and rhetoric, cliché, sloppy phrasing and slang, getting it right is fiendishly difficult. Two essential injunctions are: "reflect" and "revise". What is it you really want to say? Is precise explication really assisted by phrases like, "webs of meaning", "cultural scripts", "discursive domains"? Revise, not to achieve elaborate literary effect, but to convey precisely what you mean to the reader. An exact, uncluttered style is essential to historical communication, it is not an extra; and if the style can be elegant (which is very different from being elaborate or rhetorical) so much the better. Sentiment is not enough in historical writing, what is needed is thought.

All human activities, including history, are culturally (or socially, the meanings in this instance are the same) influenced, but history is not "culturally constructed" or "culturally determined". Too many naïve statements have been made along the lines of "each age rewrites its history". History is not a formation dance in which everybody in one period marches in one direction, and then, in the next, marches off in a different direction. What has happened in the history of historical writing is that the scope, and the sophistication, of history have steadily extended. In the twentieth century there was some development away from political history, but political history is still very important. In fact, no one type of history is intrinsically better than another: provided the fundamental, but ever-expanding methodologies are adhered to, it all depends upon which topics and questions are being addressed. In the recent study of history greater emphasis has been given to comparative history and to cultural history: but one of the greatest strengths of history today is that nothing is ruled out. Conclusion At its very core history must be a scholarly discipline, based on thorough analysis of the evidence, and in the writing up of which language is deployed with the utmost precision. There must be constant awareness of the methods and principles of that discipline, constant attention to how it is taught, and how, at different levels, it is communicated to wider audiences.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Historians do not, as too many of my colleagues keep mindlessly repeating, "reconstruct" the past. What historians do is produce knowledge about the past, or, with respect to each individual, fallible historian, produce contributions to knowledge about the past.

# data[].attributes.headline
Why Study History Through Primary Sources

# data[].attributes.subject
Why Study History Through Primary Sources

# data[].attributes.body
It is clear that all our information in regard to past events and conditions must be derived from evidence of some kind. This evidence is called the source.

# data[].attributes.headline
The family history of Facebook: how social media will change the world

# data[].attributes.subject
The family history of Facebook: how social media will change the world

# data[].attributes.body
I’m fascinated by social media. My Gen X friends can’t understand it. Most of them are too busy struggling with families and careers to spend time glued to Facebook and Twitter.

# data[].attributes.headline
How art gives shape to cultural change - Thelma Golden

# data[].attributes.subject
How art gives shape to cultural change - Thelma Golden

# data[].attributes.body
Thelma Golden, curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, talks through three recent shows that explore how art examines and redefines culture. The "post-black" artists she works with are using their art to provoke a new dialogue about race and culture -- and about the meaning of art itself.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How art gives shape to cultural change - Thelma Golden

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Walter Darby Bannard Archive is an online archive of written works by and about Walter Darby Bannard.

# data[].attributes.headline
The idea of 'ethical art' is nonsense. We have to separate art from life

# data[].attributes.subject
The idea of 'ethical art' is nonsense. We have to separate art from life

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On my kitchen wall, there hangs a cartoon by the brilliant illustrator Tom Gauld. I bought it from him after I saw it in the Guardian, where it appeared on a letters page in which readers debated the impact of revelatory biography on art. Yes, indeed. It's possibly rather middle class, this cartoon, and perhaps you're already thinking: my God, you couldn't parody this woman if you tried. But I am going to tell you about it anyway.

It has eight frames. The first contains its title, which is: "Eric Gill's Busy Day". The second, captioned "Typography", shows Eric Gill, the artist, messing about with fonts. The fourth, "Sculpting", shows him bashing away with a hammer. The sixth, "Tea Break", has him with a cup of darjeeling in his hand. And in the seventh, "Drawing", he is involved with a pencil.

But what, I hear you ask, of frames three, six and eight? In fact, they're just white squares: "Censored," they say. In these spaces, you must imagine what our hero is up to - though it's probably best not to, given that Gill had an incestuous relationship with his sister, abused his two elder daughters and experimented sexually with his dog.

Last Friday morning, I stood in front of this cartoon, a cup of tea in my hand, and I thought yet again about the fraught line between a man's life and his work. Moments before, I'd read that the Tate had removed from its online collection 34 prints by Graham Ovenden, the artist who was last week found guilty at Truro crown court of six charges of indecency with a child and one count of indecent assault. And while I didn't disapprove of this decision one little bit (the gallery, quite properly, is seeking information about whether any of these images of children portray Ovenden's victims), I could feel an old anxiety creeping over me.

Where, I wonder, will this investigation end? According to what I read, the Tate is also considering the "wider ethics" of showing work by Ovenden, and until this review is complete, these 34 prints "will not be available to view by appointment". Wider ethics. What does this mean, exactly? It sounds a touch North Korean. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the images in question do not portray Ovenden's victims. What then? Will the Tate return them to the public view? Surely it must, for if it is unethical to show work by a paedophile, what are they going to do about all the other artists who had dubious sex lives? Unless, of course, this rule only applies to perverts who are living.

It's baffling to me, the belief that art must be "ethical", as if it were so much fair trade chocolate. It's so much more complicated than that. The laughable idea that it can pass or fail some kind of tick-box test! What was art in March must surely be art in April. You can't un-art art, though Hitler had a go, when he decided that what was modern was also degenerate and set about destroying it and, far worse, those who made it.

There are those who will say that Ovenden's images of children are now revealed to be porn rather than art, but that argument crumbles to dust in this case, since the subjects of many of the Tate's images aren't even naked. Just to be clear, though - even if the children were naked, I wouldn't feel any differently. The qualities that won them a place in the Tate's collection can't be extinguished - rubbed out, like chalk on a board - by the perversions of the man who created them. If those qualities now make you feel uncomfortable as you look on, well, that is a part of their power. Live with it.

Not to play the art critic, either - even if I thought Ovenden was talentless, I would still be writing this - but it seems to me that much of his work captures something about childhood that many adults are reluctant to acknowledge: its loneliness, its isolation, the feeling that one will never make it out and into freedom. It may well be that he had his reasons for exaggerating these aspects of it in his work but that doesn't make such emotions ersatz.

We have to give it up, this weird inability of ours to separate art and life. It makes fools of us. People were after Ted Hughes for years - the old misogynist, the monster, the wife killer - and then, in 1998, he published Birthday Letters and they had to eat their words. All that love and pain and regret. "Drawing calmed you," he wrote, and suddenly they had it from his side.

But it also robs us, if we give in to it, of so much that is good and beautiful. When Andrew Motion published his biography of Philip Larkin in 1993, and we learned of his casual racism, and the way he behaved with women, they all lined up to have a go at him: Lisa Jardine, Tom Paulin, Alan Bennett. Jardine said, somewhat gleefully: "We don't tend to teach Larkin much now in my department of English. The Little Englandism he celebrates sits uneasily within our revised curriculum." I remember feeling enraged by this. For one thing, Larkin doesn't celebrate anything terribly much - he's not that kind of poet (and when he does, it's mostly love). For another, I could not get over the idea that someone would deny their students the pleasure of discovering Larkin's poetry - so clear, so plangent, so intensely beautiful - because they didn't agree with his politics. It felt criminal to me.

Did Albert Goldman's sordid revelations about Elvis and John Lennon honestly change how we feel about their music? No, and nor should they have done. Did you go off Brighton Rock once you found out, courtesy of his biographer Michael Sheldon, that Graham Greene wanted to commit adultery "behind every high altar in Italy"? If you did, it's your loss, not his.

I could go on and on. With every new biography, there comes fresh outrage. But let's return to where we started: what about Eric Gill? The Tate has a piece by Gill called , made for Edward Perry Warren, a collector who also commissioned Rodin's . It's a lovely thing, a naked couple carved in Hopton Wood stone, clinging to one another as if sex were a matter of life and death (which it is, sometimes).

Does it change anything knowing that one of the models was Gill's sister, Gladys, with whom he was then having an incestuous relationship? Not really. It has an existence all of its own, this carving, powerful and true. Gill made it but it's we who keep its meaning alive, bringing to it our feelings, our thoughts, our sense, however muddled, of what it means to be human.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The idea of 'ethical art' is nonsense. We have to separate art from life | Rachel Cooke

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Rachel Cooke: We'd be wrong to let the sordid revelations about Graham Ovenden's sex life colour our appreciation of his work

# data[].attributes.body
Is everything art? (Think  Tracey Emin's My Bed, Marcel Duchamp's The Fountain)

To what extent do you gain understanding of human psychology in general, or society's dynamics n general, from the particular version in the particular novel?

If an artist makes a copy of a great painting that is so well done that he can deceive most experts, is he as great an artist as the original painter?

What distinguishes propaganda from art that expresses a point of view?

To what extent do artists, critics, and members of the general public audiences all share the same criteria for evaluating the work of art?

Are there concepts, named in language, that you think are extremely important - perhaps even essential - in discussing and evaluating the arts?

To what extent do you think that some of the arts gain their communicative power by being free of language and its confines?

What characteristics do the arts share in common in their ways of working?

To what extent do the arts help us to see the world with new eyes?

Do you think there are universal standards of beauty, or do you think they vary from country to country?

'It's a great work of art, but I don't like it.' - How, if at all, can someone say this with consistency?

How much can we learn about the way a culture sees the world by studying the art that it produces?

Does a colour photograph capture nature more accurately than a black and white one?

To what extent do you think you can understand or appreciate a work of art if you know nothing about the context?

To what extent do you think artists ought to engage with the political issues of the day?

When, if ever, do you think that a work of art should be censored?

To what extend does - and should - art inform our ethical position?

# data[].attributes.headline
Michael Dunn: What Makes a Good Knowledge Question?

# data[].attributes.subject
Michael Dunn: What Makes a Good Knowledge Question?

# data[].attributes.body
Michael Dunn creator of http://theoryofknowledge.net/ and experienced Theory of Knowledge teacher answers the question: What makes a good Knowledge Question? in his guide to Theory of Knowledge for the IB Diploma.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Michael Dunn: What Makes a Good Knowledge Question?

# data[].attributes.headline
Knowing and Knowledge: Kathleen Alexander at TEDxVirginiaTech

# data[].attributes.subject
Knowing and Knowledge: Kathleen Alexander at TEDxVirginiaTech

# data[].attributes.body
Dr. Kathleen Alexander has been conducting research in East and Southern Africa for over twenty years.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Knowing and Knowledge: Kathleen Alexander at TEDxVirginiaTech

# data[].attributes.body
Remote Teaching Resources for IB Teachers serves as a vessel to project my passions, and clue in my loyal readers as to what inspires me in this crazy world.

# data[].attributes.body
The "brand new" TOK exhibition is worth 33% of the grades. It is assessed internally, but moderated externally. The exhibition aims to assess how you can apply TOK concepts to the real world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
TOK 2022: THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE WEBSITE FOR THE IBDP

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Free TOK website for students and teachers of the IB DP. Contains a wealth of lesson materials as well as top tips for the assessments of the new 2022 theory of knowledge specification.

# data[].attributes.headline
A TOK Understanding Knowledge& Knowers Workshop

# data[].attributes.subject
A TOK Understanding Knowledge& Knowers Workshop

# data[].attributes.body
Take a moment to reflect on the painting below by Rene Magritte “Treachery of Images” which he created in 1928-1929. This is the image that appears on the cover of your TOK course overview. As a critical thinker & “knower”, you will need to develop the skills that will allow you to observe, examine, experiment, interpret, reflect, evaluate & assess yourself & the world around you.

# data[].attributes.headline
are you curious to know how to write TOK Essay!!

# data[].attributes.subject
are you curious to know how to write TOK Essay!!