We have just started our TOK course this week, we first talked about 16 words and one of them is the word perspective. Perspective means a particular way of thinking about something. Your perspectives might be totally different from others and that is because of your experiences, religion and the environment you are staying. We discussed four questions:
- Is it wrong to place yourself in the middle of your own map of the world?
Africa is in the middle if the map on image 1, Australia is in the middle of the map on image2. These two examples show different perspectives on how people see the world. The activity we done before which is to draw world map without any help, and of course everyone’s world map is different. The reason of that might be the environment.
And we found out that the world we know now is very different from what we know the world when we were child. Family is basically the world of a child, as we gain more knowledge education and on the Internet or travel a lot our worldview expanded. That is another example of perspectives.
- What does this say about how we see ourselves in the world particularly in relation to others?
I think I can use the example of child views v. now views. When we were child we only need to consider about your parents, or ourselves maybe at that time you will think, “everybody has to think about me first”, but now it changes you found out that there are not only you on the planet there are more people than you thought, there are some people living under a bad life-conditions, somebody might have the same thoughts as you, etc. then you started to think about others and I think this is the start point of a person’s socialize.
- What is the connection between maps and politics?
I think the general relationship is map shows the territories and the boundaries. I like the point that Josh rose up: “map separates the country,” it reminds me that several years ago some Tibetan wanted to be separate from China I think this is also related to perspectives, what we thought about then and what they thought about themselves is totally different. Taiwan is also an example; mainland China think Taiwan is a part of China, but Taiwanese people they don’t think so although they call themselves a part of China. I think the reason of this is because of education, what our teachers and parents told us were different and therefore we think about it differently.
- Is there a thing as a correct map? Why?
In my opinion every map is not exact it has error, if we compared the map the true world, then the map will be wrong. This is about one perspective; another perspective is depends on what is the purpose of the map. If you were a diver you might want a GPS map shows all the streets, if you were a helicopter diver you might want a topographical map, then is map is correct.