Knowledge is Power for Survival Training Day

Theory of Knowledge is a subject that encourages students to reflect on what they know—and how they know it. But it also requires them to consider what they don’t know, and this is one of the key objectives behind our Survival Day trip.

This year, 60 students ventured out to 怀柔石门山露营区 Camping Area in Huairou Shimen Mountain), where they were placed in an unfamiliar context and cut off from the tools they usually rely on to fill gaps in their understanding—books, the internet, and their phones. This experience helps them recognise how difficult it can be to accurately identify the boundaries of our knowledge.

Before Survival Day, many students might confidently say, “I know how to make a fire using a flint and steel.” But this trip teaches them that they don’t really know how to do that unless they’ve actually experienced it. Watching a video or reading about the process is not the same as feeling the tools in their hands, gauging the pressure needed on the steel, or arranging the kindling so it catches a spark.

Survival Day also prompts students to reflect on how we value different types of knowledge. Is knowing how to start a fire more or less valuable than knowing how to solve a quadratic equation? How do we decide? Why do we teach one of these skills in school, but not the other?

These are the kinds of questions we hope our students will be pondering as they drift off to sleep on the bus ride back to school—tired out after a long day of building wobbly shelters, burning sausages, and getting (temporarily) lost.