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The Great Gatsby And Personal Knowledge

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From the moment we are born we start to gain knowledge and we continue to do so as we age. Throughout our years, the knowledge we learn becomes more and more complex, as we have more understanding though various experiences. Ultimately, we may notice that there are different types of knowledge, which are shared knowledge and personal knowledge. Shared knowledge is generally exchanged between people, organizations and is known to the general public. While on the other hand, personal knowledge is gained by firsthand experiences especially through emotion, imagination, faith and intuition. This begs the question of where is the line between shared and personal knowledge and furthermore, to what extent are we even capable of purely personal knowledge. …show more content…

However, upon discussing the novel in class, my teacher and other students continuously spoke about how incredible Fitzgerald’s writing is. Consequently, I started to ask myself if my opinion of Fitzgerald’s writing style was wrong, especially because my teacher, with far more experience and authority, was telling me differently. Now after two months of discussing The Great Gatsby, I realize that my opinion has changed: I now find Fitzgerald’s writing style fantastic. This made me wonder how we know our thoughts are our own. This shows that particularly for students we find that a lot of the time teachers tell us what to do or think unintentionally, so it can be hard to distinguish if our thoughts are truly personal or shared with, and from, the others around us. We even see this within the IB education; the IB education is designed to encourage individual thought (personal knowledge), yet the curriculum ironically sometimes results in the reverse as students can simply subscribe to shared knowledge for fear of “getting it wrong” and receiving poor …show more content…

In our Theory of Knowledge class, we often do ethical “pickles” (dilemmas). When an ethical pickle is presented, the class usually splits into different sides, which represent various opinions about the ethical pickle. It is interesting because we all live in the same city and go to the same school, yet our views on ethical problems are often completely different. This suggests that in spite of the influence of shared ethical knowledge, all of us develop a personal morality, which indicates that an important role is still played by personal

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