A Free Series for High-School Students
Guide #1 – Education and the Unconscious
You are born with powers of mind — like reasoning, imagination, and perception. But to use them well, you need a rich base of knowledge. This guide tells you why.
Our background knowledge is always working. We perceive, analyze, and create based on what we already know — we just don’t notice. It operates below the surface of awareness, quietly shaping everything we think and do.
Education matters because it builds that base. The broader and richer your knowledge, the more powerfully your mind can work.
Based on Harry Broudy’s Theory of the Uses of Schooling.
Guide #2 – TOK4ALL
Coming Summer 2026
Only a fraction of high school students get to take the core IB class — Theory of Knowledge (TOK) — but its content should be available to all. TOK asks the big questions: How do we know what we know? What are the limits and barriers to knowledge? How do we think critically and act with intellectual integrity? It maps the landscape of human knowledge — from the sciences to the arts to everyday life.
We design TOK content for Gen Z: short modular epubs — heavy with visuals — and social media reels. We also extend standard TOK content by covering topics like Knowledge Acquisition, Epistemic Cognition, Epistemic Virtue, Extended Cognition, Theory of Mind, & Agentic AI.
We’re building the delivery system now. We think students will find the content useful.
About the Author
Student Short Guides To The Mind by John G. Schmitz, Ph.D. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.