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 experience the IB class, Theory of Knowledge (TOK), but everyone should have a chance. We offer TOK content to all students through Gen Z-native formats: visual, modular epubs and social media reels.
Key Topics: Landscape of Knowledge, Knowledge Acquisition, Critical Thinking, Epistemic Cognition, Epistemic Virtue, Extended Cognition, Theory of Mind & Agentic AI.
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.