TOK4ALL
Theory of Knowledge for All
You can’t switch your autopilot off. So build it well.
The best thinking course in secondary education — for the students who will never be allowed into it
The International Baccalaureate’s Theory of Knowledge course asks one question — how do you know that? — and builds a 100-hour course around it and around the knower who asks it. Fewer than one secondary student in a hundred worldwide, and fewer than three in a hundred in the United States, will ever take it.
TOK4ALL is for the others. A free, plain-language guide to your own mind and to knowing well: how your mind works below the surface, why school works even when you forget what you learned, what you owe other people when you pass on what you know, and how to think with an AI without handing it your judgment. Written for high-school students. Useful to anyone.
One text, three ways in
Read it
Fifteen short sections, a page of everyday reminders, and an exercise wing. Free online and in print.
Watch it
Every idea in the book cut into short video — Instagram, TikTok, YouTube — under the TOK4ALL handle.
Talk to it
An AI advisor built on the book itself, so you can question it, argue with it, and make it show its sources.
A sample: the Truth Contract
Most of what you know, you did not find out. Someone handed it to you — a parent, a teacher, a book, a screen. Which raises the question: what do we owe each other, as givers and receivers of knowledge?
TOK4ALL, Section XI
Two rules, simple enough to memorize. One: for something to count as knowledge, it has to be reliably produced. Two: share only reliable knowledge — and if you’re not sure, say so. That’s the whole contract. You’ve already signed.
Where it stands
The complete first draft was finished in August 2026 and is being revised. TOK4ALL is the second of the Student Short Guides to the Mind; the first, Education and the Unconscious, is free on this site. The project is organizing as a nonprofit. It is, and will remain through publication, a work in progress.
Hear when it’s ready
TOK4ALL by John G. Schmitz, Ph.D. — PsyArts Press. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.