I teach philosophy on TikTok, perhaps to the surprise of some colleagues in the discipline (who haven’t met me), and to parts of the internet. The core skeptical question I’m most often asked (or, at least, the question that’s at least behind the questions I’m actually asked), is whether it’s possible to teach philosophy in 60 seconds or less. I’m familiar with this question. Answering it experimentally is the reason I started making TikTok videos. Within 30 days of beginning the experiment, I’d answered it in the affirmative to my satisfaction. Here, I’d like to reflectively reconstruct why I think this is the case.
In what we might loosely refer to as “the literature” on pedagogy in higher education, “active learning” has long been contrasted as a better model of education than the “transmission of knowledge” (ToK) model that many of us have internalized and baked into our pedagogy (reflectively or otherwise).
In the ToK model, the teacher has some expertise, some specialized knowledge, that students need (and perhaps want), and her primary aim is to share that knowledge in a deep, rigorous, and comprehensive way. Students come in with more or less “blank slates” that need to be filled with the kind (and form) of knowledge that will allow them to engage in some specialized practice or activity, like, for instance, contributing to literature in the discipline of philosophy via a published research paper.
In workshops across university campuses, the professional and amateur pedagogues (like myself) that work with centers of “Teaching,” “Teaching and Learning,” or “Learning Excellence” will sometimes object to ToK as having been designed, via the industrial revolution, as explicitly for the production of factory workers. It’s referred to as the “factory model” of education. Images of rote memorization exercises—sometimes lasting 8 hours at a time and led by a stern, idiot schoolmaster—are invoked to explain why faculty need to permanently archive their PowerPoint slide decks. Faculty who resist risk being pejoratively (albeit indirectly) labeled the “Sage on the Stage,” which we’re told is essentially embodying the Dickensian Schoolmaster.
But the reaction against the ToK model of education in such circles is a bit overstated. (Something even us pedagogues are starting to recognize.) Some students need the kind of specialized knowledge that this model is most adept at providing. Call it “transmission,” “installation,” or simply “sharing,” but many graduate students want to publish papers in a highly professionalized discipline, and courses that exclusively emphasize self-discovery, the “co-production” of knowledge, or intellectual humility will not provide that for them. The problem comes when most college teachers—who received their PhDs in highly competitive, research-focused graduate programs—sometimes don’t realize that there’s another, better way to approach the undergraduate education that comprises the vast majority of their teaching obligations.
The new model asks instructors to articulate clear learning goals, and encourages many of these learning goals to focus on something other than creating area experts, like themselves, or cultivating highly professionalized skills, like research writing for academic publications.
But when pedagogues like me refuse to recognize anything legitimate about the ToK model, and professors rightly recognize that this model is what they, themselves, have found to be the most effective part of their learning process, the result is misunderstanding, and sometimes quite a bit of bad faith engagement, all around.
So we, as faculty at (elite) undergraduate (research) institutions, need to bring the ToK model just a bit closer to the model preferred by those pedagogues. We need a model of “Teaching Intensive Knowledge-co-production” (TIK) that we can marry to the ToK model.
We need TIK-ToK.
My 12.6k (and counting) followers on TikTok (the platform) are graduate students, other professors, middle school children, bored undergraduates from other institutions, ex-Mormons (a surprising number of ex-Mormons), and enthusiastic users of SoberTok. I don’t presume that they want to develop any of the expertise I can offer them (mostly on epistemic responsibility and its conceptual relationship to doxastic voluntarism), though I sometimes assume they’d like to access it. I’m sometimes a “Sage” on that stage, and simply record a shaky (cinema verite), straight to iPhone camera explainer about a difficult research topic I’ve encountered. Far more often, though, my learning goals are simpler. By the end of most of my Tiks (or Toks, or whatever the equivalent term to Twitter’s Tweets is), I want my viewers to understand something like, “The distinction between instrumental and final goods,” or “How Pascal’s Wager works,” or simply “What the surprise exam paradox is.” With some careful consideration, I can design a learning experience that illustrates these. I can engage in (sometimes extensive) discussion about that experience in the comments. I can link to further resources for those who might want to go on to declare a philosophy major.
The trick on the TIK-ToK model is just choosing the right learning goals. Not trying to take on too much (I’d never attempt to survey an entire literature in about 10 seconds), or presume to authoritatively explain (and dismiss) an entire sub-field or discipline. (Unless I was doing that as. a. joke.)
Might TIK-ToK lead to confusion among my 12.6k “students?” Obviously yes. And in the same way that my 27, 50-minute “active learning” lectures often lead to confusion in the 150 undergraduates who take my semester-long intro to philosophy course at Notre Dame. And in the same way that my 5-year-long PhD studies left me (somehow, still) unable to articulate what the “synthetic a priori” is with any sort of comprehension. Confusion is a crucial part of the learning process, as is curiosity, clarity, failure, discovery, and, ultimately, love. To learn you’ve got to become excited by knowledge, obsessed with it, sometimes dangerously so, sometimes in ways that might border on compulsion, or even addiction. How else could someone, like me, make it through 7 years of graduate studies—3 of those with children—making, on average, just about $20,000 per year before taxes?
Might TIK-ToK on TikTok contribute to the worst cognitive trends in an already vulnerable population (e.g. the shortening of attention spans, the internalization of FOMO, the alarming rise of despair, depression, and anxiety)? Obviously yes. And that’s something I think about monthly, worry about daily, and—should I come to a certain kind of affirmative answer with certainty—will be the reason why I immediately and permanently delete my account.
You can learn in almost any way, and from almost any model. The Greeks allegedly did it on foot, on the move. The Romans did it on the battlefield, sleeveless in the freezing rain. The medievals did it in quiet monasteries or in the public square with a bunch of randos. Our students mostly do it on their iPhones. But whether we’re firmly committed to a TIK model, a ToK model, or a TIK-ToK model on TikTok, the joy of teaching—the love of it—embraces these modalities. It inspires a desire to learn from them, on or in them, and certainly with anyone else who is willing to explore the possibility of gaining something of true and lasting intellectual value via their use.
Paul Blaschko
Paul Blaschko is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches courses he’s designed on big questions and the philosophy of work. He recently co-authored a bookpublished by Penguin Press about how philosophy can help us live better lives, and his new book on work and the good life will be published by Princeton University Press in 2025. Blaschko directs a program in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters devoted to exploring how the humanities can help us find meaning in work, and regularly consults with professors across the country about how to create better, more innovative philosophy courses. Embarrassingly, perhaps, he also does quite a bit of philosophy of TikTok.
