Tekabe Nebiyou B.Sc

 

 

Tekabe Nebiyou - Professional Summary:     Currently studying International Horticulture and Marketing at the University of Van Hall Larenstein in The Netherlands.[ Not Updated Yet ]

 

 

Tekabe Nebiyou - Professional Experience:    My friends call me “philosopher” perhaps as a way acknowledging my ability to engage in deep and independent thinking. I have been called a bubble of energy as I have always challenged myself academically by opting rigorous courses whilst I participate actively in extraculiculare activities in and outside school. Searching for a college that is a best match for such a personality was not easy. In fact, one would have despaired out of frustration unless the person was like me with the word ““despair”“ non-existence in his dictionary. [ Not Updated Yet ] 

 

 

Tekabe Nebiyou - Education:     2008- VAN HALL LARENSTEIN UNIVERSITY WAGENINGEN, NL
INTERNATIONAL HORTICULTURE AND MARKETING
2007-2008 UNIVERSITY COLLEGE MAASTRICHT, MAASTRICHT, NL
BEGGINERS’ DUTCH COURSE, MODULE A1 (CERTIFICATE)
2004-2006 SOS HERMANN GMEINER INT’L COLLEGE TEMA, GHANA
INTERNATIONAL BACCALAUREATE (IB)-DIPLOMA
2000-2004 SOS HERMANN GMEINER INT’L COLLEGE TEMA, GHANA
(INTERNATIONAL GENERAL CERTIFICATE OF SECONDARY EDUCATION (IGCSE)-MERIT)
1996-2000 SOS HERMANN GMEINER SCHOOL HARAR, ETHIOPIA
PRIMARY AND MIDDLE SCHOOL
[ Not Updated Yet ] 

 

 

Tekabe Nebiyou - Interests: 

 

1.THERE ARE MANY DIFFERENT AUTHORITIES, INCLUDING ACADEMICS, POLITICIANS, GLOBAL ORGANIZATIONS AND COMPANIES, WHO MAKE KNOWLEDGE CLAIMS.AS AN EXPIRIANCED TOK STUDENT, WHAT CRITERIA DO YOU USE TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN KNOWLEDGE, OPINION AND PROPAGANDA?


A knowledge claim is any statement that someone puts forward as true, or at least as worthy of consideration. All the statements below are knowledge claims. If we absorb all knowledge claims without questioning them and tracing them down to their roots, then we will find ourselves in total confusion. More often than not, we come across the sort of knowledge claims like the ones below with similar or even contradicting views. All knowledge claims that emanate from different sources can be the reflection of the knowledge, personal or organizational opinion of the sources. They could also be propagandas! Consider the following knowledge claims…


An Ethiopian comes and says,” The Ethiopian calendar has thirteen months.”

“The Queen of Sheba was an Ethiopian.” Another Ethiopian claims.

A report from the World Health Organization reads,“ It has been estimated that about 800 million of the world’s people suffer from chronic malnutrition, 200 million of them children. Of this number, between 18 and 20 million people die of starvation or starvation related disease each year, a figure that translates to 50000 people each day.”

Elijah Muhammad referring to Black Muslims once said, “We the Black Nation of the Earth are the NUMBER ONE owners of it, the best of all human beings. You are the most Beautiful and the Wisest.”

“Everything great, noble, or fruitful in the works of man on this planet, in science, art, and civilization…belongs to one family alone…History shows that all civilization derives from the white race, that none can exist without its help, and that a society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves the blood of the noble group that created it.” said Le Comte de Gibueau.


The big question here is what criteria do we have to use to distinguish between knowledge, opinion and propaganda? Knowledge is facts or experiences known by somebody. Opinion on the other hand is the capacity that enables one to act upon the best facts that he possesses, although they are incomplete and there is no signed guarantee of satisfactory results. Propaganda can be considered as the systematic spreading (propagation) of information or disinformation, usually to promote a religious or political doctrine with the intention of instilling particular attitudes or responses. Examples of the use of propaganda are the racial doctrines put forth by Nazism in World War 2 and some of the ideas and strategies propagated by the USA and the USSR during the cold war (1945-1990).

Almost everything that we know originates from four basic sources. The first, our sense, can be considered our primary source of information. Two other sources, reason and intuition, are derivative in the sense that they produce new facts from the data already supplied to our minds. The fourth source, authority, is by nature secondary, and second hand facts prove to be the most difficult to handle. The farther a source is removed from our own experience, the more caution we must exercise before deeming its knowledge claims being knowledge, opinion or propaganda.

Why are these knowledge claims made? First of all, knowledge claims are targeted at audiences. Then, the reason for which these knowledge claims are publicized and the circumstances under which these knowledge claims are made could put us in a better position to distinguish between them. For example, in January this year, the government of Ethiopia claimed that there was a bumper harvest. However, the United Nations published a report in March warning the catastrophic scale of food shortage that about 10 million Ethiopians are going to face unless the international community gives aid. One of these two knowledge claims should by all means have to be a mere opinion or propaganda. Looking back at the institutional records of the two organizations, also, considering the political implication of such claims, we can clearly see that one of them is a propaganda rather than knowledge. The ruling government in Ethiopia was busily campaigning to win the general election in May. Politically speaking, it will not make any sense for the government to expose its weakness. Rather, it wants to be seen as the savoir of the people. To instil this idea of successfulness, the government talks of bumper harvest whilst the ten million people are actually hungry! On the other hand, the United Nations is an independent institution so, it presents an independent knowledge claims. Thus, we can safely consider its knowledge claim as being knowledge rather than an opinion or propaganda. In this case we are using the institutional credibility to distinguish between the different knowledge claims.
Lets look at the knowledge claim about the Ethiopian calendar. It will just be a matter of approaching an Ethiopian to confirm this claim. With the explanation that all months in the Ethiopian calendar have thirty days each except the “thirteenth” month, which has only five days, could settle our doubt about this knowledge claim. How about obtaining an Ethiopian Calendar to confirm the claim? If indeed the calendar has thirteen months then definitely, this is knowledge not an opinion on the part of any Ethiopian. But if we know only our experiences, how can we be sure that we know anything about the real world? This is a coherence test. That is to say, when a knowledge claim is made, we verify it against an existing evidence and if the claim coheres with the evidence at hand then the claim is considered to be a knowledge not an opinion or a propaganda.
“The queen of Sheba was an Ethiopian.” This knowledge claim will definitely give us a bit of a problem. To start with, we cannot go and crosscheck as we did for the claim about the calendar because Queen of Sheba is not accessible to us in time and space now. Also this knowledge claim will be even dubious when another person from any of the Middle Eastern countries comes and tells us that,“ Queen of Sheba was indeed Iranian, an Iraqi…” Logic and reasoning might not help you in your effort to classify this knowledge claim. Then we will have to search within us to make sense of this knowledge claim. As an Ethiopian for example, I personally believe that the claim made by the Ethiopian is neither an opinion nor propaganda. It is knowledge!! Because I have been brought up in a society, which takes pride in its history and contribution to the world. “The passion for truth is (sometimes) silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority.” The Ethiopian church authorities have been very successful in making all their followers accept the story about the Queen of Sheba without questioning it. So, does it mean we are likely to be biased even when we are trying to distinguish between claims? Are our emotional and intellectual and even our physical proximity to the subject about which knowledge claims are being made dictate our judgment to classify knowledge claims?
Propagandas are almost always aimed at belittling a party while up lifting another one. Propagandas sometimes consist of knowledge claims that might not necessarily be always true. For example the knowledge claims by Elijah Muhammad and Le Comte de Gibueau are both propagandas each praising their own class of races and their acceptability purely lays on the colour and personal stand of the audiences. Of course some people could appear indifference to any type of propaganda and will not heed any attention to them but it is not always easy to stay indifferent to propagandas because they tend to touch upon the sensitivity of the human race. This rather makes them a very powerful means of communication but not a reliable source of knowledge.

While we can be grateful that our sensory and information processing systems have rendered our physical environment meaningful, we have reached a point in our quest for reality when we want to go beyond our limitations and try to know what the world is really like. We want to make whatever corrections are necessary in our perception, so we can move out of our shells and come to know our universe and its principles of operations. In the processes we always bump on to knowledge claims from institutions, authorities, or academics, which could be knowledge, opinion or propagandas. The uses of the criterion suggested in my essay are some of the ways to distinguish between these various knowledge claims but not the sole means.

 

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