148. THINKING ABOUT WORLD BOOK DAY - How Reading Is More Than The The Fetishisation of Books

March 06, 2023 by DaN McKee in Book, Censorship, Communication, Culture, Education, Free Speech, Philosophy, Philosophy Unleashed, Pop Culture, School, Social Media

“Instead of asking what we are reading on World Book Day, we ought to raise the level of questioning: what are we reading and how is it changing us? What is it making us think? What questions are the book raising? Even if the answer is, to all these questions, not a lot (I am unchanged, not thinking about anything, and asking no questions), to ask them makes us perhaps realise that some books are like junk food while others are more nutritious.“

145. IT'S NICE TO HAVE OPTIONS - Existentialism and UCAS.

February 06, 2023 by DaN McKee in Communication, Education, Existentialism, Epistemology, Ethics, Free, Obligation, Philosophy, Philosophy Unleashed, School

“Deciding not to bore the student with Donald Rumsfeld’s treatise on known knowns and known unknowns, I instead decided to offer guidance from the existentialists. That is to say: no real guidance at all. What my student was facing, I suggested, was a living example of the sort of anxiety and despair existentialist philosophers suggested comes from our absolute freedom.“

144. CHALLENGING PERCEPTIONS - Why Top Tier Football Clubs Continue To Do Women's Football A Disservice

January 30, 2023 by DaN McKee in Communication, Culture, Education, Ethics, Gender, Identity, Meaning, Perception, Philosophy, Philosophy Unleashed, Pop Culture, Sport

“Why complain about this in a philosophy blog? Because a perpetual area of philosophical inquiry concerns perception versus reality, and sometimes this coming apart of perception from reality (or reality from perception) often leads to questions in ethics too. I believe this problem - of the women’s teams of football clubs not sharing the same home ground as their male counterparts - touches on both.“

143. ARTIFICIALLY PRODUCED - Is using ChatGPT To Do Your Work Cheating?

January 23, 2023 by DaN McKee in Anarchism, Communication, Education, Ethics, Epistemology, Mind, Philosophy, Philosophy Unleashed, School, Student Writing, Technology, Artificial Intelligence

“The following essay for Philosophy Unleashed was produced by AI. ChatGPT to be precise. I asked it to attempt to write a Philosophy Unleashed post on the topic of the ethics of using ChatGPT to cheat in school work, and do it in the style of me as author. I will present the essay to you first, then show you how it came to be. As you read, ask yourself the question: if I hadn’t told you it was artificially generated, would you know that a human being didn’t write this? And if you know my work specifically, would you know that I hadn’t written it?“

140. SABBATICAL - On The Importance of Taking a Break

December 12, 2022 by DaN McKee in Christmas, COVID19, Education, Free, Mental Health, Mindfulness, Perception, Philosophy, Philosophy Unleashed, School, Work

“It shouldn’t be surprising to realise that, for an animal which literally shuts completely down every night and knocks itself unconscious as a means of essential restoration, stopping is good for human beings.“

136. NO GODS NO MASTER-DONS - Decolonising Twitter Migration

November 14, 2022 by DaN McKee in Anarchism, Authentic Democracy, Communication, Culture, Education, Ethics, Immigration, Identity, Obligation, Philosophy Unleashed, Philosophy, Politics, Technology

“The site of struggle here being the realm of social media might seem trivial to some, and online colonisation lacks the bloodshed and brutality of historical imperialisms, but as a living model it has been instructive of the sorts of behaviours we see offline too.“

133. THE HARD PROBLEM OF BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS - On The Difficulty and Need For Waking From Dogmatic Slumbers

October 17, 2022 by DaN McKee in Black Lives Matter, Communication, Culture, EDI, Education, Existentialism, Identity, Mind, Perception, Philosophy, Philosophy Unleashed, Politics, Racism

“I’ve been thinking a lot about consciousness this week. Not the traditional philosophical questions about mind and body, but political consciousness. Specifically Black Consciousness.“

132. BLACK HISTORY WITHOUT TEETH - On The Potential Epistemic Deficit of Black History Month

October 10, 2022 by DaN McKee in Academic Freedom, Black Lives Matter, EDI, Education, History, Identity, Philosophy, Philosophy Unleashed, Politics, Racism, School

“we need to first address with students core concepts like structural racism, white supremacy and white supremacist thinking, historical constructivism, critical race theory, colonialism, ideology, education policy and curriculum design. Without that, it will be very hard for the students we teach to place any of what they learn during Black History Month into a meaningful, long-term schema of knowledge.“

131. UNWELCOME VISITORS - When Jordan Peterson Came to Michaela

October 03, 2022 by DaN McKee in Anarchism, Communication, Culture, Education, Ethics, Free Speech, Philosophy, Philosophy Unleashed, Politics, Q&A, School, Academic Freedom

“We should have more unwelcome visitors to our schools, not fewer. More opportunities for students to ask questions and poke holes. More academic freedom to develop an enduring culture of critique and scrutiny so that ideas are never accepted without a fight. If we are worried about the young and impressionable minds of our students, it’s time that we stopped them being so impressionable.“

126. EDUCATED ABOUT EDUCATION - Anarchist Pedagogies and Learning From My Students

July 18, 2022 by DaN McKee in Anarchism, Education, Philosophy, Philosophy Unleashed, School

“If I had planned an ideal last lesson for you (an actual lesson aimed at teaching you something new) what would we be doing and how would we be doing it?“

124. WHEN DOING PHILOSOPHY ISN'T DOING PHILOSOPHY - Exams Aren't Everything

July 04, 2022 by DaN McKee in Philosophy, Philosophy Unleashed, School, Mind, Education

“I wrote that phrase on the board: “Metaphysics of Mind”. I then made a lame philosophy joke: “let’s see if the innatists are right. You haven’t been taught any of next year’s content yet but do you already know what philosophy of mind is?”
The task they are then set is to simply “do philosophy” to try and work out what they think next year’s course will cover, simply from the phrase “Metaphysics of Mind”. I give them a blank sheet of A3 paper and ask them to fill it with all the questions, issues and answers they think they will be studying from September.“

119. DECOLONISING DECOLONISATION - Why Diversifying Reading Lists Isn’t Enough

May 23, 2022 by DaN McKee in History, Education, Culture, Philosophy Unleashed, Philosophy, School, Black Lives Matter, Racism, Politics

“I found myself asking the obvious next question: is our own British colonialism taught openly and honestly in British schools?”

117. ROE VS WADE VS PHILOSOPHY - Abortion and the Illusion of Law

May 09, 2022 by DaN McKee in Communication, Education, Ethics, Free, Gender, Justice, Obligation, Philosophy, Philosophy Unleashed, Politics, Punishment, School

“one of the founding principles of Philosophy Unleashed is that it is a place to go “beyond the curriculum” and discuss things not covered by GCSE and A-level courses in Philosophy. Abortion ethics, as every student knows, is central to any current examination specification in either Religious Studies or Philosophy, and most undergraduate courses in Ethics will also cover it. So I will be careful here not to simply rehash the standard arguments most people will have already covered.“

112. KILLING THE AUTHENTIC SELF - Why Is It So Hard To Be Yourself At Work?

March 14, 2022 by DaN McKee in Censorship, Culture, Education, Free, Gender, Identity, Justice, LGBTQ, Philosophy, Philosophy Unleashed, Politics, Racism, School, Work, EDI

“It’s time that schools became more diverse, and their staff, at least in the short-term, a little less comfortable.“

109. QUITTING MY JOB - The Thought Behind Making A Change

February 14, 2022 by DaN McKee in Education, Ethics, Free, Mental Health, Obligation, Philosophy, Philosophy Unleashed, School, Work

“I told my form on Friday that this would be my last year at the school. I hadn’t been keeping it a secret, but there also hadn’t really been a relevant opportunity to bring it up.“

106. WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS - On Our Failure To Communicate

January 17, 2022 by DaN McKee in Education, Epistemology, Meaning, Philosophy, Philosophy Unleashed, Communication

“Often we hear people say something that they didn’t think they said at all. They might accuse us of not listening, or being ignorant of certain things, but the fact remains that if you say X and I hear Y, then you did not communicate X to me, you communicated - whether intentionally or not - Y.“

103. SAYING NO TO WHAT IS DONE - On The Tyranny of Appealing to Decorum

December 06, 2021 by DaN McKee in COVID19, Culture, Education, Logic, Meaning, Obligation, Philosophy, Philosophy Unleashed, School

“But recently I have been thinking about a pet peeve of mine. Possibly the most frustrating appeal to authority of them all. I shall call it the appeal to decorum…“

101. TEACH MORE PHILOSOPHY IN SCHOOLS - Why Philosophy Deserves Distinct Curriculum Space

November 22, 2021 by DaN McKee in Authentic Democracy, Education, Philosophy, Philosophy Unleashed, Politics, School, Work

“Not all study of Philosophy ends in revolution. But it could. Certainly the careful and methodological scrutiny of our ideas and concepts - shining a probing light on the underlying arguments which uphold them - and learning how to question the fundamentals of logic make it harder for the manipulations of rhetoric and emotive reasoning to deceive us and might therefore lead to outrage if such deceptions are exposed in the Philosophy classroom. But this ought to be welcomed if one of the end goals of our education system is a student’s ability to be an informed citizen of a cooperative democracy. One might therefore see Philosophy’s diminished, corrupted, place on the school curriculum as evidence that producing such capable citizenry is not, therefore, one of the actual aims of this current education system.“

- Character Flaws: An Anarchist Critique of Character Education in England's Secondary Schools -

October 27, 2021 by DaN McKee in Education, Anarchism

DaN McKee’s new paper Character Flaws: An Anarchist Critique of Character Education in England’s Secondary Schools has been published in the latest ANARCHIST STUDIES journal. You can read it, open access, here: https://journals.lwbooks.co.uk/anarchiststudies/vol-29-issue-2/abstract-9445/

97. BLACK HISTORY MONTH - On Tackling My Continuing Blind Spots

October 11, 2021 by DaN McKee in Black Lives Matter, Education, Identity, LGBTQ, Philosophy, Philosophy Unleashed, Racism

“As it is Black History Month here in the UK I thought it would be worth remembering the most influential black philosopher in my own life so far - the young, black, A-level student of mine from about six years ago who asked me a simple question to which I had an embarrassingly limited answer: “are there any black philosophers?”“