101. TEACH MORE PHILOSOPHY IN SCHOOLS - Why Philosophy Deserves Distinct Curriculum Space
I have had an interesting few weeks discussing the teaching of Philosophy in English Secondary Schools with a range of different people. It was also World Philosophy Day last Thursday. All this has left me more convinced than ever of the value of Philosophy on a school curriculum, but also of how that curriculum space for Philosophy, where it exists at all, is currently an impoverished version of the subject. There are too many competing masters - examinations, school policies, government policies, the legal requirement for Religious Education, etc… - to give Philosophy its distinct place, and time, to do what it can do so well: give students the tools to think deeply, and critically, about life’s ultimate questions.
The first potential barrier to Philosophy being given a central role on a school curriculum is this: if the end result of the study of Philosophy is greater self-knowledge and self-reflection which, in turn, leads to greater social-knowledge and social-reflection which could lead to the further questioning of the established norms, values and purpose of society and its institutions (including the schools in which the Philosophy is taught and the governments which structure the schools) then perhaps this is an end result the gatekeeping structures of power would like to avoid? Philosophy can begin fairly innocuously, with questions such as “how do you know the chair you are sitting on really exists?” But once we dissect what we mean when we say “chair”, what “really exists” actually entails, and how we can say we “know” anything, it is all-too easy to then turn our eyes to other questions. Questions of justice, of democracy, of purpose. How do you know, for example, that what your teachers are telling you is worth knowing? Start tugging at that thread and soon, by way of the National Curriculum, exam specification and Department for Education guidelines, we might end up questioning a concept of “worth” that is based on the arbitrary whims of government policy and the needs of business…and then questioning the “worth” of government policy, or government, at all.
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.
At a meeting of the fledgling Association of Philosophy Teachers (APT), as part of a wider outreach programme from the British Philosophical Association (BPA) a few weeks ago, many of us discussed the feeling that, while we were all teaching Philosophy in schools in a variety of ways, it all too often felt like we were smuggling the subject in through the backdoor rather than making it central to the curriculum. In teacher training, for instance, one cannot currently train to be a professionally qualified teacher in England strictly as a Philosophy specialist. Like my own route to the qualification, if you are a Philosophy graduate looking to teach below undergraduate level, you have to do it through becoming a specialist in Religious Education (RE) instead. In the last few decades the acknowledgement of pluralism in society led to the acceptance that RE in schools cannot be used for Christian indoctrination anymore (as it was in my own school days) which meant opening teaching up to include aspects of theology and religious ethics. This welcome addition to the teaching of RE meant that a background in Philosophy became an asset for RE teachers and a background in scripture alone was no longer fit for purpose. But it has also meant, given that all English schools have the legal obligation to teach RE to all students but do not have that similar obligation to teach them all Philosophy, that most students only ever experience Philosophy - if that word is used explicitly at all - through their RE curriculum. What this means is that the idea of Philosophy becomes limited to answering only questions about, or around, God, with even the study of Ethics becoming a discussion which usually centres around competing conceptions of what it is believed a deity said about right and wrong rather than other, competing, principles. While there is no doubting the importance of religion in people’s worldviews, and in their ethical deliberations, this hinders Philosophy in two important ways:
1) It ignores important philosophical questions which are not necessarily connected to religion, such as distinct questions in political philosophy, for example.
2) Dogmatically, it cannot seriously raise philosophical objections to religion itself, which are the foundation of RE as a discipline, reducing questions about god’s existence and religious observation to one of personal choice, and agreeing to disagree, rather than seriously investigating the philosophical validity of positions and arguments as independent propositions distinct from a person’s particular lived faith.
The issue (2) describes ties to another way that Philosophy is hindered in its teaching within English schools right now: examination. (2) is largely the case because the teaching of RE frequently leads to examination in RE, either internally, through a school’s own assessment regime, or externally, through public examination such as GCSEs or A-Levels. In each case, as it is the teaching of religion which is central to the endeavour, not Philosophy, assessment is usually designed to ensure a student’s knowledge of religion is shown. This usually translates the so-called “evaluation” of beliefs into a cartoon of “Religious Person X believes…A” vs “Religious Person Y believes…B” and, if we’re very lucky, “also Non-Religious Person Z believes…C”. But the level of “evaluation” expected here is merely an overview of given supporting reasons which ends in almost a personal choice of which particular “sources of authority” the student decides to select as most pertinent. A student could literally score highly in an RE paper by outlining the logical contradiction of, say, the Design Argument (if all complex and intricate existing things require a designer, then what designed the superlatively complex and intricate god?), and its lack of necessary entailment for the existence of god (the apparent design in the world can be explained by an understanding of evolution, of which there is far more evidence, etc.) yet conclude with the mystifying platitude “but who designed evolution? I think the only answer can be an omniscient and omnipotent God, and this is compatible with what was revealed in scripture” and this would be considered a sound piece of thinking. In fact, even an argument like this is more sophisticated than is required for the highest grades in RE, where an overview of different personal religious positions is required far more than an overview of the technical strengths and weaknesses of any particular argument. While marks will be awarded for that familiar setup of intellectually weak television journalism - side A vs side B; Catholics think C but Protestants think D; Sunnis believe E but She’s believe F, etc. - to seriously contest the very premise of a dispute, and suggest that both sides in the “debate” are working from flawed assumptions is not the business of RE, whereas it might very well be the business of Philosophy. But a mind trained to pick a side, rather than unpack an argument and deconstruct a specific set of ideas is a mind that, when later introduced to Philosophy proper, will struggle to break the conditioning of too many years of For/Against simplistic binary thinking.
I saw this firsthand last week at a small Philosophy competition myself and some local schools run together. After being postponed due to Covid in 2020, this year’s competition (in which my school is the only competing school which teaches standalone Philosophy and runs a Philosophy Club facilitated by a distinct Philosophy specialist, alongside any Philosophy embedded within our RE curriculum) focused on Bostrom’s Simulation Argument. The competing schools were asked to prepare responses following an introductory talk by a University Philosophy lecturer. The two other schools denied the possibility of a simulation based on the uniqueness of the human soul, the limits of computer technology, the meaning and diversity of human life, and the perceived need for a god. In other words, they did not engage with Bostrom’s argument at all, which posited the mathematical probability that we are currently in a simulation based on the exponential improvement of computer technology that will make the possibility of such simulation statistically probable in the future and which, combined with the existence of multiple compelling motivations for why someone might make such a simulation in the future, makes it almost certain that in the future multiple people will make such a simulation. Bostrom suggests that given the numbers involved, if there were, say, a trillion real people alive in the future, and several thousand simulations were made, each with the population of a planet, then the population numbers of the simulated would far outweigh the population numbers of the unsimulated, reducing our odds that we are one of the far fewer real people and not one of the simulations considerably.
My school’s contribution was to make a two-pronged attack - playing first with the logic of Bostrom’s numbers (eventually one could imagine an infinite number of simulations but as infinity itself is incomprehensible, an infinite number of simulations would perhaps be no simulations at all, therefore making the probability that we were in one actually zero…though, they then conceded, if we are in a simulation we cannot trust that what we think we know about infinity is true because we do not exist in reality. Perhaps in the real world, beyond the simulation, infinity is a tangible thing and we have only been given limited knowledge here?) before reaching the more empirical conclusion that, while it might be possible to reject Bostrom’s specific argument about a Matrix-style computer simulation, we are nevertheless obviously living in a simulation of reality because we live in the representation of reality our brains construct from all the sense-data it receives from the real world outside.
Their response was the first of the three. I heard it and was impressed. They’d had no help from me, other than being in a school with me for years which tries, where possible, to teach Philosophy as something distinct from RE. Year 11 students - 15/16 years old. But as the other two schools gave their responses, focusing on God and the miracle of the human soul, I worried that we’d lost track of the Philosophy here and had returned to RE-style platitudes. When the more open discussion section started and the other two schools dominated, arguing about miracles and the complexity of human life, I grew frustrated for my students. God, of course, was something their own argument reminded us we would have no accurate knowledge of if we were in a simulation as who knows what really existed in the real world? If we were a simulation, perhaps it was one in which an experiment was specifically being done to see the effects of certain mythical stories on human societies? And what do we mean by “God” in this context anyway? Is the programmer of the simulation God? And if there is a God, and this is not a computer simulation, certain gods entail that this world still remains something less true than ultimate reality. The Hindu concept of maya perhaps? Or a veil of tears or test before the true reality of our afterlife? A simulation by another name?
As time came for the judge from the University to give their verdict, I prepared for the worse. Confused by the irrelevance of the discussion, my students had kept quiet for most of the debate portion of the competition. I assumed that, like the scene on Plato’s ship, the louder voices would prevail as the true Philosopher(s) sat unnoticed and ignored. A similar thing had happened during the previous year’s competition when the judge had been a local Reverend, impressed with the gusto of ideas expressed far more than with their clarity.
However, game recognises game, as they say, and Philosophers recognise Philosophy. Our team were declared the winners.
While it was obvious to me, and to the University philosopher who made the judgement, that they should be, the shock in the room was palpable. Students and teachers alike seemed surprised by the decision. Schools and students know how to judge the quality of a debate: who was more persuasive? Schools and students know how to assess the quality of an evaluative essay where evaluation is defined as analysing the evidence-base of contrasting viewpoints and making a decision about whose supporting evidence is stronger. But do schools and students, even with all the alleged “Philosophy” taking place in them, know how to identify good philosophical argument from bad? Philosophy, as they saw it that day, was surely the back and forth sparring of debate, sprinkled with references to religion and personal faith, regardless of whether it had any relevance to the specific arguments ostensibly being analysed. But this is, in fact, the very stuff philosophers might - and did that day - dismiss, as mere sophistry. Sound and fury, signifying nothing.
As nice as the victory was, it pointed to this deeper, enduring problem with the current state of Philosophy in schools. For even my winning team of students had assumed they had lost. Philosophers though they might be, they are also students of RE. Of History, English, Geography, and all the other GCSE subjects where evaluation means picking a side rather than analysing premises and checking for logical soundness. In a room of three schools, all of whom believe that at least some Philosophy is going on inside their classrooms, the occurrence of genuine Philosophy happening right in front of their eyes shouldn’t have been so unrecognisable. Yet it was.
Earlier in the week I had been at a talk by Craig Adams about why schools struggle to teach Critical Thinking. Adams suggested that if we taught music the way we currently teach critical thought in schools we would teach it like this: play students a bunch of songs, expose them to varied types of music, and hope they sort of pick it all up by osmosis. Then get surprised when they come to their instruments and don’t know how to play.
I think it may be a little worse than that. I think it might be more like a scenario where some schools aren’t even playing them music at all. They’re playing them something else. A spoken word album of poetry? Or maybe just the choruses but none of the verses? Perhaps only the notes that can be produced by an Oboe?
And then we scratch our heads and wonder why the students taught in this way cannot compose a complete song.
Philosophy has the potential to transform the way a student sees and thinks about the world. The potential to make them analyse and evaluate their deepest beliefs and assumptions and critically engage in their existence. It creates clarity of thought, rigour of thought, and precision of thought. It fine-tunes defences against fallacious thinking and trains us in intellectual creativity, curiosity and dexterity. It also teaches us to be humble. To check our own flawed thinking and be open to poking the holes in our own positions. To learn how to constructively discuss differences of opinion on firm and agreed footing and identify how to make our collective thinking consistent and coherent.
But only if it is done well.
And doing it through the back-door, impeded by the competing and often conflicting demands of whichever discipline is being used as the curriculum Trojan horse to smuggle it into the school is not only unideal, it can be actively damaging to the endeavour.
As part of World Philosophy Day this year, I asked the students at my school to answer some questions to win some Philosophy books. One question was “why do you think it’s important for philosophy to be taught in schools”. There were lots of interesting answers, but the winning one strikes a chord with what I have been saying: “Developing social and communication skills, understanding different perspectives, empathising with others, and building up thoughts of reflection are benefits of philosophy unmatched throughout the rest of the curriculum. I think the teaching of philosophy in schools would have a domino effect on future society, resulting in a more logically thinking, rational population. Students love to ask questions and philosophy provides an outlet for imaginative ideas to come to life…Questioning is a natural instinct, and philosophy would allow students to question many daily occurrences, outside of the exam based specification. This inner reflection on beliefs is key to my thoughts of why philosophy should be accessible as a subject. In fact from an alternate perspective, maybe it would be more appropriate to rename this question, ‘Why SHOULDN’T philosophy be taught at schools?’“
Until Philosophy gets its distinct place on the core school curriculum for all students, one can only assume that its absence is because those in charge of determining curriculum time and subject importance (both in government or in school leadership) either do not want our students to develop those important intellectual skills vital for democratic life or, worse, that they actively want these critical abilities to be distorted and impeded through misrepresentation and curricular compromise to the point of their practical impotence.
Author: DaN McKee
My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE and from all good booksellers. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here.