208. WHY #PHILOSOPHYMATTERS IN THE CLASSROOM - Reports from the Field
For week two of British Philosophy Fortnight I thought I might look at why #PhilosophyMatters in schools.
In the British Philosophical Association’s video (above) released to mark British Philosophy Fortnight last week, I make the following case:
Philosophy matters to students because it’s a unique space in the school curriculum where they’re taught to take everything they think they know and see if this received wisdom can stand up to philosophical scrutiny. Including the wisdom they receive in the philosophy classroom itself. In a world where we are increasingly bombarded with truth-claims, and information and misinformation is coming at us without any distinction between the two, when students have the tools to be able to analyse claims for their validity, it’s a vital intellectual self-defence that we should want all young people to have. And that is why #PhilosophyMatters.
So I thought it might be nice to look at a few examples from my own classroom over the last week where I feel that this has happened. Amidst all the bog-standard school stuff done to ensure students develop skills and knowledge to be able to pass GCSE and A-level exams, have we actually had the space to have any of those sorts of conversations I say are important? Have I got any evidence that #PhilosophyMatters in schools in the way I say it does, and can a snapshot of a single week in my own classroom show it?
Looking back at my timetable for Day One of British Philosophy Fortnight, my first lesson last Monday was what could have been a very non-philosophical, information-heavy, Religious Studies GCSE lesson on the role of prophethood in Islam. But, being a philosopher, and my students trained in Philosophy, not just Religious Studies, we took the opportunity to have a preliminary discussion about what makes someone a trustworthy source of information. Soon we found ourselves delving deep into areas of epistemology. “Credentials” was a word that came up early on, but it was hard for the group to define what exact credentials they meant once the fallacy of appealing to authority was raised and the spectre of someone with particular credentials still having the capacity for getting things wrong. Direct, first-person observation of events ourselves was offered instead, but also problematised when we considered just how bad human beings are as eye-witnesses and how prone to error our memory can be. And, of course, the big one: recognising that “trustworthy” doesn’t actually mean the same thing as identifying a source of truth. I can trust someone for reasons other than the reliability of their information. Consider a “trustworthy” theatre company I trust precisely because I know they will lie to me in a very interesting way each time. And, further still, even if I did require truth from someone I was assessing the trustworthiness of, truth itself can be hard to confirm or deny. How do I know that I have got it? Were scientists who ultimately had their theories disproved still not trustworthy at the time despite, ultimately, getting it all wrong?
And yes, of course the conversation turned to the internet and “fake news”. Given the lack of guarantee that anything can be 100% correct, how careful ought we be about what we share? How can we mitigate as much as possible against potential error, and get as close to the truth as we are able, avoiding both those sources which are trying to intentionally mislead and deceive and those which are simply careless spreaders of misinformation? Which led to the question, and returning us to the issue of “trustworthiness”, what if we trust a source simply because it brings us comfort, not because it is correct or reliable?
That conversation certainly felt like it mattered in the world today, where many of us live in echo-chamber bubbles of our own misguided views parroted back at us and where, time and time again, research has demonstrated the ineffectiveness of combatting misinformation with fact-checking. Suggesting, instead, a more psychological basis for our worldviews than an epistemic one.
Later on that same week, a Ukrainian student asked me when discussing our weekends at the start of a lesson, how I could be a fan of the philosopher, Noam Chomsky, when he seemed so uncritical of Putin? Accepting that he was right to call Chomsky out on this, and acknowledging that I thought Chomsky, though an intellectual hero of mine, also made mistakes and had problems with his thinking at times, was itself a reason #PhilosophyMatters. No Gods, no masters in the philosophy classroom. No heroes either. Just a commitment to getting as close to the truth as we can and an open-mindedness to critiquing all ideas. But our discussion about the current conflict brought to mind a recent philosophy club session where Year 8 students had turned up from lunch wanting to continue their own lunchtime conversation about Ukraine and Russia. I had told them this was ok to do, so long as we made the conversation philosophical, not merely political, as it currently was in the questions they were asking. Instead of merely asking whether Ukraine should concede land to Russia - as they were initially asking - and what we could do practically about the war, I asked us to think deeper. I asked why people desire land in the first place, both in terms of resources and practicalities, and in terms of identity and sovereignty? We discussed the need of having a place to call your own and whether this was a real need or a need created by conditions of oppression: needing a place to call your own only because no such place yet exists. This led to asking a further question about the nature of war in general: do people fight for their land because that particular piece of land is so important to them, or does it become important to them because we have such an unwelcoming world where people know they will not be able to establish themselves happily somewhere else if what they already have is taken from them? In other words, might a different approach to the way the world treats refugees and dispossessed people transform our instinct for violent response in the case of invasion? Could alternative distributive arrangements of global wealth and technology eliminate the need for exploitative or expansionist invasions in the first place? Might there be no more reasons for invasions if everyone across the globe had everything they needed?
Instead of just arguing about the world as it is, and what to do there, we considered also how the world could be.
That felt like it mattered too. However, the older, Chomsky-critical, student raised a valid objection when I recounted what Year 8 had discussed: the questions about the ideal world might be interesting, and and even useful one day, but don’t we still need an actual position for the real world and how things are now? In other words, he made a philosophical argument that, sometimes, philosophy is the wrong tool for the discussion. Helping Ukraine today is what matters, not imagining other Ukraines that might one day be.
That conversation mattered too, and the theme continued into my lower sixth Philosophy lesson last thing that same afternoon. Studying Aristotelean virtue ethics, we were deep into the critique of abstract normative ethics and exploring Aristotle’s far more practical idea of the good life as it might actually be lived over previous theories’ more abstract rules and duties. Aristotle, instead, asks us to live a life of growth, developing virtuous behaviours and characteristics the same way we might develop our skills at the piano, or as a tradesperson: through sustained and intentional practice, taught by an accomplished teacher. So we spent the afternoon considering who our role models of virtue might be in 2025, that we might be able to use these examples as a practical model of the good life for us to emulate until we develop the virtues ourselves. What could matter more than that? The agreed upon trio were: rugby player turned fundraiser, Kevin Sinfield; the activist and musician, Paul Robeson; and former BBC fact-checker, Ros Atkins. The question of whether these three human beings actually are good role models to emulate for their morality seems like something which absolutely matters given that these are role models already being emulated by at least that particular class of students.
Later in the week, a Year 10 class conducted a community of inquiry about the limits of free speech. They asked if knowing the consequences of speech, and choosing not to say something, was still freedom? And if it is, at what point does it become oppression if the consequences to saying certain things become so dangerous that the speaker might be risking real harm - even death - for saying what they want to say? Is the fact that someone could still always choose to speak, even if their speech might kill them, proof of true freedom of speech, or is such an understanding of free speech missing the point of what we want free speech for?
And yes, the class did discuss the limits of what they are allowed to say in the classroom as part of their argument. Noting that the nature of a Community of Inquiry meant they were able to have a free, entirely student-directed, discussion right now, with the question picked from the initial stimulus material entirely their own choice, they also noted that they were not allowed to have a non-philosophical discussion and just chat about their day. Was the lesson itself an example that free speech is always limited, qualified, and monitored speech? And was it fair that they, the students, could be punished for speaking off-topic and yet me, the teacher, would not be punished for going on a tangent? Luckily, I did not have to be the one to point out to them that even I, the teacher, had limits to my speech in the classroom. That if I went on an extremist rant or discussed something inappropriate there would be consequences for me far more severe than the consequences they might have for discussing last night’s football instead of Philosophy! We all had a limit to what we could or couldn't say freely. Nor did I have to raise the determinist question of whether free speech can even exist if freedom itself - human free-will - might merely be an illusion. The conversation mattered, as has every community of inquiry the group has done weekly since September. And I know that they matter because instead of asking them to say “yes sir” or “here” in the register that day, I asked them to reply to their names by telling me if any philosophy they had done in school had “mattered” to them, and impacted their lives in some way. Happily, the vast majority of students had a story to tell. Transformations in their perspectives about language, about ethics, about the world. Transformations I wasn’t surprised to hear having spent most of my professional life enjoying the reports from parents every parents’ evening of conversations held around the dinner table stimulated by that day’s Philosophy lesson.
“We never had anything like that in school when I was a kid” they often tell me. And perhaps the questionable state of the world today is a symptom of that lack of a philosophical education we older citizens received?
Year 8 had their own Community of Inquiry on Friday, about the morality of pet ownership. Perhaps this trivial discussion might appear like something it is hard to imagine matters all that much, and yet very quickly these twelve and thirteen year olds were discussing the distinction between kidnapping and adoption/foster care. Is what we do to animals in the form of pet ownership more like an abduction, or an adoption? And what gives people the right to take someone away from their original habitat and attempt to “make things better” for them? Our treatment of these animals, just like the assumption that speaking about animals might not matter, could well be “speciesist” another great idea from Philosophy which matters. Meanwhile, in this week’s session of the junior Philosophy Club, no longer focused on Ukraine, a student presented us with questions about greed which allowed the club to untangle exactly what made greed different from merely acting selfishly or acting from want. We could want things without being greedy, and be selfish without being greedy. We could event selfishly want something and still not be greedy. So what defined “greed” and would the concept of greed disappear in a world without resource scarcity? Could you still be greedy in a world where nothing was limited?
While Year 7’s only lesson this week was not hugely philosophical, being not only a written assessment but an assessment that followed a term of developing some religious literacy in the Abrahamic faiths, the question they wrestled with still contained a small spark of philosophical inquiry: do the Abrahamic faiths have more in common than they have differences? Although we were really looking for them to demonstrate secure subject knowledge from across Judaism, Christianity and Islam, any questions analysing supposed divisions and seeking what is actually shared in common between seemingly divided groups seem to matter quite deeply in a world so quick to draw lines between “us” and “them”.
After Easter, we shall be asking these same Year 7 students to think deeply and seriously about what they think happens when they die, and whether the narratives of these religions they have studied for the last term can stand up to scrutiny in the face of what we can justifiably say about life after death. It was Camus who said the only philosophical question worth asking is whether life is worth living. So it is a question which at least one philosopher thinks matters above all else.
Meanwhile, that #PhilosophyMatters to our year 9 students was made starkly clear on Tuesday after a visit to the school from holocaust survivor, Mind Hornick, brought to life the horrors of Auschwitz. This half term, we have been focusing on Judaism, the holocaust, and the philosophical problem of evil, and students have seen that the more historical approach of simply learning the details of what happened during World War II sidesteps some of the more profound consequences of this unparalleled atrocity in human history: how can people maintain their personal faith in God in the face of this targeted attack on their specific religious identity which the God they hold a supposed covenant with has seemingly allowed? History matters, of course, but just as science without philosophy is lame, as Einstein once suggested, History without philosophy becomes merely the aimless record keeping of a hoarder. Philosophy allows us to not only know what happened in history, but learn its deeper lessons. To not only paint parallels between the rise of fascism and anti-semitism in Germany in the 1930s and our current day rise in far-right authoritarianism and prejudice, but articulate what exactly is wrong with these movements of dehumanisation and division and why we ought to commit to that increasingly forgotten statement of “never again”.
Perhaps you think my repeated assertion that #PhilosophyMatters to just be one of R.M Hare’s “bliks” we hold. A foundational belief unswayed by any seeming facts of the matter? Or perhaps you hold a blik of your own that philosophy does not matter. Either way, if you think the argument about whether either of our views can be falsified, and if that should affect the meaning of those deeply held beliefs, then you have to agree that my Year 13 A-level students, studying the University debate around religious language between Flew, Hare and Mitchell this week, where the idea of such bliks was first raised, were also engaged in Philosophy that matters.
Ultimately, if you’ve read this far and agree with me that this stuff matters, then you probably agree that #PhilosophyMatters, and should be part of any school student’s curriculum. You might therefore agree with what the British Philosophical Association is asking for with its British Philosophy Fortnight, and what the new campaign is all about. The BPA ask that:
Philosophy provision is extended in primary and secondary schools, and colleges, including the launch of a Philosophy GCSE
University Philosophy education is supported and seen as fundamental
UK Philosophy research and PhDs are funded to maintain their world-leading status
Philosophers are invited to be expert members on scientific committees and government taskforces
For more information see the BPA’s own webpage and, if your school isn’t providing philosophy provision on its curriculum, ask them why not. After all, Philosophy isn’t just about imagining possible worlds that might be, it’s about practically engaging with the world we currently have and making it better.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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