Diana Senechal, the author of “Republic of Noise,” describes the resources and methods she used to teach philosophy to students in a New York City high school.
Students read “The Book of Job,” Plato, Orwell, and other classics and discussed their meaning. It is very satisfying to think that teaching of this quality still survives in the age of teach-to-the-test. Job is never on the test. Just part of life.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Absolutely perfect example of why centralizing education will never work.
I pity the kids who will suffer under this scheme.
yes yes yes yes yes
You don’t need to wait until middle school to teach/develop understanding of philosophy, you just need to be allowed to make responsible decisions within your own classroom, not dance to the string-pulling of legislators and non-educators.
Tom Wartenburg, PhD in Philosophy at Mount Holyoke College offers a website full of resources for using the highest quality picture books with elementary students to explore philosophical concepts. http://www.teachingchildrenphilosophy.org/wiki/Main_Page
I’ve taught workshops for teachers of preschool and they find the site resources to be suitable even though the original guides were written with 8-12 year olds in mind. The high level thinking that takes place in these activities is exactly what SHOULD be happening in classrooms.
MOMwithAbrain,
You should not take statements like “Philosophy is not all logical by any means” to be a definitive statement about the study of philosophy. Analyitic philosophy is nothing if not logical.
Of course. When I say “philosophy is not all logical by any means,” I am thinking of philosophers from Plato to Augustine to Buber. For all the appearance of logic in the Republic, it is only loosely logical, and then only at times. A great deal of the argument is imaginative and speculative.
No doubt you approach philosophy from the continental tradition. I resonate with the Anglo-American tradition.
Of course, philosophy is not all logical. The idea of equating philosophy with logic is only about 150 years old, and was spearheaded by Mill and Russell and the mathematical logicians who built the highly logical formalism that now underlies mathematics.
But the real idea of philosophy (i.e., lover of wisdom) is the struggle to understand life, a struggle that cannot always be expressed in a logical structure.
To me, one begins to appreciate philosophy when one accepts the inevitability of death; only then does the need to understand what a good life looks like have any value.
What fun to be discussing these things. Thanks to everyone for the comments–including the comments that challenge what I’m doing.
It has been my dream to discuss actual subject matter within education discussion. It happens sometimes, but not often enough.
I was a little surprised by the reading list until I went to the posting. This is a high school course.
You are right. I corrected it.
Diane
“Teaching Philosophy in Middle School” is a well-meaning but ultimately ill-advised idea. To analogize with a hammer, the reductio ad absurdum would be to teaching metaphysics to kindergarteners.
During their adolescent years, students should be developing their pluripotent capabilities. I’d like to see them developing a solid foundation in Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Statistics, and Calculus.
On the Humanities side, I’d want to see children learning the rules of grammar, diagramming and constructing sentences, reading for comprehension and analysis, as well as mastering rudimentary formal and informal logic.
I am not a vulgar reductionist who only wants to “teach to the test.” But children must learn to WALK before they can RUN.
Let’s recover our lost academic virtues.
I made a mistake. It is a high school course, not middle school.
Dr. Ravitch,
Thank you for your reply.
Even so, I think the gist of my argument still stands. While the 9th-grade subject matter outlined in the blog post seems appropriate and worthwhile, the bulk of the philosophical propounded by Ms. Senechal seems to be premature and therefore directed at the wrong audience.
Let students shed their adolescence and get some real life (e.g. work) experience before they being to wax speculative on “what really matters” and “what they really believe.”
Less self-absorption should be the order of the day.
(If they must study philosophy, they could and should limit it to a History of Thought. Give every student a copy of Bertrand Russell’s “A History of Western Thought” or Will Durant’s “The Story of Philosophy” and be done with it!)
If one were to follow your argument through, herbert1820, then one would eliminate literature from the curriculum as well. The kids are too young to be thinking about life. Too young to ponder Shakespeare’s sonnets. Too young to know about Oedipus or Achilles or to enjoy Nikolai Gogol’s stories.
Far from encouraging self-absorption, my philosophy curriculum gives students some perspective on themselves. Take this passage from Plato’s Republic, where Plato discusses some of the pitfalls of democracy (my eleventh-grade students read this last week):
“A teacher in such a community is afraid of his students and flatters them, while the students depise their teachers or tutors. And, in general, the young imitate their elders and compete with them in word and deed, while the old stoop to the level of the young and are full of play and pleasantry, imitating the young for fear of appearing disagreeable and authoritarian.”
Now, we had to sort this out a bit. For one thing, Plato’s conception of democracy is extreme, with people doing whatever they please at any given time. The students recognize that we have a mitigated democracy, with various checks and balances, and that its consequences, too, are mitigated. They realize, also, that in the Republic Plato largely ignores the virtues and benefits of democracy (though he considers it superior to tyranny). So by no means were they taking the above statement (or the Republic overall) at face value. Nonetheless, they saw something recognizable in it. Here’s a striking image of the teacher trying to appear “cool” in order to please the students.
My ninth graders study rudimentary formal and informal logic in their Rhetoric and Logic course. We pay attention to grammar as well. This is in many ways a writing course–but the students will also read and discuss exemplary speeches and essays. In the logic unit (which works well with their geometry course), they will study both formal and informal proofs and devote some attention to fallacies.
Youngsters were taught the trivium (logic, grammar, and rhetoric) for years. They also read and discussed the great ethical stories of the Bible and read other great works that raised philosophical issues.
Our society has suffered greatly since abandoning that curriculum and trying to “package” knowledge into set lessons that are “delivered” to the students. Now, most people can’t conceive of letting children read and discuss great works (with appropriate expectations given their age). Worse, they confuse philosophy with the lecture note from their usually opaque college lectures. Philosophical works are far more approachable that most colleges and graduate schools will ever admit. We can and should engage our children with the great works.
I think in France (and possibly Germany), philosophy is mandatory in high school. N.B. We also read the book of Job in 9th grade English. It was thrilling and inspired in me a life-long interest in the Bible as poetry.
I see many of my students thrilled by Job. Yesterday I did something a little different with them. They had read Job 26-31 (Job’s long lamentation before Elihu speaks). I asked them to select a passage that they found particularly striking or beautiful and to explain in writing why they chose it. Then, when they came to class, I had them go to the front of the room in pairs and lead a discussion of the passage they had chosen. One of the two would read the passage aloud, the other would speak about it for a few minutes, the first would respond to the one who had spoken, and then other students (and I) would comment.
I was surprised by how well this went and how much thought the students had given to these passages.
Diane, thank you for this post. I’m honored.
I liked the effects of Plato’s Republic in my inner-city philosophy class. “Knowing one’s proper place” in the “hive” as the highest Platonic ideal of all, “ideal justice.” Social stability is contingent upon everyone’s unquestioning acceptance of his or her socia/economic lot in life. Now there’s the seminal paradigm for perpetual poverty in this country; inner-city kids need access to this information. Therein lies the real reason philosophy is not taught in public education.
Plato’s Republic has many facets and subtle points. It would be a mistake to read it for its stated ideal alone; there is also the progression from one idea to another, and the interesting points, stories, and questions along the way. Yes, Plato believes in social stratification of a kind, but his main concern is with virtue. He makes a fascinating argument that the tyrant is the unhappiest of men, since he has a tyranny inside himself as well as on the outside.
And he sees no good in vicious moneymaking at other people’s expense (from Book IX):
“In light of this argument, can it profit anyone to acquire gold unjustly if, by doing so, he enslaves the best part of himself to the most vicious? If he got the gold by enslaving his son or daughter to savage and evil men, it wouldn’t profit him, no matter how much gold he got. How, then, could he fail to be wretched if he pitilessly enslaves the most divine part of himself to the most godless and polluted one and accepts golden gifts in return for a more terrible destruction than Eriphyle’s when she took the necklace in return for her husband’s soul?”
Yes. And thus democracy cedes to tyranny. And yet…. And yet, what about the tyranny that lurks behind idealism itself, especially the kind of idealism that would have a philosopher king as the prime social mover through his daddy-knows-best “noble lie”? Students who don’t spend a great deal of time on this curious twist in the Republic–of course, after exploring all books thoroughly– miss out on one of the essential (if I dare use this word when talking about Platonic essentialism) ways democracy BECOMES tyranny. Essentialism / idealism is the prime mover behind a truly effective noble lie. If Plato is one of the fathers of monotheistic religious thought, as some would claim, it is more important than ever to observe how his initial plan for essentialistic thinking mirrors later “opiate of the masses” attributes of the invisible ideologies that control us. It is similar to the ideal of no child left behind v. the reality of No Child Left Behind.
It is worth noting that analytic philosophy is only one current in philosophy–not its be-all and end-all. As one fortunate enough to have had philosophy in high school, I can attest to its enduring value. I often think of the man–now deceased–who taught me, as one of the two most important academic educators in my life. My interest in philosophy has endured through my life, and its value truly cannot be reduced to any kind of test.
The only test that really matters is life, and how one lives it.
de finibus
It is just one current, but it certainly dominates philosophy departments in the US. I thought it would be the approach to philosophy that MOMwithAbrain might appreciate more than continental.
Well, there are also variations within that current. John Stuart Mill may be considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy, but in 1826 he had a mental crisis, and after much searching, found in the poetry of Wordsworth a “medicine” for his “state of mind.” During this time he came to value and understand the imaginative arts.
He wrote in his autobiography:
“What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a Source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle of imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind.”
Now, he did not, as a result of this, turn away from analytic philosophy–but he did come to appreciate Carlyle, the “Coleridgians,” and the German philosophers:
“all of them fiercely opposed to the mode of thought in which I had been brought up, had convinced me that along with much error they possessed much truth, which was veiled from minds otherwise capable of receiving it by the transcendental and mystical phraseology in which they were accustomed to shut it up, and from which they neither cared, nor knew how, to disengage it; and I did not despair of separating the truth from the error, and expressing it in terms which would be intelligible and not repulsive to those on my own side in philosophy.”
It was then that he revised “On Liberty” with his wife. The book came out of her influence and their conversations and relationship; it is a departure from analytic philosophy, though not (in my view) a rejection of it. It is certainly not systematic. He wrote:
“The ‘Liberty’ is likely to survive longer than anything else that I have written (with the possible exception of the ‘Logic’), because the conjunction of her mind with mine has rendered it a kind of philosophic text-book of a single truth, which the changes progressively taking place in modern society tend to bring out into ever stronger relief: the importance, to man and society of a large variety in types of character, and of giving full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions.”
There’s much more to say about all of this (and much, much more for me to learn). But here’s a philosopher who evolved: who began in an analytic tradition and, without rejecting it, came to recognize other ways of approaching truth.
Here’s a link to his autobiography, by the way. Fascinating reading.
http://www.bartleby.com/25/1/
There are certainly different schools of thought within analytic philosophy. There are also some contemporary philosophers who do both analytic and continental philosophy very well. Iris Young, for example.
What is philosophy?
Seems the answer to that question is as old as the term and that it still hasn’t been answered definitively. See below for just a few “definitions”.
From: dictionary.reference.com/browse/philosophy
noun, plural phi•los•o•phies.
1. the rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, or conduct.
2. any of the three branches, namely natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and metaphysical philosophy, that are accepted as composing this study.
3. a system of philosophical doctrine: the philosophy of Spinoza.
4. the critical study of the basic principles and concepts of a particular branch of knowledge, especially with a view to improving or reconstituting them: the philosophy of science.
5. a system of principles for guidance in practical affairs.
From: Wiki
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language.[1][2] Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument.[3] The word “philosophy” comes from the Greek φιλοσοφία (philosophia), which literally means “love of wisdom”.[4][5][6]
From: Merriam Webster online:
1a (1) : all learning exclusive of technical precepts and practical arts (2) : the sciences and liberal arts exclusive of medicine, law, and theology (3) : the 4-year college course of a major seminary
b (1) archaic : physical science (2) : ethics
c : a discipline comprising as its core logic, aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology
2a : pursuit of wisdom
b : a search for a general understanding of values and reality by chiefly speculative rather than observational means
c : an analysis of the grounds of and concepts expressing fundamental beliefs
3a : a system of philosophical concepts
b : a theory underlying or regarding a sphere of activity or thought
4a : the most basic beliefs, concepts, and attitudes of an individual or group
b : calmness of temper and judgment befitting a philosopher
The trivium was abandoned (or transformed) during the Renaissance, beginning in about 1450. According to the great scholar P.O. Kristeller: “In the Renaissance, the Italian humanists, who in many respects continued the grammatical and rhetorical traditions of the Middle Ages, rechristened the old Trivium with a new and more ambitious name: Studia humanitatis, and also increased its scope. They excluded logic and added to the traditional Latin grammar and rhetoric not only history, Greek, and moral philosophy (ethics), but made poetry, once a sequel of grammar and rhetoric, the most important member of the whole group.”
They dropped logic because under Aristotelian Scholasticism it had become excessively analytical and went back to the conception of the humanities advocated by Cicero, who had been approved by St. Augustine & St. Ambrose. By poetry was meant mainly heroic and epic literature, plays on elevated topics based on history and myth, and genres such as the satire and elegy. By moral philosophy they meant ethics,;by rhetoric they meant public speaking. But of course the entire curriculum was concerned with morality (behavior).
I thought I had posted this info before, but it didn’t seem to go through.
Thank you for this, Harold.
Teaching or rather promoting philosophy will ultimately put teaching as a career in its rightful place – a noble job.