Abstract
In ‘Why Teach Philosophy in Schools?’, Jane Gatley critiques existing defenses of teaching philosophy in schools and advances her own. Despite my reservations about her account in its current form, I remain deeply sympathetic to Gatley’s goals, to the radical consequences of her theory of educational goods, to her commitment to defending philosophy on the basis of its distinctive characteristics, and to her deep appreciation of the power of analytic philosophy.
Gatley begins by surveying the history of, and challenges faced by, including philosophy in schools in Chapter 1, and then turns, in Chapter 2, to her first major task: rebutting existing defenses of philosophy in schools. She asserts two criteria that any such defenses should meet: they must establish ‘(1) that teaching philosophy provides some specifiable educational goods and (2) that there is reason to hold that these goods are only or best delivered by teaching philosophy’ (p. 27). A curriculum that is not grounded in the pursuit of specifiable educational goods risks incoherence, and it also wrongs students by unjustifiably imposing on their time (p. 28). And since resources are limited, an argument for including one element in a curriculum must show that it delivers these educational goods uniquely or better than its rivals (p. 27). Knowing that a program fosters a purported educational good is insufficient to show that this purported good is appropriate in schools (e.g. religious indoctrination is illegitimate in public schools), and research demonstrating a program’s capacity to foster a legitimate educational good (e.g. critical thinking skills) is insufficient to show that this program fosters this good uniquely or better than its rivals (pp. 32–38, 42).
While much of Chapter 2 is well reasoned, Gatley’s second criterion misses something crucial about the context in which educational programs are chosen and requires more positive support and a defense. Suppose that a philosophy program provides a much larger number of educational goods than any feasibly implemented rival program and that these benefits are significant – both plausible assumptions – given the wide-ranging nature of the goods Gatley discusses in her brief review of the literature on the Philosophy for Children (P4C) movement. Under this supposition, such a program may still be justifiably implemented, due to time and resource constraints, even if it fails to provide a greater benefit than every single rival for every single educational good considered in isolation.
In Chapter 3, Gatley turns to the topic of educational aims and goods. She begins by describing theoretical education, which is ‘the practice of conveying ideas to students’ (p. 55). We learn, in Chapter 4, that, rather than ‘a form of education that lapses into the transmission of inert ideas’, ‘a theoretical education changes how people understand the world’ (p. 99, p. 94). Gatley’s account, which she calls the utility account of education, holds that a theoretical education is broadly useful for students because it provides them with ‘the ability to interact effectively with the world in virtue of the insights into the world provided by theoretical content’ (p. 91). This usefulness for individual students is what justifies theoretical education. And when students are informed ‘about many different ways of understanding the world taken from the best theoretical content available to humankind, then it is valuable because it helps students to interact effectively with the world’ (p. 105).
Given this aim, the elements of a theoretical education should not merely be selected based on how fundamental they are to an academic discipline, but based on the extent to which they address ‘prominent and pressing questions’ that will emerge within the context of students’ lives (pp. 107–108). The role played by academic disciplines, in this picture, is to serve students by organizing these questions and their answers into a coherent and properly scaffolded curriculum (p. 110). Gatley’s proposal would thereby shuffle the hierarchy between students and disciplines, thus constituting an intriguing and valuable contribution to the broader discussion of how educational institutions ought to be organized.
Gatley does not appear to provide an actual argument for the conclusion that it is good for students to interact effectively with the world (i.e. as opposed to arguments based on the assumption that effective interaction with the world is a valuable end). But surely, effective interaction with the world is not always good: an education that produces students who effectively design unimaginably cruel weapons or environmentally devastating business models that fall through the cracks of regulatory agencies is objectionable on those grounds even if the education is fostering their effective interaction with the world in ways that support their cherished ambitions. 1 Due to examples like this, it seems Gatley is mistaken when she says that ‘effective interaction with the world is useful towards any end of education’ (p. 117). An account of when, and to what extent, it is good to foster effective interaction with the world, as well as an explanation of how these limitations can be generated from within her utility account, is warranted. 2
In Chapters 5 and 6, Gatley proceeds to her final task of arguing that a theoretical education based on the discipline of academic philosophy – particularly the tradition within analytic philosophy of carrying out conceptual analyses of ordinary concepts – should be taught in schools (pp. 131–132). Her first argument is that teaching students theoretical content from philosophy is the best way to help them answer prominent and pressing questions based on ordinary concepts: concepts, such as love, happiness, right, and wrong, which ‘are used in many areas of discourse and in ordinary life and their meaning has not been formalized’ (p. 128). Her second is that a theoretical education in philosophy is the best way to ameliorate the concern that ‘a broad, theoretical education might become fragmented, both from students’ experiences of the world and within the curriculum itself, so that different theories and disciplines become disconnected from one another’ (p. 154).
I have no reservations about Gatley’s endorsement of analytic philosophy, but there are problems in her arguments for both conclusions. She claims that ‘some [disciplines outside of analytic philosophy] involve the systematic study of prominent and pressing issues, such as women’s studies, or human sexuality studies’ (p. 145) but she never follows up this assertion with a discussion of how these two disciplines fail in comparison with philosophy (she critiques history and literature instead). What is more, she never demonstrates that a theoretical education in analytic philosophy does a better job of helping students make adequate 3 progress on ordinary questions than an obvious and ostensibly non-theoretical intervention common in procedurally directive 4 approaches like P4C: simply teaching students, through a series of exercises considered in isolation from the philosophical canon, a way of thinking that resembles the method of reflective equilibrium (e.g. testing definitions of ordinary concepts against counterarguments, revising these definitions in light of such tests, and then beginning the process again).
Gatley’s account also leaves open the question of whether philosophy is the most effective approach for reducing, as opposed to merely redistributing, fragmentation. For example, her proposed curriculum for helping students deliberate about whether to use cannabis involves the following: a basic introduction to ethics that includes a survey of deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, and moral relativism; an introduction to philosophy of law; and important thought experiments from the literature on hedonism (p. 177). While such a curriculum may help some students reduce their fragmented picture of the world, other students may be initiated into a world replete with even more diverse and intractable conflicts that produce new forms of fragmentation. They may find themselves, for example, completely stuck between rival normative ethical theories that provide compelling and contradictory answers to their questions.
Finally, absent an empirical investigation into just how widespread, pressing, and important the negative experiences of fragmentation are for students, the example of cannabis may be focusing on a problem deemed far more important by the disciplinary tradition of philosophy than by a majority of students themselves – a problem for her utility account, but not for the disciplinary accounts that she rejects (see Chapters 2 and 4). In the case of cannabis, my hunch is that many accept or decline without being troubled by fragmentation: perhaps they treat the recommendation of an older sibling, friend, parent, or religious leader as decisive, or perhaps they choose impulsively.
Gatley’s defenses in Chapters 5 and 6 therefore do not appear to pass the test that she appealed to when rejecting defenses of philosophy in schools in Chapter 2. This is because she has not satisfactorily supported the empirical claim that theoretical education in philosophy is superior to non-philosophical forms of theoretical education or skill-based (i.e. non-theoretical) forms of philosophy education along the dimension she has identified as important: providing students with the tools that they need to pursue prominent and pressing ordinary concept questions to the extent that this pursuit is actually useful for them as they navigate their lives.
Despite these concerns, I want to emphasize that Gatley’s account remains a fascinating and innovative argument for the value of including philosophy in schools, and I fully expect that she will successfully defeat all of aforementioned challenges in future works. In the meantime, I believe that she has provided our field with a helpful step in the direction of finally justifying the inclusion of philosophy in schools. All advocates of philosophy in schools ought to be grateful to her for pushing us to identify and focus on the contributions that philosophy seems best positioned to uniquely provide.