The Coolest Subject on the Planet How Philosophy Made its Way in Ontarios High Schools

Abstract

Introduction: To many philosophers, it is strikingly obvious that philosophy should be taught at the high school level. These are the critical years when students are exploring their assumptions and calling into question the values and worldviews of their parents, peers, and society. Training in philosophy can provide high school students with powerful tools of analysis and critical reasoning, new ways of looking at the world, and new approaches to problem solving. It can also help students to situate their inquiries within the context of a 2,500 year old discipline, and thereby develop their sense of themselves as part of a shared and ongoing conversation. Curiously, however, philosophy is part of the official secondary school curriculum in only a handful of developed countries around the world. Still more curiously, North America lags far behind Western Europe in this regard. For the most part, philosophy is taught in only a small number of public and private secondary schools across North America, often as part of a course in another discipline. Why North America lags so far behind is open to conjecture. A number of extra-philosophical factors would obviously need to be explored to arrive at an adequate explanation for the slow entry of philosophy into North American secondary school education. These factors might include, for example, suspicions among policy makers and education interest groups that philosophy is a potentially subversive subject; theories of cognitive development in educational psychology that hold that adolescents are neither emotionally nor intellectually mature enough for philosophical thinking; and stereotypes about philosophy as an impractical and abstruse subject with little real world application. Other factors might include disciplinary rivalries within the secondary school curriculum, curricular inertia, lack of adequate funding in schools and school boards, and the absence of teacher training programmes in the colleges of education. However, it is not the focus of this paper to supply an explanation for why philosophy has been so slow in gaining entry into the secondary school curriculum.