“In this post, I want to encourage a conversation about active steps that we—all of us who love, teach, and write philosophy—might take to help philosophy’s future.”

There are many concerns about the future of philosophy in higher education. In the following guest post, Alex Guerrero, professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, puts forward two ideas he thinks are both feasible and effective about how to improve philosophy’s prospects.

This is the fifth in a series of guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.

(Posts in this series will remain pinned to the top of the homepage for several days following initial publication.)

Two Ideas for Improving the Future of Philosophy
by Alex Guerrero

For those of us who teach philosophy or love philosophy, it is hard not to notice the steady drumbeat of despair and demise sounding in the background of what we do. There has been much discussion on these pages and elsewhere about the many threats and concerns.

Some aren’t particular to philosophy: the general decline of interest in and support for humanistic education and a decline in humanities majors and enrollment, the corporatist mindset and administrative takeover of higher education, the politicization of higher education, the political attacks on “critical race theory” and other humanistic subjects, the decline in public support of and funding for post-secondary education, the threats posed by AI to the humanities and university education. Other concerns—including the regular “what are you going to do with that?” jokes and “uselessness” rhetoric, circulating in the public and on occasion being embraced by administrators—are more philosophy-specific.

These and other forces have resulted in philosophy department and program closures, firing of tenured philosophy faculty, failures to allow departments to replace retiring and departing faculty, and a general sense of precarity regarding the future of philosophy, at least within the university setting.

Responses to all of this are often reactive (let’s try to put out this particular fire), fatalistic (so philosophy, too, burns in the world-engulfing flames), exhausted (I’d like to help, but I’m already on fire myself, thanks), or aloof (I can’t even smell the smoke from way up here).

Many of these responses are understandable, even sensible. But they leave us struggling to address the fundamental problems in a substantial, organized, sustained way. In part to help in this regard, the American Philosophical Association has a Committee on the Status and Future of the Profession (CSFP). That committee is charged with studying trends in “graduate and undergraduate education in philosophy” and “conditions relevant to the employment of philosophers in academic and non-academic work,” as well as making recommendations to the Board of Officers of the APA about things that might be done. This committee often has also helped to organize events and panels and to bring philosophers together to work on various issues and create relevant resources and reports. (One of the most notable of these is the Department Advocacy Toolkit, created to help at-risk departments, to help departments avoid being in positions of peril, and to help strengthen and expand philosophy departments and programs.) I have served for a year on this committee and have just started a 3-year term as chair of this committee.

In this post, I want to encourage a conversation about active steps that we—all of us who love, teach, and write philosophy—might take to help philosophy’s future.

I will focus on two specific ideas that I think are relatively feasible, have substantial potential for expanding broad engagement with philosophy, might create employment opportunities for those with graduate training in philosophy, and might help alter and improve the broad public perception of philosophy.

I see these as in line with other, somewhat less specific suggestions in the direction of expanding and encouraging public philosophy (as I argued for last year). It would be helpful to have a conversation about these specific ideas. And it would be great if people interested in helping with one or both might comment or email me to let me know; we need all the help we can get! The CSFP is small (a chair, six members, and five ex officio members), basically unfunded, and largely powerless. As a result, it is limited in what it can do—at least without enlisting sizable support from the broader philosophical community.

Beyond these two ideas, we would also very much welcome other ideas for “active” efforts to help improve the future of philosophy and philosophy education.

(1) Advanced Placement (AP) Philosophy

Most US and Canadian high schools offer no philosophy courses. Even for those people who then attend college or university, most never take a philosophy class. Unsurprisingly, then, many people in the US and Canada have very little idea of what philosophy is. This is true even of relatively well-educated people and people who end up in influential roles in politics, science, business, law, entertainment, the arts, and even in education. (There are a few exceptions; we make sure to list them on our ‘why study philosophy’ posters.)

There are many good ideas about how to address this awareness and exposure problem. (There is no guarantee that exposure will lead to genuine valuing and appreciation of philosophy, but it might seem a necessary condition.) However, few of those strategies compare with giving people an in-depth, full year exposure to the subject. In the United States and Canada, there is no easy way to get philosophy to be part of the standard curriculum at any of the K-12 levels. This is in large part because states, provinces, and territories are all largely autonomous when it comes to setting their curriculum. There also is nothing like the groundswell of support that would be needed to make it a required offering—in part because of the awareness problem and commonly shared misperceptions of the field.

Enter the ‘Advanced Placement’ courses and accompanying exams, overseen by the College Board, an American not-for-profit organization formed in 1899 which also oversees aspects of the SAT, SAT Subject Tests, the PSAT, and a variety of other standardized tests.

The AP program offers “university-level” classes and examinations to current high school students. Some of these courses are viewed as “honors” or “advanced” courses within the high school course offerings. So, one might take AP Biology, rather than just Biology. Other courses count more as electives, not standing in as an honors or advanced version of a required course. High school students can take AP exams on a wide variety of subjects—typically at the end of an accompanying AP course on that subject—as a way of earning credits from the college or university at which they eventually enroll. Perhaps even more important than their role in providing potential college credit, AP courses are also often seen as central markers of academic challenge and accomplishment, and a key measure for students applying to competitive colleges and universities.

There is no other nationwide educational program that has anything like the reach and pervasive presence of the AP program. There are roughly 17 million high school students in the US. 3 million of them took AP exams last year. In 2023, 5.2 million AP exams were taken. And the trend line is dramatically upward. In 1956, there were only 12 AP courses and exams offered. Now there are 40 AP courses and exams. The number of students taking AP English Language and Composition has increased over 200% over the last 20 years. The number of students taking AP Psychology has increased 280% over the past decade.

(An alternative program, sometimes held up as an alternative, is the International Baccalaureate Organization (IB). IB is a global program offering advanced courses in a packaged curriculum. There is some philosophy already in that curriculum—focused on epistemology under the heading of Theory of Knowledge. But it also is just a much smaller program in the US and Canada, present only in 960 high schools in the US and 190 high schools in Canada.)

The AP program is very much not just a presence at elite or private high schools. There are exam fee waivers available for students with demonstrated financial need. There are roughly 20,000 high schools in the United States. The AP program has a substantial presence at most of those schools. Consider, for example, some of the more prominent AP classes, and the number of schools that had students taking those AP classes and exams last year:

Even somewhat more ‘niche’ AP classes are present in many schools:

The College Board oversees a largely centralized process by which the course content is established, and the course exams designed, informed by substantial guidance from college professors and veteran teachers in the subject area. High school teachers can design their own course (informed by the officially determined set of expectations for course content articulated in the Course Exam and Description (CED) for each course area) and submit the syllabus to the AP Course Audit for approval. Or they can borrow existing, approved syllabi on the topic.

Given its prominent historical place in the academy, education, and human intellectual life more generally, Philosophy is arguably the single biggest absence from the AP roster. There is no good reason for this. There is every reason to think that the course would be popular, particularly given the large already extant ecosystem of high school debate programs, ethics bowl teams, and angsty, thoughtful teenagers looking for something interesting and challenging to think about.

There are hard (albeit exciting) questions about how exactly to design an AP exam and course in philosophy. Many of these questions are just like those we confront when teaching Introduction to Philosophy. One approach would aim to be more historical, covering big ideas from prominent figures from the history of world philosophy. A different approach would focus on major subfields: epistemology, ethics, logic, metaphysics. A yet different approach would combine these in various ways.

Of course, quite a lot of thought has already been put into designing “pre-college” philosophy courses, spanning a range of approaches and topics (critical thinking, historical and/or great books approaches, ethics, applied philosophy, intro to philosophical problems, logic, and various combinations of these), and a range of grade levels (everything from pre-Kindergarten through high school). There is an APA Committee on Pre-College Philosophy, and the APA has created extensive resources both for those looking to find jobs in these areas, and for those looking to design courses or organize clubs in pre-college settings. Indeed, an AP Philosophy course was the subject of some discussion by the Pre-College Philosophy committee in 2016.

And of course, these same questions have arisen for every AP course and exam. Nothing here seems insurmountable, even if we should expect some disagreement, modification over time, etc. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

And there are many reasons to think that AP Philosophy would be good—for philosophy, and more generally.

Most obviously, imagine the sheer exposure to philosophy and philosophical ideas that would accompany a decently sized AP course, say, a course like Art History (25,000 students a year), Microeconomics (95,000 students a year), or Music Theory (18,000 students a year). It is hard to say how big AP Philosophy might become, but it is easy to imagine it having numbers in that ballpark.

It is hard to calculate the value of that enrollment or exposure, but it seems likely that it would increase interest in philosophy at the college and university level. We might think that high-achieving, academically inclined high school students—the kind who care about taking AP classes—are a particularly great target audience for philosophy. And it would dramatically alter the general awareness of philosophy, even among those who never study it further. Many more people would have a sense of the serious content, interesting ideas, and important figures in philosophy. We are, of course, biased, but philosophy is pretty easy to fall in love with.

It would also dramatically expand the breadth of exposure to philosophy, making it so that many students—and not just those who attend elite private high schools—might have a chance to encounter philosophy while in high school. I am sure many of us can recount our somewhat chance early encounters with philosophy which, imperfect as they might have been (I read the whole ‘Philosophy’ section at my local public library; it was entirely Ayn Rand books that had been donated… more on that below), piqued our interest and got us interested in finding more. Again, we are a biased lot, but there is every reason to think that many others would fall in love if the right books or ideas came into their hands.

More subtly, perhaps, having an AP Philosophy class would also signal that philosophy is appropriately seen as a core academic subject, part of the “educational canon” along with these other fields. People from countries in which philosophy is a standard part of the educational curriculum in pre-college instruction find it striking and odd that philosophy is not a central subject here. (And, of course, that seems right to us!) (A side note: it is surprisingly hard to find detailed evidence regarding the teaching of philosophy in pre-college settings around the world. From various Wikipedia entries, largely uncited, one can find the following suggestions: In the province of British Columbia, philosophy is taught as a social studies course at a 12^th grade level. In the United Kingdom it is possible to do A-levels in philosophy. In many other countries, philosophy is part of the high school curriculum (in some cases as part of an extended series of classes): Algeria, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Japan, India, Italy, Morocco, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Tunisia… It would be good to get more information about this! Feel free to provide relevant local knowledge in the comments.)

If we consider the future teaching of philosophy, having an AP Philosophy course as a presence at 3000 or 4000 schools (or more) would make it so that a non-trivial number of teaching positions might be more attractively filled by someone with a background in philosophy, whether a BA, MA, or PhD. We shouldn’t expect that every high school will rush out to hire such a person, but nor would it be that those with philosophy degrees are seen as notably less ideal as high school teachers than someone with, say, a degree in History, Chemistry, English, or Psychology.

There are, of course, many possible concerns!

A general kind of concern is that the AP program is far from an ideal model of liberal arts education. The big exam at the end leads to a troubling kind of ‘teaching to the test’ model, familiar from general criticisms of standardized testing. It is impossible to educate and train students on skills—such as philosophical writing—that are hard to measure at scale via such tests. The College Board that runs it operates as a quasi-for-profit entity. And all of this means that the introduction to philosophy students would get from an AP Philosophy class would be, in many ways, less good than what they would get in a standard intro to philosophy class at, say, a small liberal arts college. A particularly trenchant, recent book by Annie Abrams, Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students, makes this case in detail. Her main claim is that the AP program started out with values that might have been closer to bring the liberal arts education into high schools, but has ended up distorted by the familiar problems posed by standardized tests, as well as private entity motivations toward scale and growth rather than educational values, and the (sadly familiar) trend toward the use of technology platforms that serve to standardize, surveil, and flatten, limiting the opportunities for creativity and genuine humanistic education.

Some of these concerns must be conceded. They are in line with concerns that most of us feel about education at every level, including at our institutions of higher education. We work within these complex and troubling forces to the best of our ability. Similarly, although these pressures might affect AP Philosophy classes, I still expect and predict that there would be many excellent AP Philosophy classes and teachers—classes that would have a genuinely transformative effect on the students in them, cultivating a love and appreciation for philosophy.

It also strikes me that it only hurts philosophy to be left out of the AP world. It doesn’t result in more students getting a good humanistic, liberal arts education exposure to philosophy. They just never encounter philosophy at all. It just makes philosophy an afterthought or (more worryingly) left out of conversations about the future of education entirely.

I am sure we would all welcome a massive influx of public funding for excellent liberal arts education in high schools, colleges, and universities, helping us to move away from for-profit considerations, quasi-privatization of key elements of education, and overreliance on standardized tests and generic massively scaled teaching and learning, which together combine to produce a kind of “dehumanistic” education. But until that time, we must fight for philosophy in the world in which we live. Or so it seems to me.

There are also more specific concerns about how AP Philosophy might be implemented.

We might worry about bad course design. I’m not very concerned on that front. For other subjects, academic experts are centrally involved, and we could expect to see a similar situation here. One thing the APA might help with, actually, is to have a committee of people whose job it is to help advise regarding AP Philosophy course design and exam content. And again, the perfect here is the enemy of the good.

We might worry about relatively incapable teachers, resulting in a bad initial exposure to philosophy for students. This worry seems to overgeneralize or, at any rate, not to be specific to philosophy. There are many subjects that high school teachers end up learning on the job, at least well enough to offer a high school course on the subject. And much of the value comes just from having students read and encounter philosophical ideas. As mentioned above, we might also expect that people with a philosophy background end up teaching some or many of these AP Philosophy classes, perhaps more so the longer the program is around.

A different kind of concern might be raised about students who take the AP Philosophy exam and use the AP credit to fulfill either a general education philosophy course requirement (at places that have such a credit) or an introduction to philosophy course requirement (for students who go on to major in philosophy) or who otherwise ‘place out’ of some philosophy class they might otherwise have taken. One thing to note is that it is often up to the department or academic institution whether and how AP credits can be used to fulfill requirements. (A department might decide that it shouldn’t count as fulfilling a prerequisite, for example, if students who’ve taken AP Philosophy typically don’t learn enough to bypass the standard courses.) There are limits to this, and Abrams details some of the political efforts made by the College Board to force universities to count the credit. This is worth keeping an eye on.

But the main response to this concern is just that it is hard to imagine the existence of an AP Philosophy class being a net negative for philosophy class enrollment in colleges and universities. For one thing, there is the much broader exposure to the subject, potentially bringing many more students to be interested in studying at least some philosophy in college. For another, already earning some credit toward the degree might actually serve as a reason for people to take more classes in the subject, as they are (depending on the local rules) perhaps already somewhat on their way toward a philosophy minor or major. Ultimately, the displacement/engagement tradeoff is an empirical question, but I’d bet that AP Philosophy gets many more people in the door of philosophy classrooms than those it keeps out.

I am sure there are other concerns!

If you’ve been somewhat convinced, you might wonder: what does it take to create an AP Philosophy course and exam?

This question was considered somewhat seriously about a decade ago by Baron Reed, Jonathan Shaheen, Kris Phillips, and others on the APA Committee on Pre-College Philosophy. It didn’t get too far in the process, but one obstacle encountered was that the College Board appears to require the raising of some substantial sum of money (perhaps ca. $1 million) to support the development of a new course and to get it off the ground. I have not investigated this issue yet, but (depending on the discussion here and with others on the CSFP), I would be happy to do so. If people had ideas for funding sources for this, that would also be very helpful.

It is not clear to me if there are any other significant impediments to creating a new course. There might be some, as the new AP African American Studies course ran into some controversy in Florida’s new educational regime under Governor Ron DeSantis, and was restricted/banned in Florida, South Carolina, and Arkansas. On the other hand, the University of Florida has been lavishly supported in creating the Hamilton Center, which is “devoted to research and teaching on Western civilization and the principles of a free society… studying the greatest works of the Western tradition and beyond.” It seems possible to design a relatively uncontroversial AP Philosophy class that would be both a serious introduction to the subject while encountering relatively little by way of reactionary backlash. (Of course, politics being what they are…)

(2) APA High School Philosophy Scholarship Competition

The second idea can be presented more briefly.

Since 1985, the Ayn Rand Institute has hosted annual student essay contests on Ayn Rand’s novels, particularly Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged. The total prize money is relatively modest, with the winning essays receiving prizes of $2000 to $25,000, and the total prize money handed out over 40 years being a little over $2 million. The contests for essays about Anthem and The Fountainhead are open to middle school and high school students. The contest for Atlas Shrugged is open to high school, college, and graduate students.

According to the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) which oversees the competitions, over those nearly 40 years, more than 455,000 students have participated in the essay contests. The ARI has also given out more than 2.5 million copies of her novels (teachers can receive the books for free if they agree to teach them in their classes), and it is estimated that 65,000 high school classrooms have taught her books since the ARI “Books to Teachers” program began in 2002. The ARI maintains a detailed website that provides pedagogical resources to high school and college teachers interested in teaching these texts, including sample syllabi, lesson plans, activities, and study guides—some created by people from the ARI, others submitted by teachers.

There is little doubt that Ayn Rand is the philosopher who is most widely read and taught in high schools in the United States, and it is entirely because of the essay scholarship competition combined with the free books program and pedagogical resources.

The basic idea here is straightforward: create an APA Philosophy Essay Competition for high school students that would award prize money and would provide similar encouragement and pedagogical support for high school teachers to teach the philosophical material. Existing high school classes could be encouraged to add a unit on the text in question, perhaps fitting into literature, civics/government, or history courses.

There are many further questions about how to set this up, how to fund it, how to evaluate the essay submissions (ugh, I wonder what the ARI is doing about ChatGPT…), which texts to focus on for the essay competition itself, whether to change those texts every year (or every five years, etc.), and so on. But, as with the AP Philosophy idea, it seems a straightforward way of getting many more high school students to engage with philosophical ideas (beyond just those of Ayn Rand).

One possibility would be to create a regular APA Committee or subcommittee to oversee the competition, to help select the philosophical text, solicit and/or create pedagogical materials, maintain the website, and to help evaluate submissions.

Some further thoughts. One place the ARI has been very successful is simply putting books in the hands of teachers and students. Obviously, there are many philosophical resources that are already freely available: open access articles, texts that are hosted by Project Gutenberg, etc. And many philosophical classics are relatively affordable, particularly those published by Hackett, but others as well. This might also be a place where donations or discounts from publishers or contributions from private foundations might help support the competition.

It would be great, in particular, to hear from people about texts that might work well on their own or paired with another text or two for this kind of competition. What would be fun and compelling for high school students without a lot of philosophical background? Ayn Rand’s work has the advantage of being in novel form, enabling it to be slotted into literature classes. What are works of philosophy that would be manageable for high school students but also ‘feel’ like literature (whether or not in novel form)?