“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:
| AP Calculus (AB) | 13,889 schools |
| AP English Language and Composition | 13,485 schools |
| AP English Literature and Composition | 12,873 schools |
| AP US History | 12,620 schools |
| AP Biology | 11,593 schools |
| AP Psychology | 9,912 schools |
| AP Statistics | 9,789 schools |
| AP Government and Politics – US | 9,700 schools |
| AP Chemistry | 9,087 schools |
| AP World History | 8,168 schools |
| AP Spanish Language & Culture | 8,078 schools |
| AP Environmental Science | 7,764 schools |
| AP Physics 1 | 7,771 schools |
| AP Computer Science Principles | 7,687 schools |
| AP Computer Science A | 6,979 schools |
| AP Human Geography | 6,893 schools |
| AP Macroeconomics | 5,809 schools |
| AP Microeconomics | 4,681 schools |
Even somewhat more ‘niche’ AP classes are present in many schools:
| AP European History | 3,698 schools |
| AP Music Theory | 3,108 schools |
| AP Art History | 2,161 schools |
| AP Latin | 926 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 12th 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)?
These are both great ideas that could do a lot of good. Thanks Alex!
About the second, I suggest broadening up the idea to include a broader range of media, especially videos. A young person making, say, a really high quality video series on YouTube or TikTok, or a podcast, would get much more notice than an essay.
As I imagine this, you’d want to incentivize and recognize young people for doing public philosophy. Maybe having a variety of prizes would be best, to encourage a wide variety of creative attempts at teaching philosophy by young people.
I love this suggestion. I was just talking with a number of undergrads who came through Rutgers for the Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy, and they are making podcasts, into videos, etc.
And one of the things that seems clear, in thinking about the future of philosophy, is that a lot of philosophy is happening on YouTube, TikTok, and podcasts, it’s just that it isn’t mostly being produced by philosophy professors and people with PhDs in philosophy. That’s exciting, but also a place where it would be great for us to do better and keep up with the times (sounding like an old person with every phrase…).
Seems like a great idea to have a separate video/audio competition, where that could either be a video/podcast response to a philosophy video, or a video/podcast response to a philosophical text (or both, I guess). I might think the video/podcast response to a philosophical text is the best way of combining new media with our traditional forms and values and skills. Also, how fun would it be to judge, and to have a bunch of great entries to highlight?
You’re absolutely right about this – lots and lots of philosophy is happening on social media, substacks, etc., but professional philosophers usually aren’t the ones producing it. You’re right to say we should get into this game, and change the incentive structure so junior people would be rewarded for it. Or somehow encourage senior people to get into it.
These are great ideas Alex!
I might be wrong about that, but I think most high schools in Ontario do offer philosophy as an elective, and I would say even more tentatively, that this might have been the result of years of advocacy and support from the CPA (https://www.acpcpa.ca/cpages/philosophy-in-the-schools). University of Toronto does run an essay contest (with rather modest prizes though) for Canadian high school students:
https://philosophy.utoronto.ca/the-aristotle-a-high-school-philosophy-essay-contest/
Very interesting on both accounts! Your colleague Martin Pickave mentioned the essay contest to me and it sounds like very much the right idea–just need some more funding and scale to compete with Ayn Rand.
It would be really interesting if anyone involved in that effort in Ontario had more details!
“Ontario philosophers discussed recent changes to the secondary school curriculum in that province. After many years of effort on the part of academic philosophers, secondary school teachers and Ministry of Education officials, philosophy is now a separate subject in Ontario’s regular curriculum for grades 11 and 12. This success has generated optimism among philosophers and teachers across the country.”
Also, Ontario should get more credit on Wikipedia! “In Canada, philosophy is not generally taught in public schools prior to university. However, in some provinces, such as British Columbia, philosophy is taught as a social studies course at a twelfth grade level.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_education
(Wikipedia, generally amazing, really isn’t doing well with entry…)
There are indeed two philosophy courses widely taught in Ontario high schools – one in Grade 11 and one in Grade 12.
For lots of information about the former, see pp.328-336 of the link below, and for details about the latter, see pp.337-354.
https://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/secondary/ssciences9to122013.pdf
Getting these in the curriculum across such a large jurisdiction was really a remarkable achievement, and I understand that the late Frank Cunningham (U of T) played an enormous role. (See his obituary here: https://philosophy.utoronto.ca/news/in-memoriam-frank-cunningham-1940-2022/)
On getting philosophy in Ontario’s high school’s, see David Jopling’s paper “The Coolest Subject on the Planet: How Philosophy Made its Way in Ontario’s High Schools,” Analytic Teaching 21(2) 2000. https://www.academia.edu/72341693/_The_Coolest_Subject_on_the_Planet_How_Philosophy_Made_its_Way_in_Ontarios_High_Schools
See also the late Frank Cunningham’s write-up from 2018, which is on the website of the Ontario Philosophy Teachers’ Association at https://sites.google.com/view/ontariophilosophy/background
Thanks so much! As (almost) always, Canada is an inspiring example.
I just found a site devoted to an ongoing SSHRC (sorta Canada’s NEH) study on philosophy in Ontario’s high schools. They’ve posted there data from their studies (under the tab “Key Findings”), resources, and a longish publication list. https://hsphil.weebly.com/
You should be tentative, Sergio. The CPA page you link to discusses a Philosophy in the Schools project that the CPA started in 2000, but if you follow another link in that one you’ll see that philosophy was approved as a high school subject in Ontario in 1995, before any CPA involvement. As Klaas Kraay and Paul Raymont say below, the Ontario approval was largely the result of work by Frank Cunningham — he deserves the lion’s share of the credit.
British Columbia has been adding philosophy and philosophy adjacent courses into its HS curriculum. There are Social Studies courses in social justice. My former colleague Nic Fillion has been working with the BC Social Studies Teacher Association to this end, but I don’t think they have yet been able to do what Frank Cunningham did in Ontario. And of course in Quebec, HS stops at grade 11, and students go on to CEGEP (grades 12-13; if they go on to University, it is a 3 year degree). The CEGEP all have Philosophy courses.
Ethics Bowl has been another way to raise the profile of Philosophy, in both Canada and the US.
Not to douse everyone’s enthusiasm, but I am doubtful that “most” highschools in Ontario offer philosophy as an elective.
I finished highschool in Ontario in 2012. In my small city of 50,000 – with five highschools – only one offered philosopy as an elective course (not the one I attended). Just because an elective is in the curriculum does not mean it is taught. To put in bluntly though, highschools in major metropolitan areas like Toronto and Ottawa are better funded. Maybe they have a higher rate of philosophy courses, but I suspect their is some confirmation bias since the best supported highschools in Ontario are the ones nearest our universities.
As someone mentioned, I found the situation in Quebec better as philosophy is a *mandatory* class in French CEGEPs (technically in English CEGEPs students must take a “Humanities” course). So, almost every francophone Quebecer I meet has an opinion on philosophy as a subject.
Things are a little better in the past decade. More than half (but not much more) of Ontario high schools now offer the philosophy electives (and of them most only offer the Grade 12 one and not the Grade 11 one). Still, the contrast between my USA and Canadian institutions is continuing to be really striking to me — None of my incoming first-years in USA ever had previous philosophy, but in Ontario, every first-year class here in Peterborough has some already-familiar students who’ve taken a philosophy class. And it is often those students who take a second or third Philosophy course, so the minority is a welcome one and effective in retention and enrolment.
Well, that is actually very encouraging!
Thank you for this terrific post, Alex!
I hope the field makes a strong push for AP Philosophy classes. That would be a wonderful thing for the field and for the country.
As for contests, I wonder if students might be interested in the topic of AI. Maybe pairing Chalmers’ recent piece on LLM consciousness with a work of fiction like Ex Machina? Perhaps this should just be one topic among many, since as Nathan says it’s good to have a variety.
These are two excellent ideas. However, as long as the economic forces push students into majors with clear employment outcomes (and as long as the funders and legislators align with those economic forces), those ideas won’t help us.
We need to positively link philosophy to employment outcomes. Otherwise, we’re gone, or at least gone at the majority of the colleges and universities in the US. I think philosophy can be positively linked to employment outcomes, but it will require some big changes.
One thing I would love to see: data on philosophy minors and/or students who chose philosophy as a second major and their employment outcomes.
The CEGEPs in Quebec teach philosophy as well. They are “colleges” that one enters after the 11th grade, but before university (or other training). You can see the wikipedia article on CEGEPs to get the basic idea. Perhaps reach out to someone working there … I know various philosophers in Canada have taught at them in the past … before getting a PhD
Yes, I was going to add that, too. Philosophy is a required subject at the CÉGEP level, and CÉGEP is required before you can enroll in a university (Québec high school goes to grade 11).
The other thing–and this is not to undermine the proposal at all, which I think is a good one–is that AP is not really a thing in Canada. A few schools (mostly private and very fancy, with students aiming for university in the US) offer AP classes and testing, but otherwise it’s pretty much nonexistent here.
I’m not sure, that’s true, Michel. Both my kids have done AP classes here at the public high school in Vancouver.
I stand corrected–looks like things have changed considerably in the twentyish years since I left high school! (Although not in Québec, due to the language thing.)
I did do AP at the time (at one of those horrific but fancy schools). At the time, it wasn’t possible to get university credit for it in Canada. Interesting to see how much things have changed in the intervening time.
According to this: https://vansd.org/college-credit/
AP courses are offered at EVERY Vancouver public high school, for example.
My love of philosophy began in CÉGEP!
Very interesting! Thanks for the information!
Tony Larivière at Lakehead might be able to say more. He did work at a CEGEP.
It’s also notable that a large portion of PhDs from programs in Quebec take jobs teaching philosophy at CEGEPs, since the pay is relatovely good and they don’t have to leave Quebec (or Canada) just to find a teaching job. So, the quality of instruction is high.
“ugh, I wonder what the ARI is doing about ChatGPT…”
If cheating is the student’s self-interest, what could their objection be?
I’m sure Howard Roark and John Galt would make some speech against it as undermining the glory and power of the individual human mind, with LLMs some kind of awful collectivist amalgamation…
For historical background, there’s a bunch of letters in Philosophical Review (54[3], May, 1945) on the role of philosophy in US education. The letters were sent to the Commission on the Function of Philosophy in Liberal Education (membership: Brand Blanshard, C. D. Ducasse, Max Otto, A. E. Murphy, C. W. Hendel).
The Commission published its own report but was so impressed by the letters they received that they devoted more than 60 pages to publishing them (along with Blanshard’s comments) in the Review.
Several letter writers mentioned the possibility of teaching philosophy in high school. I’m not sure what to make of this advice from Columbia sociologist Robert S. Lynd but it’s interesting:
Very interesting! Thanks for this. Could be very useful.
These are great ideas. I’ve been thinking of creating a funded MA program (but with only one or two TA lines) for those interested in teaching philosophy in high school. We already have one graduate (of our PhD student) who has been tremendous at this, teaching philosophy at a nearby charter school. But I worry that there isn’t enough interest in this. Of course, if there were an AP program in philosophy, then there would be.
My students and I are working on a “Philosophy Through Theatre Games” (PTTG) initiative, to bring philosophy into high schools.
We use interactive participatory activities to explore philosophy ideas.
You can read about it here.
https://www.georgigardiner.com/projects#h.mru6pz2s66q2
The project has relocated to Tulane University in New Orleans. This is perfect, since Tulane University is heavily invested in community outreach. And the philosophy department already has high school ethics bowl .
My plan is to have my students develop the activities and resources, as part of their coursework.
They will (for example) adapt Augustin Boal’s activities to address themes from their university philosophy courses.
We then beta test these ideas in the high schools of New Orleans. And then make the resources available for the wider philosophy community.
Ethics bowl is debate-centered. PTTG, by contrast, focuses on collaboratively exploring ideas, and will appeal to more arty kids and theatre kids.
This project has received generous funding from the APA Berry Grant for public philosophy and the Denbo Center for the Humanities.
If anyone wants to join the team, please contact me.
As someone else mentioned, Quebec offers 3 mandatory post-secondary (but pre-university) philosophy courses to anyone in a post-secondary institution. Cegeps are like community colleges and SLACS. Philosophy is also a mandatory subject in trades programs in cegep.
It’s really helping in terms of job prospects, but not so much either (the job market for cegeps is still saturated, it’s very hard to get a job especially with no experience at first). The requirement to teach these courses is an MA in philosophy, so in a way it helps decrease the number of PhDs on the market. Université de Montréal even offers a specialized MA in teaching philosophy, which includes a stage (internship?) at the end during which the student has to teach a course (or a couple of classes) at a cegep. It also obviously helps Quebec society in general by making people more aware of ethical, socio-economic and philosophical issues.
I think the rest of Canada and the US could really benefit from looking at how philosophy is taught in the general pre-university curriculum. You should look at how France does it too.
Be careful about looking at the French model. In France, curriculum is approved at the national level, and since the advent of the republic, that curriculum has been designed to build a national identity. Right now, colleagues are fighting a very steep uphill battle to diversify the standardized aggregation through which individuals qualify as teachers. The simple goal is to get some women philosophers on the examination list.
To join up this discussion with a parallel discussion in the UK:
I heard that A. C. Grayling and John Taylor were developing a Philosophy GCSE qualification
And I heard that this group were championing it:
https://www.philosophy-foundation.org/
GCSEs are the qualifications that structure education for students aged around 14 – 16 years old in most of the UK. Scotland has a separate system.
Alex, for the funding, the APA’s approaching Bill Miller might be a possibility. If he is willing to give 75 million dollars to Hopkins for philosophy, then he might be willing to give 1 million for AP Philosophy course creation (after all, that could be a lot of impact for 1 million dollars). It seems like he is a believer in philosophy, and he obviously has enough money to donate 1 million dollars (or at least a large part of what is needed). Just a thought…
An AP philosophy course would be so cool. Thanks for this great post, Alex.
Do you (or others) have a sense of what the million dollars that the AP people want could actually be required for? It seems wild to me, especially given that these folks take in revenue from the tests. But then I’m pretty inexperienced at national level curricular roll-out for high school.
I would be hesitant to say that we teach philosophy in high schools in China, unless by teaching philosophy you mean teaching a couple of Marxist doctrines coupled with government propaganda. I mean, the textbook literally says that the debate between materialism and idealism is the most fundamental debate in philosophy, and that dialectical materialism is the truth…
…which brings me to a bigger concern about AP philosophy (as much as I love this idea), namely that putting a certain set of historical philosophers in the AP course and test students on it will exacerbate the already pretty bad canon problem in philosophy. AP, as I understand it (but correct me if I am wrong), does not allow teachers the same kind of flexibility in selecting who and what to teach that college instructors have in teaching intro to philosophy courses. So that means that generations of high school students will be taught and tested on the same set of historical figures, and that just makes it even harder to get underrepresented philosophers and traditions into the mainstream. Every time I go back to China and tell people that I do philosophy, people will ask me about Marx, plus sometimes Hegel, and nobody else. One might worry that AP philosophy will similarly make the public associate philosophy with just a few big names.
Agreed. I was actually inclined to the proposed idea when I began reading the post, but got alerted when it casually brought up China as an example of teaching philosophy in high schools…
a potential solution might be that, instead of teaching (canonized) “figures”, AP philosophy classes (and, in my opinion, college philosophy classes too) should focus on teaching (contemporary) “topics” (e.g. how to think about climate change philosophically? how to think about populism philosophically? how to think about AI philosophically), and read contemporary debates and contemplations on them. Let students feel that philosophy is really not about long-dead (white male) people, but about the imminent problems faced by us and our world.
Yes, thanks for these comments. I tried to be clear that my information about philosophy in high school in countries other than the US was very limited (at best).
It seems very worthwhile for some empirically trained researcher to actually investigate where philosophy is taught, but also what the curriculum looks like.
As is clear from the discussion about France and Italy, and, in a different way, China, there are many ways of “teaching philosophy” some of which aren’t really teaching philosophy at all…
And yes, as someone with family ties to Cuba, I’m very aware about the ways in which philosophy can be objectionably restricted, censored, so forth, just as with other subjects.
A genuine question, given that I’ve now started teaching Introduction to Chinese Philosophy and regularly get students in the class who were educated in China before coming to the US: is really just Marx, maybe some Hegel, a lot of dialectical materialism… and no Kongzi, Mozi, Mengzi, Xunzi, Zhuangzi, etc.? I realize that one probably isn’t reading a lot of JS Mill and Rawls.
So the way the Chinese state-sponsered education works vis-a-vis philosophy is that there is no such thing as a course on philosophy. There are nine courses in total; they are all mandatory until some point in high school where you’ll need to drop three and prepare the rest for College Entrance Exam (Gaokao, perhaps similar enough to the German Abitur). The philosophy stuff is scattered in two places. All the more traditional Chinese philosophy stuff gets taught in a class called Chinese under literary studies facade. That’s where we read Kongzi, Mengzi, Zhuangzi, etc. The rest is in a course called “Ideology and Politics”, where there is one semester in high school dedicated to “philosophy”. That’s where you get some cherry-picked history of philosophy plus a lot of Marxist dialectics. And no, definitely no Mill or Rawls. Not even Plato or Aristotle, to the best of my knowledge (I graduated that system some 10 years ago).
Thanks for providing that background. Interesting. Is the discussion of Kongzi, Mengzi, Zhuangzi, etc., somewhat getting into the philosophical ideas, or is it more focused on the texts as literary works, or the role of the ideas in Chinese culture and history?
It’s more on the literary and cultural-historical stuff, I would say. If there is any philosophy at all, it’s the kind of philosophy “with a right answer”, so to speak.
There is a central issue with AP that, since everyone needs to take the same test nationwide, there needs to be some sort of canon that prepares them for that. It could be a set of historical figures, or a set of questions and broad schools of thought on those questions, or something else.
This means that it needs to be well-designed to ensure that underrepresented philosophers and traditions are represented in this canon, rather than either having a stale canon, or hoping that with no canon, individual teachers will be able to independently figure out their own separate ways of incorporating different underrepresented philosophers and traditions.
Creative solutions may be available – I seem to recall from my high school days that in some of the AP exams, there is an annual rotation of a special topic, so that there might be a specified novel that AP English Lit will have one essay question on this year, or a specified historical topic that AP US History will have.
That annual rotation idea sounds interesting!
I understand there’s also a nontrivial amount of interest in John Dewey’s work in China today, owed to his time there. After he gave the lectures that became Reconstruction in Philosophy in Japan, Dewey extended a similarly brief stay in China to a two-year period of lecturing and touring there in 2019-2021.
There certainly is. Dewey’s work (and, I should say, American pragmatists in general) is really influential among philosophers and education theorists in China, and certainly there are people who try to practice that in philosophy teaching. Fudan University in Shanghai hosts the Dewey center in China, and it so happens that it also has a (so far as I have heard) pretty well-run high school philosophy summer camp, and I know someone who graduated there that’s do some great work in designing and teaching middle-school and even primary-school philosophy courses. Coincidence or not, I don’t know. But state-sponsored, College-entrance-exam-aimed education, especially in those parts of China that’s economically not as well-developed as Shanghai, is a different question.
Also, I bet John Dewey was not visiting China between 2019 and 2021. After all, we were locked down at that time…
My first real exposure to philosophy was in taking AP European History in high school. That was also one of the first classes where I felt really intellectually excited in school, so I feel fondly towards AP classes.
On the topic, it would be very nice if this became a way for people w/ philosophy degrees to find work teaching in public schools, but I suspect whoever teaches an AP philosophy class will also have to be able to teach something else, like history, English, etc., and also probably have an education credential of some sort, so it’s unlikely to directly open up many more jobs for philosophers. Still, if it opens a few, and encourages more people to be interested in philosophy at the university level, I’d take it to be a win.
My impression is that most AP classes are supposed to be similar to intro classes in the subject area. So, my AP Chem class gave me credit for the first year of university chemistry, and AP European history gave me credit for the 2nd part of a two-course “Western Civ” sequence. I’d guess the goal for AP philosophy would be to give credit for into to philosophy, and while intro to philosophy can be set up in any number of ways, it would be good to have a class like this set up so that it’s likely to be accepted as giving credit for an Into class at many universities. If it doesn’t do that, it’s a lot less likely to be a popular subject for students. The exam has to be standardized among all test takers, and be likely to be accepted as being an indication of being able to pass an into class in the subject, so that seems to me to suggest that a “contemporary topics” focus is less ideal for this purpose, though of course a good teacher can work that in to the subject matter.
Overall, it sounds like a great proposal, and I hope it will work out.
As a current community college professor and a former community college student, I can’t help but read the AP class idea as an effort to, in effect, trade away high quality community college courses taught by a well paid and well educated instructors with academic freedom in exchange for a lower quality boxed course taught by a less educated and lower paid instructor with less academic freedom. These are the courses you are replacing, and there is no scheme that saves those jobs.
So what’s the benefit? A shot at marginally higher enrollments in upper division courses at the schools these students transfer to, where those elite professors making far more money, and who have never attended and would never teach at a community college, can enjoy marginally better job security.
English is one of the most popular AP classes. English, as a discipline, is in as bad of a position as philosophy if not worse. Students don’t use the exposure of taking an AP English class as an invitation to major in English, they use it to get out of service courses and institutions like community colleges that only teach service courses will be the losers here (along with students, who will likely receive an inferior course).
Thanks for raising this concern. I would be interested to learn more about the suggestion that AP courses lead to the “replacement” of community college courses.
I would have thought that there are (literally) millions of students taking AP classes and AP exams who never take community college courses, and wouldn’t have done so whether the AP program existed or not.
Of course there are also some who use AP credit to skip courses they might have taken toward an AA degree, just as they do with BA or BS degrees, but I would have predicted that much (most?) of the AP credit displacement takes place with BA and BS degrees. But I would very much appreciate more information about this if you happen to have any links, etc.
Also, there is some discretion on the part of community colleges as to how much AP credit they accept, what levels they accept, and so on, right?
I’m also not sure of the background argument here. It seems a similar argument could be made that community colleges are stealing students and funds away from 4-year institutions, as they can take a bunch of service courses in community college and then transfer to a 4-year institution and get a degree there while only paying 2 years of tuition, not taking intro/service classes at the 4 year institution, etc. That seems like a bad argument, because it doesn’t pay enough attention to the reasons students might prefer this, the reasons this is good for students, given the costs of higher education and the limited size and location of those institutions in the US. But then for a similar reason this seems like a bad argument against students earning some credit through AP classes. And then it seems like the point is that we should be pushing to reduce those costs, better fund higher education, expand access, etc., across the board. But maybe I am missing your point here!
(If your point comes down to there being an access/quality tradeoff, I do get that. I mean, plausibly both the AP classes and community college classes offer dramatically more access to subjects like Philosophy, while also likely not being as good in course quality as, say, a 10-person intro to philosophy class taught at a small liberal arts college by a professor with a 2-2 teaching load.)
I think the case with English isn’t analogous. Students have taken many English classes in middle school and high school, whether or not there is an AP class. (Same point could be made regarding History.) That just isn’t true for Philosophy.
“Of course there are also some who use AP credit to skip courses they might have taken toward an AA degree, just as they do with BA or BS degrees, but I would have predicted that much (most?) of the AP credit displacement takes place with BA and BS degrees.”
I bet that this is correct. I don’t teach at a community college. But I do teach at a very non-elite four-year college, and many of our students transfer in from community colleges. Very few of my students took AP courses in high school. And, beyond this, very few of my students would have gotten high scores on their AP tests (4’s or 5’s) if they had taken AP courses in high school. This isn’t a shot at my students’ ability levels. It’s just a description of where they are, academically, when they end high school or begin college. (Some of them progress remarkably well in college. But that takes time, effort, and coursework. They are not in position at the end of high school to be getting 4’s or 5’s on AP tests.) The general takeaway, I think, is that AP test credit displacement mostly happens when we are talking about students higher up in the food chain, namely, the ones going to, say, the top 250 four-year institutions. The credit displacement is not taking place in any significant way at institutions like mine or at community colleges. At least that is my suspicion. (Also, with English and history, it’s not like those are dropping out of community college course offerings just because English and history have AP exams. I’ve looked at a lot of community college transcripts in my day, and English and history courses are about as commonly taken as anything at community colleges. Granted, it’s possible there is credit displacement that I am unaware of in relation to English and history. But still…)
This is a great reply. Right, AP English hasn’t helped English departments in colleges or universities. I’d say the same for History.
I wrote a longer response to this and the community college concern that was eaten, I think. Maybe it will be excavated.
But just on the English/History comparison, it seems a big difference is that students take many classes that cover English and History from 4th grade through 12th grade. That’s not true of Philosophy.
By my lights, it’s not that there’s anything magical about AP classes and eventual interest in the subject in college. (There might even be a small hit to enrollments, if people use AP credit to place out of things.) The AP program is just the best way to try to get Philosophy classes into high schools at scale.
I’d certainly be interested in seeing that response!
I love the idea of more philosophy everywhere. More in the high schools, sure. But I agree entirely that it’s just going to nuke the intro courses at CCs and at many 4-year schools, given that most 4-years in most states accept CC or AP credits. And nuking PHIL 101 seems like a disaster.
Here’s some data on humanities enrollments, which for History and English have decline steeply since about 2012.
But I don’t know whether AP courses in those fields have increased or declined as well. Seeing that longitudinal data might help decide what effects more (or less) AP courses have on later enrollments.
More philosophy in high schools? Yes!
Will it help philosophy in colleges? Might help, might hurt.
I’m trying to figure out the method by which it might hurt college philosophy enrollment.
If a college has a requirement that a student take at least X humanities classes, and the AP counts for that, then the student might take X-1 humanities classes instead.
But how many colleges have requirements of that format? I think it is more common for people to substitute an AP class when a *specific* college class is otherwise required (like bio majors being required to take Chem 101 as a prereq, which AP Chem can be substituted for) – and I don’t think many institutions or majors have Intro to Philosophy as a prereq of this sort.
I guess the question is how many institutions have a requirement that is open-ended, like “at least X science classes and at least Y humanities classes”, where AP classes can count. (And how many of those are students already fully placing out of with AP History and AP English Lit.)
Those are the right questions to ask, but I’m not aware of any data that would answer them.
The only relevant data seem to be that there are lots of English and History AP courses, but English and History have declined severely. Obviously, that’s only correlation.
If English and History were counting on HS AP to save their futures, I bet they’re pretty disappointed.
Two separate issues:
1) Does having high school AP courses help a discipline survive or expand at colleges (by getting students to take its courses and major in it)? English and history AP courses have been around for a long, long time. I took AP courses in high school in those disciplines back in the 1990’s. The decline for English and history majors had nothing to do with AP courses. It had to do with 2008 and college inflation never stopping. True, AP courses have not saved (or significantly helped) those disciplines at the college level. But it’s a little different than the case with philosophy. With philosophy, we have an exposure problem. People are exposed to English and history all the way through school, from grade school through high school. With philosophy, we don’t get exposure until college, as things stand now. Would exposure to philosophy in high school help increase interest in philosophy at the college level? I think it would, but I admit that I don’t know for sure. Even if it wouldn’t help, I’m virtually certain it wouldn’t hurt. (CC Prof’s concerns about gen ed curriculum/core curriculum courses and community college courses seem to me off target.)
2) Alex mentioned this second issue in his original post, and to me, it’s extremely important. Having high school AP courses helps English and history PhD’s in the following sense: if they are unable (or don’t want) to get a college teaching job, then they have high school teaching jobs open to them and have a good chance of landing those jobs. With philosophy PhD’s, this option is much less realistic, simply because philosophy is much less often taught in high school. But having AP Philosophy helps a lot in this regard. It would open up a good number of jobs for philosophers at the high school level. To me, this is an enormously important factor in Alex’s proposal. When I was having trouble on the college-teaching job market, I kept trying to find ways to see if I could teach high school. But it was hard to sell my abilities honestly, given that my degree was in philosophy and high schools mostly don’t teach philosophy.
I think it would be great if philosophers could teach in high schools.
It’s not likely that it would be philosophers with PhDs. Philosophers on a high school teaching track would need to do whatever the state systems require for teacher certification. And that would probably be done at the BA/MA level. So that might help BA/MA programs.
(I’ll note that, about 20 years ago, I spent a lot of time working on proposals to expand philosophy in high schools in NJ. Some NJ high schools do in fact teach philosophy courses. We never could get the project off the ground due to state bureaucracy and general lack of interest.)
For public high schools, teacher certification is indeed onerous in all (or almost all) states. But for many states, the private (non-public) high school teaching certification process is relatively lax. Some states don’t require any state certification at all for teaching in a private (non-public) high school. I think this is true in New Jersey, for example. AP courses are often offered at private (non-public) high schools. Thus there would be a real opening for PhD’s in philosophy to teach AP Philosophy at private (non-public) high schools in many states, without having to do too much certification work.
I know I’m being disagreeable in repeatedly pushing back against your and CC Prof’s reservations concerning Alex’s proposal. Sorry about that. I just don’t want this proposal to get killed in committee, so to speak. It’s one I actually care about, and so I feel the need to try to answer the objections to it.
I had a hard time following this comment. Anyway, if the name of the game is to get more students better education, piping more of them into community college by restricting what they can learn in high school seems weird.
In Italy, philosophy is an integral part of the high school curriculum, especially in specific types of schools. Philosophy becomes a core subject starting from the third year (out of five years) and continues until graduation. The curriculum is structured around the history of Western philosophy, beginning with pre-Socratic philosophy, moving through medieval and modern philosophy, and, when the teacher has developed more competence during their university education, concluding with some contemporary (mostly continental) thinkers.
Students rarely read and analyze primary texts from major philosophers. Instead, they focus more on handbook-style introductions and commentaries. Teachers typically provide lectures on philosophical topics, but there is rarely any discussion aimed at engaging students in critical thinking and debate. Oral exams are the most significant part of the assessment process in Italian high schools. Students are expected to discuss and explain philosophical concepts, which they essentially need to memorize.
As a result, most students end up hating philosophy and considering it an obscure subject chosen by an elected few. This negative perception might be due to the outdated historical approach to philosophy, which involves a long overview of all major philosophers who have contributed to various fields of philosophy, combined with a focus on continental contemporary philosophy.
Not more than a month ago, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, to convey the idea that she is a pragmatic politician, said: “We don’t do philosophy here.” While your proposals make sense to me, I think that a deeper look at the Italian way of teaching philosophy in high school might give you insight into what not to do.
These are very interesting proposals, and I really appreciate the APA and CSFP, in particular, putting in the time and thought to advocate for the profession like this. Thank you! I’ve also found the discussion in the comments here really interesting, including concerns that have been raised.
One thing that strikes me as important to keep in mind is that one key goal in connection with saving Philosophy departments is to increase the numbers of Philosophy majors. I say this based on my experience at my own campus, where the most important currency of the realm is majors. The dean doesn’t seem much interested in the fact that the two minors (Philosophy, Ethics) are thriving, nor that the Philosophy faculty do a ton of teaching in service of other majors, both in the core curriculum and in specific classes on degree plans (eg, Philosophy of Science)–not to mention that the faculty publish well, do a ton of committee work university-wide, etc. Semester credit hours come up a lot, but discussion always seems to return to the request that we increase the number of majors. And, as recognized in the OP and other comments here, this is nigh impossible to pull off given that almost all students come into college having declared a major and almost none of them have any exposure to philosophy prior to enrolling at university (at least, in the US context). This is all, of course, on top of the current political context, public misconceptions of philosophy, etc.
One reason I find it interesting to consider the possibility of developing an AP Philosophy course and funding and running an essay contest for pre-college students is that they will expose students to philosophy early enough for them to catch the bug and declare it as a major when they enroll in college. These aims are also compatible with other important efforts, such as P4C, Ethics Bowl, various public philosophy initiatives, etc. And, of course, they are compatible with gathering the info and making the case that Philosophy majors are employable (and not just at establishments that serve fries).
In this vein, I wonder if there has been discussion of increasing support for and the availability of dual credit (sometimes called dual enrollment) Philosophy courses. [I found some limited discussion of them on the APA site here.]
Dual credit courses allow high school students to enroll in college courses, taught either on the high school campus or on a local college campus (or online), and receive college credit if they pass. They are different from AP courses in important ways (some of which would perhaps alleviate worries that have been raised about academic freedom and calcification of the canon). Dual credit courses are also sometimes considered less rigorous and, for this reason, perhaps seen as harming some high-achieving students on their college applications (to elite schools). I’m not sure about this last point. But I am sure that dual credit courses are seen as very attractive to many cost-conscious students, including those from groups under-represented in the profession, such as first-generation college students and those coming from rural and low-income districts (such as the one my children attend). Also, dual credit courses can be taught by college faculty or approved high school instructors, so they may have some particular advantages to philosophers’ employment prospects. (Though, I’m sure these classes also feed some of the structural issues noted in other comments, such as those relating to precarious employment.)
An effort to increase the offerings of dual credit Philosophy courses has the potential to contribute to the goal of supporting the health of the profession (in the US, at least) and is compatible with the proposals in the OP. In fact, an overall strategy of advocating for an AP Philosophy Course and increasing dual credit Philosophy offerings may be a nice one. Dual credit courses need not be general Philosophy courses–they could be Intro to Ethics, Critical Thinking, etc. So, it could be possible for high school students to complete more than one Philosophy course pre-college and receive college credit for doing so. Perhaps this would hep to increase the number of students coming into college declared as Philosophy majors. I’d be interested in what others have to say.
This could also perhaps begin to address the concerns raised above by CC Prof… a lot of community colleges have strong relationships with high schools via dual enrollment classes.
I like these ideas. I imagine PLATO and Squire Family Foundation have considered them and have some ideas to share.
I would advocate for creation of a really good curriculum for a course on Ethical Reasoning that could ideally satisfy a social studies elective and be attractive to a wider range of students than AP, without risk of students testing out of college core courses in philosophy. Ethics Bowl cases could be used and teams created, some simple logic and critical thinking, diverse readings from philosophy and literature, film, etc., policy debates, and promotion of philosophy major as useful for law and much more. Ideally taught by people with philosophy training, but that’s always going to be tough until we create teacher certification with social studies for philosophy students.
How many colleges have a core course in philosophy that could conceivably be tested out of? I imagine many of the catholic universities do, but not many others. (I suppose there might be some that require “three humanities classes” where students can already fill two of them with AP History and AP English Lit.)
Even if there aren’t many, one reason to take an AP philosophy course would be that it counts towards the total required for the AP Scholar awards, which are presumably desirable for admissions.
Thanks, Alex, for starting the discussion with these proposals. While I don’t want to discount their merits (which are many), I am a bit concerned about the degree to which (a) they are top down and (b) focused on prestige. With regard to (a) in order to get Philosophy taught in schools, the profession needs to build bridges with teachers, and to make sure that teachers at all levels have the Professional Development they need to deliver curriculum. I wonder whether the APA committee could start by reaching out to philosophers who have already built those connections and/or to teachers themselves to ask what they would recommend. (I have some names, as I am sure do you). I suspect it will be different region by region.
With regard to (b), I think the aim is to promote the actual practice of philosophy, and not to mark philosophy with a kind of status, though maybe it is both. Some commenters have already pointed to community colleges. Promoting Ethics Bowl and supporting the teacher coaches is another way to demonstrate how philosophy is empowering.
Thanks so much for the initiative!
Another intitiative which might help would be working to ensure that philosophy courses can count towards a BEd’s requirements, much as history, sociology, etc. courses already do. At a minimum, it gives prospective teachers a reason to take some philosophy courses, which can then be used to help develop a HS curriculum.
I feel almost awkward pointing this out, but, well, someone has to – there’s an equivalence made here that is at the least questionable, and historically certainly false.
The original question is how to improve the future of philosophy. The question that’s answered is how to improve the survival prospects of a very contingent set of institutions and jobs.
Why does the future of philosophy depend on ensuring that philosophy departments continue to exist? Philosophy departments haven’t existed for the vast majority of the time that philosophy has been around, and philosophy seems to have done just fine.
Could you please clarify the times you’re thinking of when
(a) Universities either did not exist at all, or else existed and did not require that everyone take courses in phillosophy and had no special department of philosophy,
and
(b) Philosophy did ‘just fine’, in the sense that plenty of people made a good living at philosophical research and teaching?
I’ll start with clarifying (b), because your “question” there neatly illustrates exactly what I was both pointing out and objecting to – the assumption that philosophy doing just fine means that plenty of people are making a good living doing it.
So, no, I’m not going to give you a time when b) holds, because that’s not a sense of doing fine that I accept. If you just want a time when plenty of people made a good living from academic jobs, sure, how about 1960s and 1970s in the US and UK?
There’s a further question / assumption you illustrate, I think – what counts as philosophical research and teaching? Is this to be made identical with what goes on in university departments under that name?
As for a), sure. How do you feel about ancient Greece?
Okay. If you don’t think we should be worried about a future in which people are doing philosophy but even fewer people are making a living doing it than today, then I think many readers of this blog may see things differently, since they presumably tend to be either professional philosophers or else students trying to become professional philosophers.
How do I feel about ancient Greece? Great, if you’re referring to city-states where entire schools were devoted to philosophy. That strikes me as the exact opposite of a university where students have to take majors and minors, and philosophy isn’t even one of the options. I thought you were talking about that.
I also feel fine about the 1960s and 1970s in the US and UK. There was no shortage of philosophy departments in universities then. I’m not sure how that supports your point.
Thanks, Pranay. I think regular readers of this space have grown tired of hearing me make versions of this point every time someone conflates ‘philosophy’ with the world of academic employment and degree-based teaching.
But I guess I’m less optimistic than your “have done just fine” comment would suggest that you are. The past shows us that the modern university isn’t the only model for a stable or flourishing cultural space for philosophical activity. But it doesn’t show that there are better or just-as-good spaces available in our culture now (or in the near future). I know you’re doing some pioneering work trying to create/foster/grow such spaces, and there are certainly other hopeful places to look (e.g. some philosophy Youtubers). But so far all of those have their origins in the work of people who were originally trained and cultivated in academic spaces.
That’s why I’m so disappointed by the continual conflation of ‘philosophy’ with ‘academic philosophy.’ If I thought philosophy would be ‘just fine’ without academia or academic philosophers, it wouldn’t bother me so much that the academic philosophers were thinking so narrowly about how to cultivate the (near) future of philosophy in our society.
Hi Pranay and Derek. I will just say that for my part, one of the very large benefits of teaching philosophy to many more people at the high school level would be the potential for philosophy to happen all over the place, not just in fancy academic spaces. I absolutely reject any conflation of ‘philosophy’ with ‘academic philosophy.’ Indeed, much of my teaching is bringing figures and texts into the ‘academic philosophy’ conversation, despite those figures and texts being produced by people very much outside of that conversation.
A side benefit of the AP Philosophy proposal might be that more people with academic PhD training could continue as philosophy teachers, and another side benefit might be that a broader group of people might end up pursuing philosophy in institutional/academic settings, but I don’t see either of those things as being where to locate all the value of this proposal with respect to the “future of philosophy.”
(I actually have been a bit concerned that working on AP Philosophy or similar initiatives goes beyond the remit of the committee I chair, which is supposed to be focused on the Status and Future *of the Profession*. I didn’t create the committee, but it doesn’t seem misguided that there is such a committee, given that these are committees of a professional association. But I feel like that future is very much intertwined with the larger future of philosophy, wherever it is taking place.)
I do think that, given our current institutional arrangements, we should aim to protect and preserve the remarkable amount of wonderful philosophy and philosophy teaching that takes place within academic settings. But we should be wary of proposals that would further entrench philosophy within those walls.
I would say this proposal is aiming to do the very opposite of that.
One other thing to note. I really would not prefer a model on which doing or teaching philosophy requires the doting patronage of the ultrawealthy. The history of philosophy that you allude to is perhaps a bit worrying on that front.
One of the amazing things about philosophy as we have it today is that people from relatively modest backgrounds can be philosophers, and we don’t have to kiss any rings or catch our death of pneumonia in drafty castles while tutoring queens and kings.
While appreciating the detailed thought that has gone into the two proposals, as well as the many comments, I wonder if we can also step back and take a broader look at the potential. I believe that philosophical skills, whether from formal training or gathered from experience, are essential for any kind of knowledge worker. The business manager trying to ascertain whether an incident requires a policy response or a patch-up is doing phenomenology, whether she knows it or not. A scientist working at the frontier of her field had better have a good grasp of Kuhnian paradigms. An AI prompt engineer would benefit from a theory of mind. Regarding this last, I was quite surprised to come across a reasoned discussion of Wittgenstein in relation to LLMs by a Software Quality Architect https://www.ministryoftesting.com/articles/testing-language-models-with-the-philosophy-of-wittgenstein. Conversely, in a long business and professional career, I have spent many, many hours listening to homespun philosophizing that led to mediocre if not failed projects; the application of Occam’s razor, or even simple logic, could have saved much time and effort. I believe we can deliver a robust answer to the, “what are you going to do with that?” jokes and “uselessness” rhetoric: it is ill-informed and wrong.
It would be nice if we could promote the idea of studying philosophy before, after, or alongside a more ‘vocational’ degree. (The above-mentioned software quality architect studied Maths first, and is currently studying philosophy; an AI guy at the bottom of the following thread studied philosophy and then computer science and ML: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicPhilosophy/comments/ceo0e2/philosophy_and_artificial_intelligence_masters/ ) Pairing with the hard sciences could be most beneficial, as scientists have the most need (since the humanities tend to provide some quasi-philosophical exposure anyway), and the hard sciences currently get the most political and financial attention.
I’ve seen one take on considering Community Colleges as a possibly better investment than AP courses, and I’d like to offer another.
The biggest constraint that I see with investing in AP courses versus Community Colleges is that “Late Bloomer” academics who arrive at a position to perform academically after High School have nowhere near the level of institutional support that High School students have to reach the University level.
The writing on the wall post-graduation for those who were, through some to no fault of their own, impeded from academic excellence, often manages to read something like “You had your chance, better luck next life”.
We can, of course, walk and chew gum at the same time and support the “on-pipeline” High School population with AP Courses and the “off-pipeline” 18 and up adult learning population by building relationships and programs with Community Colleges.
While the College Board is a good organization to partner with to serve High School students, it is also possible that Community Colleges can play a part or even be a better partner to serve High School students when it comes to access to Philosophy.
To give an example from my alma mater, Durham Technical Community College, we were fortunate enough to have a sizable “Middle College” program where High School students could attend a hybrid schedule of both High School Courses (Including AP) and Community College Courses that awarded credit hours towards an associate’s degree.
It’s also worth noting that bad course design could be less of an issue for a Community College professor that only has to worry about their institution’s policies than a High School Teacher who is bound by the policies of their individual institution, the school district, and the College board (assuming the course is AP).
As for material recommendations, I think it would be fun to showcase parts of Andy Clark’s Mindware and the Science Fiction of Ken Liu given the interest in Artificial Intelligence.
Cognitive Science overall offers exciting philosophy with clear connections to STEM.
It’s an old warhorse but I’m still very partial to Plato’s Republic.
It’s true that high-school-level philosophy courses are offered in the various countries mentioned. But in all of the cases with which I am familiar —Algeria, Bulgaria, Egypt, France, Italy, Morocco, Tunisia— these courses are so different in their aims and content, and in the competencies they are meant to develop, from anything that might be of any use to a first-year grad student at, say, Rutgers, that it seems like something of an equivocation to cite them. A philosophy course at the Italian liceo might help a student go on to compete in the national philosophy bowl, where they might be called up in front of the auditorium to expound on the key ideas in an essay by Giacomo Leopardi. Has anyone ever been admitted to a top-ranked grad program in the US on the basis of a proposal to work on Leopardi? In France philosophy at the lycée is narrowly focused on developing the skills to pass the Bac Philo, which involves writing an essay in a particular rigid format that exists nowhere outside the French examination system and those systems modelled on it, such as you’ll find in Francophone North Africa. Philosophy in high schools in the US would be a great thing, but because philosophy is almost by definition a discipline that has very pronounced national characteristics, it is not at all clear that global comparisons are of any use here.
Thanks, that’s very helpful. I certainly have seen this difficulty up close doing graduate admissions, as something like 45% of our applicants are now international students. Some of those students have trained in clearly analytic programs with a contemporary focus, but many have not (just as many US undergrads have received a philosophy education that might have only limited analytic, non-historical coursework).
I am still interested in what philosophy is taught where and when (and why!), but not because it seems likely to be very similar to what might be done in the US.
I see no good reason why logic, its fundamentals, theorems, and fallacies, aren’t taught and put into practice right beside mathematics from the start on (and quite frankly philosophers aren’t exempt from the need for that education).
As a side, I also think our educational system needs more strongly to support and encourage the autodidactic bc that fertile ground fosters genius, and these are the doers, thinkers, creatives, and problem solvers.
Nice ideas, but none of this will really help. Is philosophy a critical area to pursue undergraduate studies. Absolutely. Will this argument help…not really. Is there an alternative that can, and help build healthy enrollments without asking faculty in philosophy departments to change what they already do? Scott Carlson from The Chronicle and outline one such approach that does work in Hacking College https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12921/hacking-college
Soon to be released. If anyone is interested contact us. [email protected] and [email protected]
I have the unusual experience where I took an elective philosophy course at my public high school in Massachusetts. The teacher held an MA in History, but nevertheless taught an excellent intro course and sparked a lifelong interest philosophy for me (now halfway through my PhD). Among other things, he incorporated a few projects where we would watch a film and then assess the ideas behind the film philosophically which always left an impact on the students I spoke with. Further, that course did help me realize I did not want to go into the old family business (engineering), recognizing full well that it would be less lucrative to pursue the humanities.
All that being said, out of a class of about 25 students, I’m only aware of one other student who went on to study philosophy after high school. This is entirely anecdotal, but a high school philosophy course, I think, can be beneficial overall.
I think the high school philosophy curriculum is a great idea not only because high schoolers can benefit not only from philosophy itself (I mean who couldn’t?) but also from the interdisciplinary skills required to be good at doing philosophy.
I’d also like to add that this gives an opportunity to people (like me) who are graduating with a bachelor’s in philosophy but are unsure if there’s time and money to tackle a graduate program, or if there’s going to be money and space available in academia when they’re done.
Many people love philosophy, there’s just very little opportunity to do something *in* philosophy without the extra years, the extra money, and the extra stress of academia.
Just picking up on some threads in the discussion regarding impact at the college level of AP credit in philosophy.
General education requirements at my institution are “distribution requirements” such that students take x Humanities, x Social Science, x Natural Science courses. Philosophy is in a mix of courses from which students can choose to satisfy a distribution requirement, and has benefited from students coming in with AP credit in history, while history enrollments have declined dramatically (philosophy is in a “bucket” that competes with history). The History program, however, has sustained a major program largely because history is a widely taught and required subject in middle and high schools, and thus there is a career path for education majors (although those, too, have declined).
Philosophy has also benefited from some other programs making an ethics course a requirement for their majors. I was Chair of my department for 13 years (over two different time periods) and I could count on one hand the number of students who, from that exposure, developed enough further interest in philosophy to switch or to add a second major in philosophy (a very small number did pick up a philosophy minor). However, the significant enrollments in Ethics courses, and those in the philosophy distribution courses, are what sustain the department’s small philosophy major program. It would decimate the department to have the enrollments decline significantly, which is what would likely happen with students coming in with AP credit, and especially AP credit in Ethics.
Regarding AP credit, there is tremendous pressure at a non-elite, private school such as mine for departments to accept AP credit. The recruitment, enrollment and financial incentives dictate so much of what it is actually possible to do (and to resist). We faced that with the IB program (which does have a philosophy course); we managed to resist giving credit for that some years ago, but might not be so successful if it were to come up again (it’s such a small program, though, and doesn’t appear to be on the admissions team radar, at least not at the moment).
Now this model (enrollments in intro level ethics or philosophy distribution course supporting a small major) may itself change as universities, my own included, start to re-examine their general education and liberal arts requirements, so there are other pressures on philosophy (and liberal arts) programs more generally. And maybe in a different model, introducing philosophy in the high schools via AP credit might have a salutary effect at the college level. I don’t know. But, on the current model, our experience would suggest that this would be quite risky.
Even when students love the subject and do develop an interest, there is so much pressure to be job ready when one graduates, that there is just very little incentive to choose a philosophy major. It has always been a small major. But, the pressures now are tremendous and it is quite evident the shifts in student enrollments to areas where they see immediate “return on their investment” (or think they would).
Alex, I was the guy who came up with the idea, in 1985, of ARI having an essay contest. And I think ARI just might help fund your idea of a contest on philosophy in general, particularly if it was on major historical themes and texts.
It’s rather a long shot, but I could raise it with them (I just last month stepped down from their Board of Directors, so I’m speaking here on my own hook.)
Ayn Rand thought philosophy was supremely important, as you know if you’ve read her West Point speech, “Philosophy: Who Needs It.”
BTW, did you know Allan Gotthelf, who taught briefly at the end of his life at Rutgers? He was one of my best friends; we went through Columbia grad school together.