Women in Philosophy: Philosophy for Pre-College Students

by Zoe Lawson

On Friday, April 19^th, the Philosophy Outreach Project, POP, held the second annual Conference for Pre-College Philosophical Engagement, or CPPE, at Ball State University. This year, we had almost a hundred students from nine high schools around Indiana come to Ball State for the day where they were able to discuss philosophy and learn more about areas of philosophy with which they were not familiar or learn about philosophy for the first time. We started the day with an activity we call Speed Philosophy, like speed dating for philosophical concepts and schools of thought. Students divide into small groups led by one of our team members and get five minutes to discuss a big question in philosophy (e.g; “What is the most real: the chair you’re sitting on, the molecules that make up the chair, or the idea of the chair?”) before moving on to another. This was followed by a keynote address from Dr. Kevin Miles of Earlham College. The rest of the day was divided into breakout sessions, 20 in total, in which philosophy students and faculty from Ball State led discussions, activities, or primers on philosophical topics ranging from Islamic philosophy to neurophilosophy to aesthetics to feminism to the philosophy of sport.

CPPE is not our only avenue for outreach, however. Throughout the year, the POP team makes visits to high schools around Indiana to give presentations on different philosophical topics. POP also works locally with Muncie Central High School to facilitate their philosophy club by preparing discussion topics and presentations for weekly meetings, a relationship that has been ongoing since 2015. This year, POP made 22 site visits to 10 different schools, giving presentations on normative ethical frameworks, philosophy of language, and debating the morality of the death penalty, among others.

POP’s other main avenue for outreach is digital. This year, we worked to expand our social media presence on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter where our social media team posts polls, primers, and pictures about philosophy as well as about our outreach visits and, more recently, about the conference. Our team has also produced literature for teachers about the value of philosophy in high school classrooms and ways they can integrate philosophy into existing curriculum and subjects. We also put together a booklet for high school students on how to start and maintain philosophy clubs, how to find and understand philosophical writing, and what the experience of a philosophy student in college is like.

I have been lucky enough to be involved with POP and CPPE for the past two years. In high school, opportunities to directly or immersively engage with philosophy are generally few and far between. It is not common for high schools to have philosophy clubs and even less common for students to have the chance to take a philosophy class before they get to college, assuming they go to college, that their respective college has a philosophy department, and that they have space and time in their schedule to register for one. Traced back far enough, philosophy serves, in some capacity, as the root and progenitor of most other academic disciplines, but in academics and especially in pre-college education, opportunities to engage with and more importantly discuss philosophy are too often few and far between.

This, of course, does not mean that students do not want to or cannot engage with philosophical ideas and considerations. During site visits and presentations, we work to not just lecture at students but to let them discuss and talk through issues. In this process, more often than not, students start to get at the kinds of questions and ideas in the field. For example, when learning about normative ethical frameworks, even though students have never read Mill or Kant or Aristotle, but when talking about what it means to make a just decision, they are able to generate systems approximating consequentialism, deontology, and even virtue ethics. When they do understand what Mill writes about utilitarianism, they are more than capable of generating thoughtful and well-reasoned critiques similar to existing prominent thinkers as well as their own valid ideas.

Philosophy is not and should not just be something for college students and doctoral theses. Such a view is inherently problematic not simply because it is untrue, but because of historical patterns in college enrollment, especially in philosophy. At the undergraduate level, only 17% of bachelor’s degrees in philosophy are awarded to people of color, almost twice as many as was the case as recently as 1995. Moving up through masters and PhD programs, the numbers become that much smaller. Only between a quarter and a third of philosophy degrees are awarded to women at all levels. While such rates have improved over time, if we conceptualize philosophy as something restricted to college classrooms and degree-seeking programs, it becomes that much more white male-centric as enrollment in philosophy programs remains centered on that group. Bringing philosophy out of the university and into pre-college classrooms can help jumpstart the process of diversifying philosophy.

Even given that students at any level do have the capacity to engage meaningfully and productively with philosophy and philosophical thought absent college, when we meet and talk with students, the presentations that POP gives in high school classrooms or at our conference, we are often students’ first official contact point with philosophy as a discipline. This distinction is an important one and should come with a certain degree of responsibility, a responsibility that professors and teachers of college-level Intro to Philosophy classes should also consider. Historically, as with a good portion of other academic disciplines, philosophy has struggled with issues of representation. Even now, the proportions of women and feminine-identifying people and people of color pursuing advanced degrees in philosophy are incredibly low.

Getting students excited about philosophy before college may help to point things in a better direction, but importantly how philosophy is first introduced to students is crucial. The big names in the history of philosophy and those taught to intro students are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly European, and overwhelmingly male. In intro classes and when teaching philosophy to pre-college students, it is easy to slip into simply following this pattern. Kant, Mill, and Aristotle are the big names in normative ethics. Understanding Locke is crucial for understanding those who came after him and wrote in response to his ideas, either to supplement or critique. If, however, students only learn about white, male, Eurocentric philosophy as they are introduced to the idea of philosophy, they wrongly come to learn that philosophy is an exclusively white, male, Eurocentric discipline. While we ideally should not have to consider issues of diversity in the history of ideas, insofar as the philosophical canon remains delimited as it is, we have a responsibility to consciously consider the ways in which we represent philosophy to those for whom it is a new idea. Instead of simply discussing Kant, Mill, and Aristotle, including the ideas women philosophers and philosophers of color helps to more comprehensively and responsibly represent philosophy. In our presentation on normative ethics, we also present care ethics and the ideas of Carol Gilligan as a counterpoint to the three other theories. In the process of planning our conference, we took care to represent as many different areas of philosophy as possible from around the world and across time. We had stickers students could take as souvenirs of famous philosophers wearing shutter shades and meme glasses (pictured above and below) and made sure that we included a diverse group of philosophers and at least one philosopher from each inhabited continent.

Zoe Lawson is an undergraduate student at Ball State University in her third year where she is triple majoring in philosophy, political science, and Spanish. This is her second year being a part of the Philosophy Outreach Project and working to bring philosophy to high school students. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of Stance, an international undergraduate philosophy journal published at Ball State.