Teachers Assemble: The Case for High School Philosophy Across Disciplines

Of all the major disciplines, philosophy is the least likely to be taught in American primary or secondary schools, either as a core subject required for graduation or as an optional elective for interested and engaged students.

For anyone with even a passing familiarity with current educational trends, the reasons for this seem both manifest and regrettable. To begin with, teachers and indeed schools themselves are often measured by data-driven curricular standards, often in the form of state and federal tests, where the benefits of teaching students skepticism (and even how to read for “pleasure”) are weighed against collectable and replicable responses on a series of multiple choice exams. Under this model, time itself becomes an enemy, as already limited classroom space must be given over to repetition and mastery of these “testable” skills. In this, teachers may find themselves trapped in a sort of educational hall of mirrors, seeing reflected back from their students only the type of “surface level” appearance that they themselves have been forced to prioritize – mechanics, say, or details of plot, or form.

Community pressures may further exacerbate this temporal tension, with parents and local leaders engaging in good-faith, if ill-advised, efforts to encourage educators to treat high school as a sort of preparatory training ground, where the value of an education is measured by how high their son or daughter scores on the SAT rather than how much they have been able to manifest a vibrant inner life. This consumer model of education winds up devaluing the high school experience as something “received” (like a washing machine), and not something “earned” (like physical fitness), with end-of-process spreadsheets and tables that look alarmingly akin to something out of Consumer Reports. (“50% of buyers report front loaders got into a better college and therefore rate Teacher Brand X as having a more efficient cycle-time! 4.5 Stars!”)

Of course, by not teaching philosophy in high school, the model itself finally becomes its own reason for existing, as fewer teachers are trained in or even comfortable with models of inquiry that would allow them to teach ethics for the next generation.

And, somewhere, the bigger questions – what it means to be alive, how to be good, what is the purpose of human life – aren’t always given the space to be debated or even broached. 

If instead of teaching to the test, however, educators looked at the skills necessary forboth the test, and reverse-engineered from the top-down rather than created from the bottom-up, few models of learning would be more appropriate, efficient, and provide a deeper understanding than those taught in philosophy. Philosophy teaches critical thinking applied to real world values and consequences. Philosophy teaches not simply the skills crucial to good argument, but how and when to wield those skills to maximum effect. And, of course, philosophy offers an invitation to examine our beliefs and prejudices in structured and disciplined ways, furthering our students’ moral educations while offering them opportunities to become better, more empathetic adults.

For these reasons, it is therefore imperative for English Language Arts teachers to find opportunities for philosophical pedagogy within the framework of their current discipline and the demands of both state guidelines and district practices.

Regrettably for these educators, even the most thorough of online searches offers little in the way of practical resources for philosophical inquiry in other disciplines that is both scalable for multiple student intelligences or grade-levels and applicable for pairing across the broadest possible combination of mentor texts.  

Designed as a complete mini-unit which can be taught either in-sequence or as one or two day lessons across many months, the following unit offers teachers of History and ELA that opportunity for philosophical pedagogy – where their students can learn the basics of moral education and philosophical precepts, improving both their thinking and academic writing through an invitation to notice, imitate, and practice the core skills associated with introductory methods of philosophy.

Outlined broadly below and explained in more detail in subsequent posts, the curriculum offers educators shareable resources to use in their non-philosophy classrooms, pairable with hundreds of pre-selected possible texts they already teach as part of curricular or district mandates, as well as both NJSL and Common Core Standards. 

An Invitation to Discover: The Philosophy of Superheroes

Designed as an introduction to eight broad categories of philosophical thought (Utilitarianism, Deontology, Virtue Ethics, Stoicism, Nihilism, Existentialism, Capitalism, and a catch-all Further Exploration), the curriculum is built around a guiding and foundational belief that it is important to meet students “where they live.” To this end, each of the philosophical domains is scaffolded through an introduction via popular fictional characters that are both immediately familiar and accessible to a wide spectrum of student learners, no matter the grade level. In this way, students are invited to immediately make connections between introductory concepts of philosophical thought and their favorite popular narratives, discovering, say, the basic tenets of utilitarianism through the actions of Thanos who, in Avengers: Infinity War, endeavored to wipe out half of the universe so that the other half could thrive. With a goal of offering educators practical, replicable, and tangible resources, each domain offers students an invitation to discover through guided pre-reading questions (in the form of a LIkert-style scale of broad ideas), free writes using both quotes and famous philosophical thought experiments, and a mini-lesson slideshow that pairs the philosophical domain with both a historical proponent and an appropriate popular superhero.

An Invitation to Become: Philosophy as Purpose

By teaching students basic philosophical concepts through an invitation to discover and make connections we give them an opportunity to learn and retain basic trivia related to the field of philosophy. This curriculum is further invested, however, in allowing students the opportunity for what former director of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Ernest Morrell calls “an opportunity to become.”  Each of the mini-lesson slideshows is designed to be followed by an activity whereby students can assume the role of actual philosophers and analyze, debate, and finally apply moral principles with both clear purpose and real-world stakes. In learning about deontology, for instance, students are invited to play a “selfishness game” whereby they are tasked with making decisions that will have real effects on their final grade as well as the grades of their classmates. While learning about capitalism, students can take part in a stock-market game where, like with real capitalism, there are only a handful of winners who get to take all.  Through this invitation to become, students will be pressed to write and think about and then share philosophical thought as having broader implications for their lives both inside and outside of the classroom, as well as policy and moral practicality in the world at large.

An Invitation to Share and Change: Philosophy as Possibility

Related to a student-led discovery of audience and purpose, an important and necessary condition of the designed curriculum is an invitation for students to share. Indeed, philosophy is meant to be read by others. With this in mind, students will guide their learning and understanding of broad domains with the goal of producing final assessments to share with their classmates. Therefore, in addition to essay questions related to certain domains, as well as more formative assessments like vocabulary, each mini-lesson comes with shareable “one-pagers,” (exit ticket-style artistic assessments to be displayed in class) and ideas for project based multi-genre and presentation opportunities.  

Finally, although the formulation of the curriculum was originally designed with a clear context, it is important to note the almost unparalleled opportunity for differentiation and adaptability based around different anchor texts for any specific learning environment or grade level, from popular middle school staples like Of Mice and Menor To Kill a Mockingbird to higher level high school texts like The Stranger or Hamlet.

In this way, the teaching of philosophy using the designed curriculum can be tied to almost any learning sequence or the “big ideas” of any accompanied narrative, allowing educators the opportunity to use these lessons in any order and at any time of the year, with adaptable formative and summative opportunities to assess learning.  

For a deeper dive into related resources, please see upcoming posts on individual domains (such as deontology and virtue ethics) that will provide a lesson plan overview, including pre-writing, activities, assessments, and slide-show presentations for high school students.

Shawn Adler

Shawn Adler is a high school English and Psychology teacher at Cliffside Park High School in New Jersey. A former professional journalist and occasional college professor of composition, he is deeply invested in creating opportunities for middle and high school students to “become.” For more information or resources, or with opportunities to collaborate, you can reach him through email atsadler@cliffsidepark.edu