When I was first hired at Mira Costa High School in 2012 as an English Teacher, I was already a semester-deep in a Masters in Philosophy that I was using to supplement the philosophy major I had dropped to a minor which I regretted deeply. I knew I was walking into a great educational program at Costa, and it was not long before I was asked to do something relatively novel. When approached the next year by my Department Chair with the prospect of creating a new senior seminar semester-long Philosophy in Literature course, I jumped at the opportunity. While it is not my end-goal, which is a pure philosophy course, it is more than simply an English class with ‘some philosophy in it.’
Costa’s Philosophy in Literature class is currently a semester-long course offered to our seniors as mandatory college-prep English credit, and is A-G approved by the University of California admissions system. Originally, I designed the course to be somewhat of a survey course — Unit 1 introduced students to issues of Metaphysics, Unit 2 to Epistemology, Unit 3 to Existentialism, probably the easiest of the philosophical movements to teach through high school core curriculum, and Unit 4 to Philosophies of Life and Ethics. Since then, I have further refined the class, recognizing that many students who go on in philosophy as majors and/or minors, or even for the sake of general educational requirements, will be instructed again on many of the core philosophical works.
Today, Costa’s Philosophy in Literature course focuses on Hermeneutic approaches to interpretation and meaning-making, which follows somewhat of a Hegelian Dialectical model (and maybe some Heidegger, too): Unit 1 on meaning-as-‘in the world’, Unit 2 on meaning as subjectivity projected ‘on the world,’ and Unit 3 as, what I simplify for students, “both in and out and neither at the same time.” We read seminal works in philosophy like selections from Platonic dialogues and Aristotle’s Metaphysics, individual arguments from Aquinas’s summa theologiae, swaths of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works, and bits and pieces, as much as they can handle, of selected works of Sartre, Heidegger, Dewey, Kant, Hume, and Hegel, to name a few.
The course is still very much an ‘exposure’ course, though we dive deeply into the major themes on meaning and interpretation through some philosophical literature, like Lewis’Out of the Silent Planet, Camus’ The Stranger, and Huxley’s ‘novel of ideas’ Point Counter Point — which was single-handedly the book that influenced the direction of the class. Many of my students choose to independently read some fantastic works in their own individual research as well. Many of my current students are reading things like Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, Dewey’s How We Think and Art as Experience, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Arendt’s The Human Condition, and Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death — all pretty impressive reads for high school seniors.
While students are hand-held relatively tightly through the philosophical readings, this course is not without its challenges and its high expectations. We read difficult texts, we go over philosophically-dense vocabulary, and analyze structure of argumentation both in successful writing and in the actual practice of creating arguments ourselves. It is in this specific lens that I have actually found the most success with high-school level writing. I find that my students absolutely thrive on being given voice, and it is through the natural tendency toward dialogue that is fundamental to philosophical inquiry that makes my class a unique daily experience for students who are often motivated by grades, task-completion, and test-score competition. Rather than being told what to think and what to say, this class really removes those kinds of constraints. While there are some days that are particularly lecture-heavy, especially those where students are being given the new tools for philosophical reading and writing, there are still so many opportunities for students to provide their own content.
Many of these exercises have come from my own philosophical education. Students complete ‘seminar papers’ on topics that are self-generated, which they read to the class and then host discussion. They are paired to other students who write a formal response, which is read in conjunction with the original seminar paper. They investigate their own philosophical topics from multiple perspectives and submit a research literature review in which they apply those philosophical lenses to a work of literary fiction for the sake of interpretative value. They analyze argumentative structure through diagramming and basic skills in formal and informal logic. By the time they settle into the routine of controlling their own learning, they host their own discussions, regardless of the ‘point values’ attached to them, and move beyond the obvious tasks for the sake of completion. While philosophy ‘isn’t for everyone,’ even the students who don’t thrive in the typical educational setting find new ways of thinking, creating short stories, philosophical art pieces and films, infusing their D&D campaigns with deeper motivation, or simply learning to challenge the system that has not worked well for them from a genuinely informed standpoint, with arguments that are now supported by more than emotion, but rather from evidence and logic.
Much of what I have learned in the process of making this course what it is has been of great benefit to my other courses as well. I also teach AP Capstone, which is all about epistemic approaches to research from a variety of lenses, and will be run as Environmental Philosophy in Fall of 2020. More importantly, philosophy has made me a better literature teacher. No longer am I simply focusing on form, symbolism, theme, and diction, but on broader ideas and motivations that are more clearly focused, and most importantly my assessments which build on the act of thinking and not the content of (generally my own as taught to them in lecture) thought. My junior English, American Literature, course has benefitted most, where now my juniors are led through American Literature with the clear focus of Personalist Metaphysics and Ethics as we track the movement of personhood and citizenship through the ethical dilemma of materialism and humanism from America’s early philosophies through contemporary counter-cultural narratives. They also analyze and diagram arguments, which this first year has shown to be incredibly promising.
While COVID-19 and our year-end quarantine has left us unable to see the fruits of that labor through the Common Core end-of-year standardize testing, philosophy has provided the mediation of the skills given by those Common Core standards that we often struggle to put together in individual content areas. Learning philosophy and teaching it to high school students has not only given them a meaningful connection to their learning, but has also provided the ability to concretely give them the clear vision that their learning in each subject is not in isolation. Philosophy in Literature students often use their learning in physics, psychology, and Calculus for the sake of advancing arguments in both the philosophical and literary aspects of our class, providing the link that often alludes them in their day going from isolated-English to isolated-Math to isolated-History classes.
We are tasked as public educators to teach students how to ‘think critically.’ There is great potential for formal education in philosophy right now as a result of such a task, as philosophy is the practice for doing such, and the results of doing so in a public school setting in even my own limited experience has shown fantastic results. Philosophy in education, both as a subject of study purely, or even bridged in teaching other subject matters philosophically, can (and does) make a huge difference in our current educational model. If our goal is for kids to be able to think and to do, then following a philosophical model for inquiry and formal argumentation will require drastic changes to our methods of assessment and practice, but it can be done, and with high levels of success.
Students really do desire the larger questions, the ability to pursue the content through their own interests, but often lack the ability and discipline to follow it through to their ends. Luckily, philosophy can provide the basis for this through inquiry-based, formal argumentation. I have been genuinely impressed year to year with the content of my students’ thoughts, many of whom are naturally far more intelligent than me, who have simply needed the tools for communicating those thoughts through acceptable, ordered means. I have been incredibly fortunate to have been provided the opportunity to explore such things with my high school students, and hope to continue to push for philosophical education in the public school sphere for as long as I have the ability to do so.
Many thanks must go out to my students for putting their trust in me for the past several years, many of whom go on each year in the dozens and scores to pursue philosophy at the next level. I am always amazed by how much purpose they seem to derive from the inquiry, and how much my own learning is infused year after year by their inquisitiveness.
Stacy Cabrera
Stacy Cabrera received her M.A. in Philosophy from Loyola Marymount University in 2013. She currently teaches junior English, Philosophy in Literature, and the two-year AP Capstone research program at Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach. She also serves as a member of the APA’s Committee on Precollege Instruction in Philosophy.
