Should Philosophy Be Studied In High School?

I think it should. If it were it could possibly presage a radical change in society. I think it isn't because the powers that be don't really want people to question the established order. The education system in general represents a poverty of imagination. As I watch the kids trundle on their way to school in the morning I feel a tremor of sadness for them. Schools are more like factoid factories than a place to prepare human beings for what should be the best possible lives for everyone.

What do you think?

 

At least base philosophical thinking. Too early in life to dive to deep & shatter their poor psyches

 

Philosophy and Psychology were the two courses which really got me interested in academics, after I basically lost interest in middle school, so I want to say Yes. Although, I believe Psychology was offered as an elective in High School.

I agree with @Running Horse in teaching only base philosophical thinking. Probably only do Western Philosophy and primarily focus on ideas of Ancient Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), Descartes, Kant, and maybe a overview of concepts: idealism, dualism, materialism (physicalism), existentialism.

Add in some basic logic, deductive & inductive reasoning and that's probably about the extent to which most teenagers could maintain attention.

 

Most parents would never be able to help with homework...

 

This. A friend of mine was just telling me her son has been placed in developmentally delayed classes at school because he's disruptive, but i've known this kid since he was a baby and he's amazingly bright, imaginative, sensitive, and a really talented artist. Kids like that have trouble thriving in school these days because they've decimated the art programs.

I think in general curriculums should be flexible and suited to each individual child's passions and talents rather than forcing every child to conform to the same standard curriculum

 

Those guys are all old white men.

 

I hated Intro to Ethics. It was one of the first classes I took in college. I felt like it expected me to change my point of view about religion to accommodate philosophy. I don't know if that's appropriate for minor children actually. It asks you to choose who would die in a given situation and then contemplate whether one life is any less valid than many lives. All that stuff sort of rubbed me the wrong way. If I took the class now I would find it easy to answer that the lives of many outweigh the lives of the few. Then the question is what if it's your life! I don't imagine many students would enjoy that sort of curriculum.

 

The truest answers to life are most often unenjoyable. This does not mean they should be ignored

 

I can only imagine what would have happened had philosophy been taught in my school. Would've been Jesus Class 101, regardless of the curriculum. I can just picture some dumb kid saying "I think Jesus was the first philosopher" and it'd be all downhill from there.

 

I took philosophy in high school and it gave me some really useful base knowledge—the critical thinking skills and the introduction to learning for the sake of learning were both helpful for me.

(So, yes)

 

ABSOLUTELY.

Right from age four/five. Whenever they start. Not philosophy as in learning about philosophers and existing theories and concepts, those can be introduced later.. but HOW to philosophize. Critical thinking. Not letting emotions rule over logic. How to THINK. If you teach kids how to think, the whole rest of school is going to be less of a waste of time. I feel strongly about this. If I had the time and money I would found a school. I plan to write a story about my school and hope someone else will found it.

 

Are you talking about the guys in US history class who signed the constitution?

I guess not, I suppose some of them were young.


The only other notable philosophy I'm aware of is Eastern Philosophy but alot of it is radically different, to the point I think it would be difficult to learn in a quarter or semester alongside Western Philosophy.

From the little I know of Middle Eastern Philosophy, there were a few philosophers in antiquity but it never really took hold like it did with Greeks and in the East and then I think eventually the Middle East became highly influenced by Aristotle.

I've never heard of African Philosophy.

 

Wisdom philosophy has not been popular in the hallowed halls for over a century, and academic philosophy these days is all about making money. They're a bit touchy about it, to say the least, but the sad truth is every branch of the sciences has adopted the use of contextualism, but almost no academic philosophers call themselves contextualists. If you want to teach children how to be the worst philosophers imaginable, and fit into the academic meat grinder of notorious workaholics with stunted sex lives and senses of humor, then go for it. One in five Americans insists the sun revolves around the earth because they had the finest teachers on the planet, while the academics have never documented the existence of common sense anywhere in the world, and refuse to discuss the subject.

Contextualism can be thought of as the idea all our words and concepts are ultimately gibberish, explaining why Max Planck begged his colleagues to explain the joke.

 

I suppose I'm thinking about the subject of ideology. Should young people be introduced to a discussion on ideology and if not why not. Capitalism would seem to exist not as a carefully orchestrated system, but rather as a "natural order" which must be obeyed. Yet young people are indoctrinated and inculcated into a system that is not just an innocent natural order of things. It is a highly organized regime of manipulation, to the detriment of young people's physical and mental health. The use of children in advertising naturalizes them from a very young age to be passive consumers rather than proactive creators of happiness and meaningful activity. Many of you will think I'm nuts saying this, but all the indicators show a picture of increased mental ill-health and other psychological disorders amongst young people. Many people who would like to teach a better way have no opportunity to do so, because we are all living in an instrumentalized construct that operates under the guise of being natural. It is nothing but. If we can't reach children through the educational system, because that is an ideological state apparatus, then other ways must be found.

 

One in five Americans insists the sun revolves around the earth and other half of them debate the meaning of stupid and who is the best example. It is illegal to vote for Mickey Mouse in Maryland, because they were all taught by academics who insisted arguing is the way to decide the truth. Richard Dawkins even made up his own nonsense word, meme, encouraging millions to argue nonsensically in the name of science, reason, and humanity. Just my opinion, but ideology is what is killing them faster, so it depends on your personal goals, because they are simultaneously destroying the entire planet.

I'm working on the analog logic required to program a bot to give them all the most exciting personalized arguments imaginable. Such a bot can be trained to present good arguments, and then lose to the idiots so they feel like they are gods of the internet or something. You could even keep one on your computer and have it take over any discussion at any time and can include a deadly accurate lie detector that makes it all that much more realistic. The idiots are so predictable what they require is proof of just how sadly predictable they are, such as predicting every presidential election with 95% accuracy, until they get the point they are simply voting for whoever advertises the most.

Throwing their own crap right back in their faces anonymously, is a 12,000 year old tradition in the Bagua. Whinne the Pooh's secret is he is a pile of crap, potty humor to be specific. Big Bird is not an evil commie plot.

 

My feeling is that on a certain level the world is an ideological battle ground operating on all levels. If people don't have some understanding of it the only thing that will have any power is rampant egotism, in which case we all go to Hell in a basket.

 

Nobody has ever documented the existence of common sense anywhere in the world, and nobody has ever proven any one ideology is superior to another when it actually comes to saving the world they are all destroying. The computers are already conducting 40% of all the Wall Street transactions and the latest estimates are that every bureaucrat in DC can be cheaply and easily replaced with current AI. The mindless mob with money and guns are about to start beating their heads against a brick wall until it hurts bad enough they will change, one hopes.

White collar crime might as well be legal in the US, but white collar jobs are about to be replaced with automation. Guess which idiots are going to start actually organizing and stop spouting crap...

 

I don't posit any particular ideology as a solution, only that we need to understand the ideological framework we are living within in order to move beyond it. That is if anyone believes in human progress and some kind of viable future at all.

 

My work includes exploring ways to prove to modern science in a self-consistent, nontrivial, and demonstrable quantifiable fashion that we inhabit a singularity, and 42 is as good an answer as anyone will ever get. I'm about half-way through the analog logic, but have already figured out a wide variety of ways its can be done. The issue appears to be that thermodynamics can express the laws of physics as differentials, because space-time is hyperuniform, making classical logic and physics ultimately context dependent for any demonstrable meaning. Technobabble, but it means modern science must adopt a mathematical sense of humor and natural philosophy if they are to even save their own bacon, and its a more primitive tribal sense of humor that is anathema in academia and modern civilization.

It also means, for example, that researchers literally cannot laugh or get the punch lines to jokes when they encounter nonsensical results in their work. They are creating their own reality, and maximum entropy has to be expressed for even distant observers who can laugh. We create the arrow of time both individually and collectively, and its demonstrable in a variety of ways. My work is in the fundamental logic, while next generation computers will spit out all the mathematics in detail.

 

I much prefer the notion of natural philosophy, as science was originally known, to the modern conception of science.