"Teaching Philosophy Outside the University" by Preston Stovall

Preston Stovall is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic, an adjunct instructor at the University of Nevada and La Roche College, and an education researcher with Studium Consulting.  He kindly shared with me this interesting piece about his teaching experiences, which I suspect will interest others (especially as it relates to this earlier discussion):

In the spring of this year David Hoinski, Justin Humphreys, and I ran a course on philosophy for 4^th graders at Woolslair Elementary, a public STEAM magnet school in Pittsburgh (STEAM is STEM with a component on the arts). Two months later I taught a similar course for the elementary students in the summer camp at the Ellis School, a private girls’ school also in Pittsburgh. Building off of work done on philosophy for children (P4C) over the last 40 years, (and with some input from Christi Favor) we designed a course around the notion of a community of inquiry (cf. Teaching Philosophy in Europe and North America, p.20). That community is centered around the cultivation of more precise modes of thought, directed at answering basic questions about knowledge, value, society, and the good life. These modes of thought were embodied in a ‘philosophical toolkit’ containing a number of simple concepts and distinctions with wide application, including analogical reasoning, the distinction between appearance and reality, and the distinction between causal explanation and rational justification. After their introduction, the students were encouraged to use these tools throughout the rest of the course as ‘free moves’ in the conversations we were to have. Both courses were well-received, and Woolslair asked us to teach two classes for the full year beginning in September. Our hope is that this project, should it find funding, will be able to help support one or two recent PhDs in philosophy. In addition to its value as a component in primary and secondary education, we believe the profession of philosophy has much to gain from programs of this sort. 

In an essay published at Quillette.com on July 1, however, Neven Sesardić questioned the widely-circulated (among philosophers) claim that philosophical instruction improves undergraduates’ reasoning skills. He writes:

In reality, however, there is no justification for such claims. Getting higher test scores after studying philosophy does not show that higher scores are the result of studying philosophy. For all we know, it may be that philosophy students are brighter than average to begin with, and that this is why they perform so well on the tests. If that were true, their high scores would have nothing to do with their studying philosophy courses. Therefore, as long as this alternative hypothesis is not ruled out, no inference about practical benefits of philosophy is logically permissible.

That essay was discussed both here and elsewhere, and I read those discussions with interest. We presented our course to teachers and administrators as an educational intervention that would help improve students’ learning in other areas. We did this on account of the large body of research supporting that claim. In this essay I want to summarize that research and invite readers of this blog to comment on its reliability.

Whatever the merit of Sesardić’s argument against the claim that philosophical instruction improves the test scores of undergraduates, it would seem the argument does not generalize. Since the pioneering work of Matthew Lipman at Montclair State University (New Jersey) in the 1970s, a growing body of research in Europe and North America has provided evidence that philosophical instruction in primary and secondary education raises subsequent learning indices along a number of dimensions. For an overview, see pp. 3-7 of Philosophy for Children: Evaluation Report and Executive Summary (2015), a study sponsored by the Education Endowment Foundation (UK) and independently evaluated by a team from Durham University, and pp.20-26 of Teaching Philosophy in Europe and North America, a UNESCO report from 2011.

Over the last four decades, individuals and institutions have developed a variety of approaches toward teaching philosophy in primary and secondary schooling (see the discussion at pp.20-21 of Teaching Philosophy in Europe and North America, the summary at The Variety of Schools of Philosophy for Children in France and in Philolab, and the essays collected in Catherine C McCall, Transforming Thinking: Philosophical Inquiry in the Primary and Secondary Classroom). Programs are currently in place in over 60 countries, serving students from kindergarten through high school. 

Different studies focus on the impact of different sorts of intervention, but there is substantial evidence (using control groups) that regular exposure to philosophical thought and conversation, beginning at 4^th grade, is correlated with improvements in mathematics, critical reasoning, reading comprehension, emotional intelligence, and listening/talking skills, and that this effect remains in place for years after instruction has ceased. For instance, the EEF study (a randomized and controlled trial) looked at the impact of a year’s worth of philosophical instruction for students in grades 4 and 5 at 48 schools in England, receiving (on average) one period’s worth of philosophical instruction per week. Page 3 of the report contains the following “Key Conclusions” (with ‘P4C’ as ‘philosophy for children’): 

1. There is evidence that P4C had a positive impact on Key Stage 2 attainment. Overall, pupils using the approach made approximately two additional months’ progress in reading and maths.
2. Results suggest that P4C had the biggest positive impact on Key Stage 2 results among disadvantaged pupils (those eligible for free school meals).
3. Analyses of the Cognitive Abilities Test (a different outcome measure not explicitly focused on attainment) found a smaller positive impact. Moreover, in terms of this outcome it appears that disadvantaged students reaped fewer benefits from P4C than other pupils. It is unclear from the evaluation why there are these differences between the two outcomes.
4. Teachers reported that the overall success of the intervention depended on incorporating P4C into the timetable on a regular basis. Otherwise there was a risk that the programme would be crowded out.
5. Teachers and pupils generally reported that P4C had a positive influence on the wider outcomes such as pupils’ confidence to speak, listening skills, and self-esteem. These and other broader outcomes are the focus of a separate evaluation by the University of Durham.

There is also an argument from principle that early philosophical instruction contributes to a better education than one lacking in that instruction. Distinctions like cause and justification, and forms of reasoning like inference by analogy, are cognitive resources that one acquires in a well-developed life. The sooner one learns how to reason with these notions, the better one is able to navigate the world. If that is right, then philosophical instruction should be expected to improve one’s education in ways that are orthogonal to those measured by quantitative testing scores.

One sometimes meets with the concern that philosophical instruction is too complex or erudite for meaningful application outside higher education, however. My experience did not bear this out, and I will close with two anecdotes on that front.

Some of the richest pedagogical experiences I’ve had have been with elementary students. On the first day of the course at Ellis, after introducing philosophy and going over its method and aims, I asked the students what sorts of ‘big questions’ they’d like to have answered. After explaining why questions like ‘where does glass come from’ and ‘how do they make tables’ were not what I had in mind, the class hit upon the following: where does the solar system come from, and where do we come from. So, I said a little about the relationship between science and philosophy, and I ran through and diagrammed the nebular hypothesis (originally owed to Kant) that the angular momentum of a rotating sun forming at the center of a nebular cloud would tend toward the formation of a solar system in which all of the planets and their moons are arranged on a plane orbiting in the same direction. I then explained the big bang, stellar nucleosynthesis, and finished with a crash-course in chemical autocatalysis, the emergence of mono-cellular life, and evolution by natural selection (in other terms, of course). To my delight, the students were not only engaged but were inquisitive about the details.

A similar experience, once again with Kant at the center, occurred a few weeks later. For the last year I taught a weekly course on Aristotelian virtue, Kantian autonomy, and cognitive behavioral therapy at the Allegheny County Jail. Some months before, we read Kant’s “Answer to the Question ‘What is Enlightenment?’”. In the intervening weeks we had discussed Kant’s contention that we are not free when we act on our desires—for, according to Kant, to act on one’s desires is to act on a heteronomous law of nature, one that causally determines what will happen in virtue of one’s place as a thing in space and time. In our last session, after some prodding, the men recalled that on Kant’s view we are only (possibly) free when we do what we should, not when we do what we want. For when we do what we should we are acting on an autonomous rule of morality, one that reason prescribes to itself in recognition that the rule is an instance of a law that applies to anyone, anywhere, and always, and so independently of one’s place in space and time. As I told the warden afterward, whatever else that course may have done, it is a good thing just to have had, and to be able to recall and talk about, the thought that true freedom is self-governing obedience to the moral law.

If a philosopher as esoteric as Kant can be made comprehensible to populations such as these, we should be wary of the conceit that philosophy is too difficult to introduce outside of institutions of higher learning.

Still, perhaps we missed something in our review of the literature on philosophy instruction in primary and secondary education. And are there similar worries about prison populations? Do the concerns that Sesardić raises about the impact of philosophy on undergraduates have analogues in these cases? Or, if the research is reliable, and given the state of the profession of philosophy in higher education today, should professional philosophers be doing more to foster philosophical instruction in non-standard (by today’s lights) settings?