There was no more firefighting to be done. It was time to run for their lives. What happened next was a lesson in how people make decisions under pressure. What can practitioners of philosophical inquiry learn from the Mann Gulch wildfire tragedy, and from the desperate ingenuity of one member of the firefighting crew?
Year 12 students are not the only ones flummoxed by questions on the HSC English exam. In certain exam questions, the radically different tasks of literary analysis and argument analysis have been unceremoniously jammed together. How are students to respond when they can’t fathom what is being asked of them? Have the exam writers produced ambiguous questions on purpose, and if so, to what end?
Without common standards for what counts as a reliable method of inquiry, we won’t be able to agree on facts, let alone on values. Since we often have to decide, jointly, what to do in the face of disagreement, we need an epistemic common currency, and we need to be able to give reasons for why only certain epistemic principles should be part of that currency. (Extracts from an article by Michael P. Lynch)
The potential impact of our work as philosophical educators is three-dimensional: politically far-reaching, socially expansive and psychologically deep. It is through collaborative inquiry and dialogic argument that students learn the communication skills that will set them up for life.
Overconfidence in poorly supported claims is rife – but epistemic humility comes at a price: you pay in tentativeness, uncertainty and sometimes indecision. Beneath the shadow that doubt casts on comfortable truths, it’s harder to know what to believe.
Knowing when to act with conviction in the face of limited information is the essence of practical wisdom. Yet hesitation is sometimes justified. It may in fact be unwise to act decisively when you don’t know whose voices are worth heeding.
We’re living at an epistemologically troubled moment in history. Entire populations have been unmoored from the kind of consensus reality that held sway in less slippery times. What happens if we ask high school students to fact-check political ads and decide which ones are truthful enough to be posted on social media?
Philosopher-activist Violet Coco has been jailed for at least eight months under draconian laws that restrain people who dare to speak up about the climate and ecological crisis. Increasingly we’re seeing intimidatory tactics aimed at discouraging dissent, and now it seems that the only people getting punished for government wrongdoing are those who courageously reveal it, says a representative of the civil society alliance CIVICUS.
The UN Secretary General recently observed: “Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels.”
Adults often comment on children’s strong sense of justice. But kids, no matter how true their moral compass, are typically assumed to be puny agents in a vast and inscrutable world; a world in which power is wielded often invisibly by adults and the institutions they’ve created. Children are reluctant heirs to ‘the great unravelling’: grave harms and epic losses that spring from the negligence, ineptitude and self-interest of previous generations. And children can’t help but participate, somehow, in the issues that overshadow our days.
It’s rare to come across a genuinely groundbreaking idea in curriculum design, but I think education researchers Stuart Rowlands and Robert Carson are onto something revolutionary. They describe a high school maths curriculum structured around philosophically-rich inflection points in the history of mathematical discovery. Tantalising narrative stimuli convey the electrifying energy that would have been felt when geometric proofs were discovered for the first time. This approach situates students as active players in a dramatic recapitulation of the history of ideas, and reconnects academic subject matter with the broader intellectual culture.
Online interaction is replete with threats to individual autonomy and democratic integrity. If we’re serious about enabling a digital democracy, we need a comprehensive program of digital citizenship education that transcends the usual framework of teaching how to evaluate online information for accuracy, relevance, authorship, purpose and bias. Educating for digital citizenship should help to restore trust in democracy by introducing resources for effective civic action.
The Philosophy Club 