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?
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?
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.
If we want to equip young people to be active participants in public life, we need citizenship education to run much deeper than it ordinarily does. Standard curricula focus on conveying knowledge of the electoral process, the Constitution, legislative process, and our purported ‘national identity’. Yet for real access to power in a democracy, young people need to understand the sordid nature of our political system and their own capacity for grassroots action.
The destruction of our climate and ecologies by powerful state and corporate actors didn’t materialise in a vacuum. It stems from an anthropocentric worldview that privileges human welfare over that of all other living beings. To reverse the damage, we need a different set of behaviours rooted in a different worldview.
“She’s dug herself into a safety hole,” said one Year 7 student, reflecting on a scenario about a woman who routinely takes a happiness-inducing drug to soothe difficult emotions. “It would be a very fragile kind of happiness.”
“You’d have your own sandbox to play in,” said another, justifying his preference for plugging into a hypothetical ‘Experience Machine’ that serves up a wholly convincing virtual reality. “It would be really cool – you could change certain things, like what sort of plants there are in your world.”
The Philosophy Club 