To activate emotions, to induce perplexity, to challenge intuitions, to ignite controversy, to elicit reasoned argument: these, I’ve argued, are what give a philosophical stimulus its juice. And these are the ambitions that inform my curation of stimuli when I’m designing new workshops. To illustrate, here’s an overview of The Real-Life Truman Show, my high school workshop about therapeutic deception in the context of dementia care.
The Socratic method, when used correctly, is an ingenious and dependable way of fostering collaborative dialogic argument in the classroom. Yet the Victorian Department of Education and Training (DET) presents Socratic discussions as something more like a chinwag, with stock sentence-starters awkwardly jammed in. It’s not only a travesty of the spirit of Socratic dialogue, but a missed opportunity for supporting the development of genuine critical thinking in schools.
Does dialogue work to harmonise conflicting views, or does it simply entrench differences? According to extensive research in the psychology of polarised opinion, the answer is discouraging: when people of any ideological stripe encounter opposing views and evidence, their beliefs grow even more divergent. Hearing from the other side seems to make people double down on their original positions.
I’m proposing three strategies that educators can use to promote genuine dialogic argument. These strategies are ones that I’ve found useful in averting pseudo-arguments –– those superficial, directionless and disjointed conversations among individuals who inter-splice their monologues while remaining essentially deaf to one another. A friend of mine likens the pseudo-argument pattern of talk to the parallel play of two-year-olds, engrossed side-by-side in their respective imaginary worlds. Let’s see what we can do to make the switch from parallel play to cooperative play in the philosophy classroom.
Guest post by Christina Majoinen. I first learned the basics of critical thinking in a class called ‘Analysing Arguments’ as a fresh first-year university student. Every class was a revelation. As I learned what an argument was, and the various ways arguments could go wrong, I felt simultaneously grateful and angry. I was grateful that I had taken this class, grateful that I had the opportunity to learn to distinguish between appropriate evidence for a claim, and what looks like appropriate evidence at first glance but actually isn’t. I was angry, however, that nobody had taught me any of this before.
This year’s $1 million TED Prize was awarded to a novel educational project that encourages small groups of children to work together, using the internet to answer big questions that interest them, while adult mediators intervene as little as possible in the children’s learning. In this post, I take a close look at the merits and limitations of this approach, and review some surprising examples of how children can go astray when they rely on the internet for answers to their questions.
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 