A couple of years ago, two other graduate students (Sam Ridge and Karina Ortiz Villa) and I started UCSD’s chapter of Briana Toole’s fantastic outreach program, Corrupt the Youth. The program partners philosophy departments with Title I schools to bring philosophy to historically marginalized and underrepresented groups of students. The following are some reflections on two things I’ve learned from working with these students. I do not mean to be giving anyone advice or professing any deep truths about pedagogy. These are, more or less, simply remarks on my experience.

First, projecting my own thoughts about what high schoolers are like onto the students usually resulted in error. For instance, I thought that students would care most about issues like social media algorithms, AI, democracy, and free speech. Roughly, I thought they’d be more attentive to practical issues than highly abstract or theoretical ones. And to be sure, they were receptive to these topics, but I was surprised to see that lectures on things like aesthetic value or quantum mechanics were frequently among the most popular. In addition, I thought that in order to get students interested in philosophy, I’d have to make it “relatable” somehow. (“How can I make the free will debate relevant to the high school experience?”) Of course, there is some truth in that. One needs to introduce topics in a way that is at least graspable. But I found that this was often more fiction than fact. The truth is that students seemed to take to exactly the kinds of things people have always found intrinsically interesting about philosophy. I didn’t need to dress up the liar’s paradox with allusions to TikTok to get them to engage. They just thought it was interesting that the statement “This sentence is false” seemed to have two truth values. I suppose that what both of these points can be boiled down to is that I sometimes underestimated the students, and when I did, I was shown to be mistaken. It was never that I didn’t think high schoolers could be bright or insightful; what I underestimated, rather, was their willingness and desire to explore abstract philosophical issues.

Second—and more impactful personally—working with these students in particular helped me learn to have a deeper appreciation for the importance of various philosophical questions. In working through arguments, I often find myself losing sight of what it is that I am actually talking about. The nouns become X’s and Y’s, the verbs ɸ’s and ψ’s, and then the game of putting these various concepts together in a way which is intuitively appealing, logically coherent, and (hopefully) novel begins. I often find myself slipping into the mindset of trying to solve a puzzle, seeing the philosophy as a kind of intellectual challenge. But various interactions with the students snapped me out of this.

I remember preparing a lesson on homelessness, covering Jeremy Waldron’s fantastic paper on the issue. I was trying to figure out the best way to present the various notions of freedom that were relevant and explain how it is that homelessness could be conceived of as a hindrance to liberty. Then, of course, there were the counterarguments that one needed to survey. On a purely negative conception of liberty, wherein freedom is nothing more than the lack of external impediments to action, the homeless could be thought of as quite free! But, then again, G.A. Cohen has presented criticisms of capitalist property rights as being freedom-hindering even on this conception of liberty. Maybe that is worth going over? (Etcetera, etcetera.)

At some point while I was working this out, I received an email from the teacher of the class we lectured in. She wanted to inform me that one of the students in the class had a parent who was currently experiencing homelessness. She told me it was fine to cover the topic, but that she wanted me to be aware. Something similar occurred during my presentation on the ethics of immigration, where I was informed that many students had close family members who were undocumented. It’s not so much that this knowledge caused me to change the lesson, but rather that it rendered salient the moral importance of the philosophical topics that I was teaching. The arguments had a different kind of weight as I read them over. It made it clear that what we think about these issues matters, that it has implications for people’s actual lives. Maybe having this kind of “ah-ha” moment reveals little more than the fact that I am privileged or academically detached. Probably both. But I suspect others in the field will relate. When you’re immersed in the theoretical machinery of moral or political philosophy, it can be easy to forget what you’re theorizing about. But I think that is a mistake. Maybe not a philosophical one, per se, but a mistake, nonetheless. At least for those of us working in value theory broadly construed (specifically applied ethics), it seems to me worth it to, every now and again, take a step back from the arguments and remember what it is we’re discussing. What are you arguing for? How would the world look if you were correct and people believed you? Have you shown the topic sufficient care and respect, given the stakes? Have you thought about those who deal with the issue at hand, read their stories, or talked to them? If not, perhaps you should. I don’t know if doing so makes the arguments better, but I think it makes me better.

I don’t have a nice bow to put on these reflections. Perhaps what I’ve said will strike most of you reading as quite obvious. Indeed, I suspect that I myself would have that reaction if I were reading rather than writing this. “Did this guy really just learn that there are people dealing with homelessness?” But, somehow, and in a way which I cannot quite articulate with the kind of clarity philosophers typically demand, these dual lessons were profound and important to me. They helped me connect to the students, to the work, and to the moral core of the philosophical issues I am writing on. If there is anything I could leave a reader with, it would be that I’ve gained more than I’ve given in working with high school students. If you have the opportunity to do similar outreach, maybe you will too.

The post Two Things I Learned Working with High School Students first appeared on Blog of the APA.

Read the full article which is published on APA Online (external link)