Wondering Aloud: Philosophy With Young People
This is a nice, accessible resource for high school students: http://onlinecollegedegree.org/2009/05/04/25-timeless-insightful-philosophers-for-your-personal-development/. It lists 25 philosophers, from Confucius through Descartes and Kant to Mary Midgley and Foucault, and gives a short synoposis about each of them.
I had a conversation recently with a colleague about the difference it makes, in his view, when students who have had philosophy in high school enroll in his undergraduate philosophy classes. He said that he almost always recognizes students who have studied philosophy in high school — he observes deeper thinking about the questions explored […]
Lexi Pelzer, a high school student who volunteered for our Center this past year, was a student at Overlake High School and is now a rising sophomore at Phillips Exeter Academy. She asked if she could write a guest post for this blog, and I thought that the theme of her post, which describes how […]
There is lots of exciting work in philosophy going on in high school classrooms around the country! Here are two public high school philosophy classes about which I’ve recently learned: In Memphis, Michael Burroughs, a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Memphis, is teaching a philosophy class at Booker T. Washington High School. […]
For the first time this summer, there will be a teaching and learning seminar for high school teachers at the American Association of Philosophy Teachers (AAPT) Conference. The seminar will be funded by the Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization (PLATO), the American Philosophical Association (APA), and AAPT. The AAPT Conference is a well-regarded biennial family-friendly event […]
I love Thomas Nagel’s short 1987 book What Does It All Mean? It’s a really accessible introduction to philosophy for high school students and up, and it captures much of what drew me to philosophy in the first place. The book focuses on some of the philosophical problems that, as Nagel notes, “reflective human minds […]
Jana Mohr Lone is the director and founder of the University of Washington Center for Philosophy for Children, an academic research center dedicated to research and practice in philosophy for children and philosophy of childhood, and she is an Affiliate Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington. Jana is the author of Seen and Not Heard (2021) and The Philosophical Child (2012). She co-authored the textbook Philosophy in Education: Questioning and Dialogue in Schools (2016) and co-edited the collection of essays Philosophy and Education: Introducing Philosophy to Young People (2012). Since 1995 she has taught philosophy in classrooms from preschool to college and beyond. A frequent writer and speaker about precollege philosophy, Jana is the founding president of PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization) and the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Questions: Philosophy for Young People. Follow her on Twitter: @JanaMohrLone