In our education system, there is a natural progression in all subjects. Young children learn letters, children learn reading, teenagers learn literature; by university age they are ready for literary criticism. Young children learn numbers, children learn arithmetic, teenagers learn the basics of mathematical variety; by university age they are ready for economics, physics, or what we call ‘further mathematics’. Children study ‘science’, teenagers learn science applied to various fields: not only physics, chemistry, biology, but also geography, psychology, sociology, even history. In this way they are made ready for higher education in these fields.
In our education system, the vast majority of students will never study philosophy at all. The first opportunity to learn philosophy might come when young people are 16 or 17, but it depends on their school. They normally have at most two years before they will study this at higher education, if they choose. But it is already too late. Imagine trying to learn the mathematics appropriate to late teenage years without ever having learnt numbers or arithmetic: you wouldn’t get anywhere. Imagine trying to interpret or criticise literature when you can’t read. What could you do?
Philosophy isn’t particularly mysterious but it is distinct. If you think it works in the same way as other subjects then you misunderstand it. That would be no different from thinking that literature works in the same way as physics: ‘Aren’t they both just a matter of interpreting data?’ A physicist might convince themselves that this is true, but they would flounder in conversation with a literary scholar, drowning in shallow water. A literary scholar might flatter themselves that they too could ‘read the universe’, but would they have anything meaningful to contribute? Forget drowning in conversation: without the language of complex mathematics, a literary scholar couldn’t dip a toe in the water of contemporary physics.
We cannot expect young philosophers to jump in at the deep end and swim, so we make it as easy as possible by choosing the shallowest of waters to start with. But there is only so shallow you can make the water before it stops being swimming at all and becomes only paddling about. Few people can swim right away, and you can hardly let them drown. So we teach them ‘political philosophy’ or ‘philosophy of religion’ or ‘ethics’, and we teach these as if they were something already familiar to them: a repository of theories. We teach them more or less as we would teach history, or literature, or science. We pretend that philosophy is no different from these subjects, because the alternative is to drown our students in something they are not equipped to understand.
If the student has been lucky enough to have the opportunity to study philosophy at school, they will be delivered to higher education familiar with the language and manners of philosophy and with some content knowledge. But do they understand what the discipline is? They have been paddling in shallow waters; can they swim? Not many. And what’s worse, they think they can swim even though they’ve only ever paddled. They think that paddling is swimming. They’ve never been out of their depth and so have no concept that there are depths beyond paddling. They are often hostile to the idea that there could be hidden depths; they are resistant to exploring. That is why it makes little difference whether a student turns up to study philosophy at university without prior study in philosophy. Often it can be helpful to start with them from the beginning.
But then the same problem remains: they cannot swim. Mostly the same mistake is repeated: we make them paddle about in shallow water. Even at higher education, we encourage students to study philosophy as if it were any other subject. But philosophy is not like any other subject. If you want to study it properly, you must approach it in a way that is different from anything else that you study.
Unlike the sciences, when you are doing philosophy, you are not investigating the world, and you are not even investigating other people’s ideas for the purposes of appraising them. You are developing your capacity for judgement by investigating your own thoughts. You are assessing their consistency or inconsistency, their clarity or vagueness, their conformity with our observations of the world. To do this, you need to learn how to think well; and to do that it’s helpful to study the best examples of ‘thinking well’ that we have in the recorded history of human thought. But it would be a mistake to think that merely knowing about these best examples of good thinking somehow makes you a philosopher. You might as well think that learning about planes makes you a pilot or that watching a fight makes you a fighter. If you cannot do what they do then you are a spectator, and that is a very different business.
If philosophers are like pilots, then what we pilot is our own lives; if we are like fighters then we fight only with our own ignorance. When philosophy is not an individual pursuit then it is always collaborative and never combative. When you are doing philosophy, you are not investigating other people’s opinions for the purpose of correcting them. And you are certainly not learning how to show other people that they are wrong. That is the task of marketeers, politicians, lawyers and rhetoricians. A philosopher would rather lose a debate and learn their error than win a debate and spread it.
A philosopher doesn’t want to win a debate; they want the truth. A philosopher doesn’t want mere information; they want good judgement. A philosopher wants more than knowledge; they want wisdom. They want true beliefs about what really matters and to make some attempt at living in a way that is aligned with those beliefs. To this end, they investigate their own life and thoughts and they put them to the test. Learning how to do that well is what we learn when we learn philosophy.
But that is not what you will find in schools and universities. There, a successful philosophical education is a matter of demonstrating your knowledge and understanding of philosophical ideas, your ability to appraise and construct arguments, and in short your ability to do what philosophy is not. We ask them to paddle and call it swimming, then graduate them and call them qualified to teach others to do the same.
And so how do you teach philosophy to young people, when all they will be assessed on is their ability to display their knowledge of information or their ability to win an argument? It is a tricky problem. The solution could be straightforward: do what Socrates did and ask them questions. Teach them to ask the right questions in the right way and encourage them to do so. Do not set them the task of answering questions as if they have the answers; do not pretend that an ability to display your knowledge of information is the same thing as wisdom. Teach them that there is deep water out there and that they might be thrown in it one day, so they had better learn to swim.
The dangers of not learning these things are clear to see in the modern world, with people falling helplessly into the varied scams of the ‘wellness’ industry, or else becoming convinced that they have no choice but to depend on medication to manage their inner lives. It’s our fault. We have chosen to fill our children’s minds with stuff and variety but not judgement. We cannot complain for getting what we choose, but we shouldn’t pretend that we don’t have a choice. We should teach children philosophy – real philosophy – as soon as they are able to think and judge and reflect on their own lives and thoughts. Teach them how to think well, develop their capacity for good judgement, and equip them to govern themselves by that judgement.
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