More Corruption of the Curriculum

nick cowen, 21 October 2008

According to recent newspaper reports, philosophy is currently being taught in primary-schools to children as young as eight years.
Since that subject does not have the widest application in the marketplace, one cannot help but admire the enterprise a philosophy graduate has shown by persuading several primary schools to use the services of his company to bring it to their classrooms. From reports of what it is purveying, however, one cannot also help but wonder whether the company might not be in breach of the Trade Descriptions Act. For whatever is being purveyed, and however worthwhile its purveyance might be, philosophy it surely is not.

Forget the hocus-pocus with which the classes are made to start, when children are invited to close their eyes, breath through their noses and ‘think of that place that makes you feel happy and relaxed’.
What is so misleading about what is being sold as philosophy are the issues children are being invited to consider, and what it is that they are being told about them.
The newspaper report provides two examples of the sorts of problem that children are being invited to consider and what it is that they are being told are their solutions.
Problem One: The children are told the fable of the frog and the scorpion. ‘The scorpion had seen members of his family on the other side of a river and wanted the frog to ferry him across. The frog was reluctant. “You’ll sting me.” The scorpion promised he would not but succumbed to the temptation half-way across. “That’s what I do”, he told the frog as both slid to their watery graves.’
The children are then invited to consider who was wrong. They are then invited to consider the same question after a robber with a knife and a ferryman are substituted for the two animals.
Problem Two: The children are shown two sets of paintings. In the case of the first, they are then told that two of the paintings are by the same artist. In the case of the second, they are told that one of the paintings is the most beautiful. The children are invited to consider whether what they have been told in each case is or could be correct.
The first problem is said to invite the children’s exploration of issues pertaining to free-will, determinism and moral responsibility. The second problem is said to invite them to appreciate the different status of matters of empirical fact and of value.
The first problem supposedly serves to alert children to the different moral status humans have relative to animals as result of their possessing free-will. Animals are not morally accountable because determined by their natures. By contrast, humans are morally accountable because what they do is not determined by their natures.
The second problem supposedly alerts children to the subjectivity of matters of value in contrast with the objectivity of matters of empirical fact. Whilst it can be an objective matter of fact that two paintings have been painted by the same artist, it can never be an objective matter of fact any given painting or other object is more beautiful than others. Always and only being in the mind of the beholder, beauty is always a subjective matter about which there is no objective right or wrong.
What, you might by now be asking, is wrong about any of this. The answer is plenty.
Consider the fable first. Fables are fabrications about animals that are intended to convey moral lessons: that is, lessons that pertain to what is right and wrong in human conduct. In the case of that fable about the scorpion and the frog, its intended moral lesson is that people should never trust the assurances of those who are known to be vicious by nature, for despite their assurances they can always be relied on to break their word, even when doing so is detrimental to their own welfare.
It positively confuses the issue to substitute humans for animals in fables then, for this suggests that, as they stand, fables do not contain any moral lessons for humans. That is to miss their whole point. Moreover, so far as philosophy is concerned, the relevant issue is whether human beings are, as they think they are, genuinely different from animals in truly being morally accountable because uniquely possessed of free-will.
The entire way children are reportedly being invited to think about the fable serves to preclude them from being able to consider the genuine philosophical question at issue here. They are being fobbed off with pre-philosophical common sense masqueraded to them as philosophical insight, whereas the whole purpose of philosophy is to challenge the deliverances of pre-reflective common-sense.
As to what children were being invited to consider in relation to the paintings, it is wholly improper for it to be suggested to them that, because people can be wrong in claiming one thing to be more beautiful than others, it follows all such evaluative matters are subjective rather than objective as matters of empirical fact are.
Maybe all four paintings are all as beautiful as each other, or that the one picked out as being the most beautiful isn’t. That a judgment involves the making of some evaluation, therefore, does not establish that it is a purely subjective matter about which there is and can be no objective right or wrong.
Indeed, if one takes people not paintings, it seems downright perverse to suggest that some are not and cannot be any more beautiful than others, and that the greater beauty of those who are more beautiful is not an objective matter of fact. The genuine philosophical puzzle, here, is how there can be such objectivity in relation to such evaluative matters, given they are not empirically decidable in ways non-evaluative judgements are.
Again, what the children were being invited to consider was not a genuinely philosophical issue. Moreover, they were being fobbed off with falsehood presented to them as philosophical insight.
None of this would matter much, save that, in such non-philosophy being allowed to be fobbed off as the genuine article, philosophy will be come to be thought of as being trivial and something any fool can do. So conceived, it can safely be allowed to wither on the academic vine, for failure of its true import to be appreciated.
There is a place for philosophy in schools, especially if children are to be made to stay on there until eighteen. But the primary stage is not the place for it. Nor is it is to be purveyed in schools through discussion of the sorts of issue through which it is currently being bogusly claimed to be purveyed there.