There are an increasing number of initiatives to present philosophy and critical thinking to school students, and I am pleased to announce a new one in my home city of Melbourne:
for ages 8 to 11. As I have argued in print, earlier conceptual acquisitions tend to greatly affect downstream beliefs, so teaching kids to question early will mean they are more inquisitive and less accepting of simple appeals to authority later, which means a critical populace. I therefore expect it to be legislated against shortly…
Lots of things are subversive, but being judged ‘subversive’ may lend philosophy a certain cachet that makes it more attractive.
On the other hand there are so many different philosophical schools of thought that you can envisage the subversive forces shattering into internal conflict…
All good teaching is subversive, though perhaps not always in a way that the authorities find threatening.
That’s only because they don’t understand it…
I used to figure that studying mathematics and science should be as much as most students needed of philosophy but seeing the incredibly low level ability of even real scientists to deal with ideas outside of their specialty, not to mention the abysmal level of thought among the blog sci-rangers, The Philosophy Club is urgently needed. It’s unfortunate that they started calling natural philosophy “science”. It seems to have led a lot of people to not understand that science depends on logic and that it is inextricably embedded in the vicissitudes of humans and our minds confronting the same universe that philosophy deals with in a more encompassing way.
“All good teaching is subversive”
As the old saying goes “try subversion its fun”
Let me give a plug for Q Is for Question, a book written and illustrated by a former student of mine.
http://www.qisforquestion.com/Welcome.html