Dangerous Minds

When I tell people that I do philosophy with kids in public schools, they often ask me questions like, “Isn’t that dangerous? Aren’t those subjects taboo? Do schools really let students talk about philosophical questions? What happens when religion comes up?”

I love this concern. Philosophy is supposed to be subversive and controversial. The patron saint of our discipline, Socrates, got put to death for corrupting the youth of Athens, after all.

Nevertheless, the concern has tended to be, by and large, unfounded. While our discussions do sometimes range over topics that might be construed as somewhat risky, (and even occasionally—especially in high school classes—risqué), it’s rare when we take on a topic that runs afoul of what’s considered acceptable in the classroom—although that may, in part, be a function of self-selection: teachers who are willing to have a philosopher come into their classrooms are probably those whose boundaries for the acceptable are a little looser than those who’d be opposed to such visits.

In fact, in almost 20 years of doing philosophy in the schools, there has been only one time when a teacher took me aside and asked me to put the kibosh on a conversation. This was about a decade ago, in a 6th grade class. We were wrapping up an introductory lesson, during which we were exploring together what philosophy is and how it’s done. A student raised his hand and asked me if we were going to do any yoga.

I thought that was a kind of interesting question, and launched into an answer something to the effect that, well, philosophy is kind of a yoga for the mind; just like in the physical practice of yoga, in philosophy, we often bend ourselves (or our minds) into atypical positions and observe our reactions to those experiences.

Suddenly, I noticed the teacher frantically motioning to me; I came over to her and she said, rather breathlessly, “No yoga! Don’t talk about yoga!”

Umm, okay, but why? She said she’d tell me later.

So, after class, she took me aside and said that a few weeks ago, they’d had a dance instructor in class and as part of their warm-ups, she did some yoga stretches with the students. A couple of fundamentalist Christian parents got wind of this and complained that their children were being indoctrinated in Hinduism in their public school class and that was the end of that.

Oddly enough, nobody seemed to mind a few weeks later, when the students and I spent an entire class period wondering together about what is generally considered the strongest challenge to traditional theism: the so-called “Problem of Evil.”